Fall 2024 | TR | 11:00 –12:15 PM | Professor Zatlin
Fall 2024 – Jonathan Zatlin
| Days | Start | End | Type | Bldg | Room |
| TR | 11:00 AM | 12:15 PM | LEC |
Explores the rise and fall of Europe’s most notorious mass movement through film, diaries, party documents, and other sources. Considers the impact of Nazi rule on art, finance, politics, and family life. Analyzes the mass murder and destruction caused by Nazi rule. Hub Areas (Effective Fall 2020): Ethical Reasoning, Historical Consciousness, Critical Thinking
Additional Course Materials:
Description: Why have the Nazis become synonymous with the most efficient yet brutal form of political rule? Why have they become the epitome of evil? This course explores origins, ascendancy, and downfall of the Nazis. Because National Socialism was a movement, rather than a political party, the course will treat Nazism as a response to the crises of liberal democracy after the Great War rather than simply a vehicle for seizing power. Because National Socialism was not a monolithic movement, moreover, the course places special emphasis on identifying the different and competing strands of thought, policy, and action associated with the movement before and after 1933. Our major themes will include the racial ideology at the heart of National Socialism and the attempt to recast German society along those lines, including the production of “Nazi” culture, the creation of “Aryan” family structures, and the construction of the Volksgemeinschaft (racial community) as well as the prohibition of “non-German” forms of science, art, finance, politics, and eventually people. Although we will devote some time to Nazi diplomacy and the advent of World War II, our focus will be on the regime’s demographic and political reconfiguration of Europe, and especially the turn to mass murder and genocide. We will conclude by examining the incomplete “denazification” of Germany after 1945.
Key themes: Throughout the course, we’ll focus on two constants of the Nazi imagination: violence and racism. The Nazi assault on German democracy began by promoting alternative cultures, parallel institutions, and an uninhibited approach to violence. After 1933, the Nazis sought to ensure the stability of the dictatorship by popularizing racism and hypermasculinity, institutionalizing police repression, and murdering real and perceived enemies – culminating in the wholesale slaughter of entire peoples.
Selected readings:
- Theodore Abel, Why Hitler Came to Power (Harvard University Press, 1966)
- W.S. Allen, The Nazi Seizure of Power (Franklin Watts, 1984)
- Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men (Harper Trade, 1998)
- Inge Deutschkron, Outcast (Fromm International, 1990)
- Marion Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair (OUP, 1999)
- Melita Maschmann, Account Rendered (Abelard-Schuman, 1965)
- Mark Roseman, The Wannsee Conference and the Final Solution (Picador, 2003)
Instructor:
