Documents, buildings, military units, personal objects and ideological symbols tell the story of Nazi Germany in a slightly different way. On the following pages we present just one of the hundred items. Paweł Sawicki talked to the author about the new book.
The first question is the most obvious one - why did you decide to present the history of the Third Reich this way? A giant story told through details - sometimes very little details.
There have been a spate of history books in English over recent years, using the approach of '100 Objects', so I certainly can’t claim originality in that respect, but it struck me that this would be a useful – and rather novel – way to examine the history of the Third Reich. Crucially, of course, it hadn’t been done before, but it was clear that this approach allowed me to write about areas that rarely received an airing, so that appealed to me. Of course, the main contours of the history of the Third Reich are well known, but there is still much for readers to learn, especially about aspects such as everyday life, propaganda and so on. The better a subject is known, I think, the more an approach like this, into its minutiae, can have a resonance and be truly effective.
In addition, I was also very much attracted by the material approach – I have always found historical artefacts fascinating, and I’m sure I’m not alone in that, yet they are rarely incorporated or used in conjunction with serious
history, instead being left solely to the collectors. This book, I think, combines the fascination of the artefacts with serious historical scrutiny.
What did you find the biggest challenge in writing about such a complicated topic as the history of the Third Reich through objects?
In truth it was not a difficult book to write. The style is more essayistic – with an essay to accompany each object – so there is no requirement to carry a narrative, or even much of an argument, over the length of the book. In that sense, then, it was comparatively easy.
I actually found the change of approach that this book demanded to be quite liberating. It was exciting to write about the story of Geli Raubal, for instance – Hitler’s niece who committed suicide in 1931 – though an artefact (a bronze bust of her that Hitler commissioned soon after her death) rather than in the
conventional way.
The biggest challenge, actually
– as in any book – was what to leave out. Obviously the main areas – the Holocaust, war, political violence, rise and fall, the Hitler-cult etc. – had to be covered adequately, as well as the technological military aspects, and then of course there were my own areas of specialism and interest... So my list of possible items grew and grew, and then had to be whittled back down to 100.
I am curious about the things that were not included. What are some of the things you decided to leave out?
There were a few things for which no decent images were available, or the items were no longer extant, like the “Germania” model, for instance. Other discarded ideas included some of the burned books, an ersatz coffee tin, a fragment of flak...lots of them. Maybe my publisher would like to do a second volume?!
Adolf Hitler's Deutsche Arbeiter-Partei (German Workers' Party) membership card