In Hitler’s Munich: Jews, the Revolution, and the Rise of Nazism by Michael Brenner (review)

Reviewed by: In Hitler's Munich: Jews, the Revolution, and the Rise of Nazism by Michael Brenner Helmut Walser Smith In Hitler's Munich: Jews, the Revolution, and the Rise of Nazism. By Michael Brenner. Translated by Jeremiah Riemer. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022. 378 pages. 35. 00 (cloth). Michael Brenner is recognized as one of the most distinguished historians of the German-Jewish experience. Although his work ranges across a broad spectrum of Jewish history, he is best known for his pathbreaking exploration of The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), Nach dem Holocaust: Juden in Deutschland, 1945–1950 (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1995), and as assistant editor to Michael Meyer in the creation of the four-volume German-Jewish History in Modern Times, a benchmark of scholarship on the subject and the starting point for subsequent historical research. When the German version of In Hitler's Munich appeared as Der Lange Schatten der Revolution: Juden und Antisemiten in Hitler's München, 1918–1923, it was something of an event. Widely and positively reviewed in major newspapers and scholarly journals, the book was rightly seen as contributing to emerging research that End Page 125 focused on the early Weimar Republic as the principal incubator of the ideologies of the age of the extremes. This research has itself been something of a surprise. In the 1990s, the political and economic tribulations of the Weimar Republic seemed like an all too trodden field. Major books like Gerald Feldman's The Great Disorder: Politics, Economics, and Society in the German Inflation, 1914–1924 (Oxford University Press, 1993) appeared as a monument marking the culmination of a rich tradition of scholarship. Beautifully written and impeccably researched, Feldman's magnum opus was formidable, and for young scholars it no doubt appeared like the imposing face of Yosemite's El Capitan to an inexperienced climber. There was no obvious way forward. But this situation began to change dramatically in the second decade of the twenty-first century. One important marker of this change was the publication, by the Munich-based Institute for Contemporary History (Institut für Zeitgeschichte), of the critical edition of Hitler's Mein Kampf. Published in 2016, shortly after the Free State of Bavaria no longer owned the copyright, as it did for 70 years after Hitler's death, the critical edition, and especially its copious and detailed notes, forced readers to scrutinize the precise context of this infamous book. A slew of publications, among them essays by Andreas Wirsching and a series of books by Thomas Weber, cast serious doubt on the old argument that Hitler's antisemitic ideology derived from the trenches of World War I and from his time in pre-war Vienna. Another such marker, appearing in the same year as the critical edition of Mein Kampf, was Robert Gerwarth's The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016) —a book that explained how the violence of World War I bled into the years of peace. Gerwarth's frame was of course Europe, but with a larger focus on central and eastern Europe than had hitherto been the case. The central and eastern model of continued violence highlighted the importance of Weimar, especially early Weimar, as the main incubator of German variants of extreme ideologies, particularly on the Right. Moreover, this new research End Page 126 was remarkable for focusing on the conditions that bred National Socialism more than on the mechanics of the Nazi seizure of power. The latter, the seizure of power, had long been a vanishing point of a great deal of historical research. Much of what ailed early Weimar, this new research suggested, was actually a product of the early years—not of the war, not of the autocratic structures of late imperial Germany, and most certainly not of a liberalism gone awry after the failed Revolution of 1848. According to these new approaches, it was the chaotic, topsy-turvy world of Weimar, especially in its early years, that created near civil war conditions, and set the stage for the radicalization of both Left and Right. Not. . .