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A. Dirk Moses, Mark Mazower. Hitler's Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe. Paperback edition. New York: Penguin. 2009. Pp. xl, 725. $20.00, The American Historical Review, Volume 115, Issue 3, June 2010, Pages 885–886, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr.115.3.885
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Extract
This book is magnificently and seductively subversive. Writing in the narrative mode for a general audience, Mark Mazower's lucid prose and preference for straightforward presentation over historiographical debate means that readers may find themselves following his broader—and more radical—arguments despite themselves. The feat of this book is not only its sweeping coverage and vast erudition; it is to mainstream a thesis that hitherto has existed on the margins of scholarship on Nazi Germany.
Since the early 2000s, members of a younger generation of historians, like Jürgen Zimmerer, Wendy Lower in Nazi Empire-Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine (2005), and the present writer have been drawing links between German and European imperialism and the Nazi empire and the Holocaust. But most Holocaust historians reject the connection and insist upon the centrality of antisemitism in the Nazi project, a perspective that culminated in Saul Friedländer's feted The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945 (2007). Mazower foreshadowed the imperialism thesis earlier in his well-known study of twentieth-century Europe, Dark Continent (1998), where he suggested—following Aimé Césaire—that the real transgression of National Socialism was not genocide per se but the importation into Europe of brutal colonial rule over non-Europeans. Moreover, this traumatic experience, rather than a Manichean struggle between “civilization and barbarism,” was for Europeans the defining experience of the twentieth century. For many of them found liberalism and democracy attractive only after the shock of being treated like “the natives.” Mazower seems to be implying that, pace the conventional wisdom, the Holocaust is not that defining an experience after all.
