Wednesday, October 28, 2015

Nicholas Stargardt

Nicholas Stargardt is Professor of Modern European History at Magdalen College, Oxford. His new book is The German War: A Nation Under Arms, 1939-1945.

From his Q & A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: Why did you decide to write this book, and how does your analysis differ from that of some other historians?

A: There hasn’t been a history of German society in the Second World War. There are whole libraries on military strategy, the Nazi leadership and the Holocaust, but we simply have not known what the German people thought they were fighting for. And this was a war the regime could not have fought without mobilizing everyone.

So, this book does something quite different from what historians have explored till now. I wanted to know what people experienced but also how completely the war overturned and transformed their lives and perspectives.

Individual voices have a special place here, because one of the key questions which interested me was...[read on]
--Marshal Zeringue