High Society in the Third Reich

This book is the first systematic study of the relations between German high society and the Nazis. It uses unpublished archival material, private diaries and diplomatic documents to take us into the hidden areas of power where privileges, tax breaks, and stolen property were exchanged. Fabrice DAlmeida begins by examining high society in the Weimar period, dominated by the old imperial aristocracy and a new republican aristocracy of government officials and wealthy businessmen. It was in this group that Hitler made his social debut in the early 1920s through the mediation of conservative friends and artists, including the family of the composer Richard Wagner. By the end of the 1920s, he enjoyed wide support among socialites, who played a significant role in his access to power in 1933. Their adherence to the Nazi regime, and the favors they received in return, continued and even grew until defeat loomed on the horizon. DAlmeida shows how members of German high society sought to outdo each other in showing zealous support for Hitler, how the old elites starting with the Kaisers sons partied alongside parvenus, and how actors, aristocrats, SS technocrats, and diplomats came together to form a strange imperial court. Women also played a role in this theatre of power; they were persuaded that they had gained in dignity what they had lost in civil rights. There emerges a fascinating and disturbing picture of a group that allowed nothing not war, the plundering of Europe, nor the extermination of peoples to alter their cynical enjoyment of pleasures: hunting, regattas, the opera, balls, dinners and tennis. More than a study of a class or a chronicle, this book lifts the veil that has concealed a society that used secrecy to protect itself

History

Steven Rendall

Americas

John Wiley&Sons, Inc.

"Our daily encounters with forgetting have not taught us enough about how much power it exercises over our lives, what reflections and feelings it evokes in different individuals, how even art and science presuppose―with sympathy or antipathy―forgetting, and finally what political and cultural barriers can be erected against forgetting when it cannot be reconciled with what is right and moral.... We find that cultural history provides a helpful perspective in which the value of the art of forgetting emerges.... That is the subject this book (through which flows Lethe, the meandering stream of forgetfulness) will try to represent and discuss by means of many concrete examples, taken primarily from literature."―from Lethe
Lethe is an exploration of the art of forgetting―as the counterpart of the rhetorical art of memory―in Western culture from the Greeks to the present. It offers penetrating analyses of works by, among others, Augustine, Bellow, Borges, Casanova, Celan, Cervantes, Dante, Descartes, Freud, Goethe, Homer, Kant, Kleist, Levi, Locke, Mallarmé, Montaigne, Nietzsche, Ovid, Pirandello, Plato, Proust, Rabelais, Rousseau, Sartre, and Wiesel. What emerges is a general view of forgetting that combines a recognition of its necessity and inevitability with a critique of forgetting (particularly in the case of the Holocaust) and the need to combat it. Harald Weinrich's epilogue considers forgetting in the present age of information overflow, particularly in the area of the natural sciences.
This magisterial book was first published in German in 1997 and has already been translated into French, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, and Spanish; a Korean translation is in the works. This is the first of Weinrich's books to be translated into English and will be welcomed by scholars and students of literature, intellectual and cultural historians, classicists, historians of philosophy, and other philosophers with literary interests. The range of the book is astonishing. In Steven Rendall's skillful and fluent translation, its readability is noteworthy.

Lethe: The Art and Critique of Forgetting

Literature & Fiction

Harold Weinrich

History & Criticism

Cornell University Press

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Books by Steven Rendall