The acclaimed history of the rise of the Nazis based on fascinating first-hand accounts. One of the Daily Telegraph's Best Books of 2017; A Guardian `Readers' Choice' Best Book of 2017; Without the benefit of hindsight, how do you interpret what's right in front of your eyes?;
Based on fascinating firsthand accounts, this illuminating book asks what it was like to travel in the Third Reich during the interwar era. Was it possible to know what was really going on? Was it possible for a visiting outsider “to grasp the essence of National Socialism”?
The accounts of a multitude of travellers are surveyed - ordinary tourists, academics and athletes, alongside royalty, celebrities and creative types like Samuel Beckett, Francis Bacon, Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West. Their experiences and responses are recounted in all their intriguing variation - bewilderment, obliviousness, internal outrage, scholarly outrage. I found the chapter on African American academic and Germanophile Professor William Edward Burghardt Du Bois particularly engrossing. Du Bois visited Germany in 1936 seeking to study race prejudice, but the organisation that commissioned his trip instead permitted him to investigate education and industry. He returned to report the “vindictive cruelty” of the “campaign against the Jews” and, while he experienced no “personal insult or discrimination” himself, he posited the view that matters might be different “if there were any number of Negroes in Germany”.
Spritely in tone, and finely researched, this is an engaging must-read for those with an interest in German history, and in social history per se. It might also serve as a cautionary tale to pay closer attention to the world around us.
| Primary Genre | History |
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The American-centric and anthology are charged with failing to provide analysis, something Boyd is not entirely innocent of, yet her well-written book nonetheless remains a guilty pleasure.
Credulous characters have always proffered sustenance and succour to tyrannies and tyrants. Much of the literature concerning “useful idiots” has, understandably given the phrase is attributed to Lenin, concentrated on Soviet sympathisers and those misinterpreting a dystopia for Utopia. It is timely therefore that light was shone on dark individuals duped into saying good things about another bad regime: Communism’s totalitarian twin Nazism. Yet Julia Boyd’s Travellers in the Third Reich is not it.
I say this because her book is more about travellers than fellow-travellers. Testimonies from a Jewish Boy Scout and Quakers – who bookend the chronologically-themed, 456-page hardback that starts and finishes in 1919 and 1945 respectively – feature alongside a Prussian princess and African-American academics. The cast is colourful though it is a black-and-white photograph that stands out.... Read Full Review
A fascinating insight into the rise of a dictatorship as seen through the eyes of ordinary people.
I have to admit up front that I am not a great reader of nonfiction, but this title caught my eye and I have to say I was not disappointed. I have always wondered how ordinary German people somehow allowed the Nazis to garner the power they did, and this book goes a long way in explaining it for me. In a relatively short space of time, a country which had been brought to its knees after the Great War was somehow seen by the German people and indeed, the world at large, as a country to be envied and emulated. National Socialism had brought a sense of purpose and order to the nation along with a sense of pride.... Read Full Review
Very interesting account, lots of different points of view to point a full picture-how this could ever happen to humanity?
This book is something else!
The accounts of people portrayed in this work paints a painful picture of how indeed holocaust could ever happen. How could an average man ever think Nazism was possible and something that has grown so much, and so out of proportion?
Holocaust as a result seems so hard to understand-and here we can get a true picture of its beginning of the creation of evil. It's not a depressing book,but very,very eye-opening and educating.... Read Full Review
