Beyond the Racial State
Rethinking Nazi Germany

A fundamental reassessment of the ways that racial policy worked and was understood under the Third Reich.

Devin O. Pendas (Edited by), Mark Roseman (Edited by), Richard F. Wetzell (Edited by)

9781316616994, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 16 November 2017

542 pages
22.8 x 15 x 3 cm, 0.79 kg

The 'racial state' has become a familiar shorthand for the Third Reich, encapsulating its raison d'être, ambitions, and the underlying logic of its genocidal violence. The Nazi racial state's agenda is generally understood as a fundamental reshaping of society based on a new hierarchy of racial value. However, this volume argues that it is time to reappraise what race really meant under Nazism, and to question and complicate its relationship to the Nazis' agenda, actions, and appeal. Based on a wealth of new research, the contributors show that racial knowledge and racial discourse in Nazi Germany were far more contradictory and disparate than we have come to assume. They shed new light on the ways that racial policy worked and was understood, and consider race's function, content, and power in relation to society and nation, and above all, in relation to the extraordinary violence unleashed by the Nazis.

Introduction
Part I. Comparative and Historical Perspectives: 1. Racial discourse, Nazi violence, and the limits of the racial state model Mark Roseman
2. The murder of European Jewry: Nazi genocide in continental perspective Donald Bloxham
3. Meanings of race and biopolitics in historical perspective Pascal Grosse
4. Racial states in comparative perspective Devin O. Pendas
Part II. Race, Science, and Nazi Biopolitics: 5. Eugenics and racial science in Nazi Germany: was there a genesis of the 'final solution' from the spirit of science? Richard F. Wetzell
6. Race science, race mysticism, and the racial state Dan Stone
7. Ideology's logic: the evolution of racial thought in Germany from the völkisch movement to the Third Reich Christian Geulen
8. Nazi medical crimes, eugenics, and the limits of the racial state paradigm Herwig Czech
Part III. Anti-Semitism beyond Race: 9. 'The axis around which national socialist ideology turns': state bureaucracy, the Reich Ministry of the Interior and racial policy in the first years of the Third Reich Jürgen Matthäus
10. Neither Aryan nor Semite: reflections on the meanings of race in Nazi Germany Richard Steigmann-Gall
11. Racializing historiography: Anti-Jewish scholarship in the Third Reich Dirk Rupnow
Part IV. Race and Society: 12. Volksgemeinschaft: a controversy Michael Wildt
13. Mothers, whores, or sentimental dupes? Emotion and race in historiographical debates about women in the Third Reich Annette F. Timm
14. Nationalist mobilization: foreign diplomats' views on the Third Reich, 1933–1945 Frank Bajohr
15. Race and humor in Nazi Germany Martina Kessel
16. Legitimacy through war? Nicholas Stargardt
Part V. Race War? Germans and Non-Germans in Wartime: 17. Negotiating völkisch and racial identities: the Deutsche Volksliste in annexed Poland Gerhard Wolf
18. Sex, race, volksgemeinschaft: German soldiers' sexual encounters with local women and men during the war and the occupation in the Soviet Union, 1941–1945 Regina Mühlhäuser
19. The disintegration of the racial basis of the concentration camp system Stefan Hördler.

Subject Areas: Fascism & Nazism [JPFQ], The Holocaust [HBTZ1], 20th century history: c 1900 to c 2000 [HBLW], European history [HBJD]