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Hitler versus Hindenburg: The 1932 Presidential Elections and the End of the Weimar Republic . By Larry Eugene Jones . Cambridge : Cambridge University Press , 2016. Pp. xvii + 411. Cloth $120.00. ISBN 978-1107022614 .
Book Reviews
The question of how the Nazis came to power in 1933 used to occupy legions of modern German historians. For a long time, the events leading up to Adolf Hitler's appointment as Reich Chancellor on January 30, 1933, were the bread-and-butter of modern German history. From the 1980s onward, however, scholarly attention shifted: the regime's racist policies, particularly its antisemitism, became the primary focus of most major works on the Third Reich. Instead of the backroom politicking of men like Franz von Papen and Kurt von Schleicher, which helped to facilitate Hitler's entry into the Chancellery, the mass murder of the Jews and ordinary Germans' complicity in the regime's persecutory policies moved to the center of scholarly analysis. Instead of 1933, the year 1941 became the new "vanishing point" of German history writing, as Helmut Walser Smith has argued in an influential study (The Continuities of German History: Nation, Religion, and Race across the Long Nineteenth Century [2008]). Around the same time, historians of Weimar Germany overcame their erstwhile fixation on the failure of Germany's first democracy. A number of important historiographical interventions by Peter Fritzsche, Benjamin Ziemann, Rüdiger Graf, and others stressed that the year 1933 was not the predestined telos of the republic's history. As a result, the history of Weimar democracy has no longer been written, in recent years, first and foremost from the perspective of its demise.
Both of these historiographical developments, important though they were, have meant that the study of the political history of the...