The Rise and Fall of Comradeship
Cambridge University Press, 1/31/2017
EAN 9781107046368, ISBN10: 110704636X
Hardcover, 306 pages, 23.5 x 16 x 2 cm
Language: English
This is an innovative account of how the concept of comradeship shaped the actions, emotions and ideas of ordinary German soldiers across the two world wars and during the Holocaust. Using individual soldiers' diaries, personal letters and memoirs, Kühne reveals the ways in which soldiers' longing for community, and the practice of male bonding and togetherness, sustained the Third Reich's pursuit of war and genocide. Comradeship fuelled the soldiers' fighting morale. It also propelled these soldiers forward into war crimes and acts of mass murders. Yet, by practising comradeship, the soldiers could maintain the myth that they were morally sacrosanct. Post-1945, the notion of kameradschaft as the epitome of humane and egalitarian solidarity allowed Hitler's soldiers to join the euphoria for peace and democracy in the Federal Republic, finally shaping popular memories of the war through the end of the twentieth century.
Acknowledgements
Introduction
a concept from a different world
Part I. The Myth of Comradeship, 1914–1939
1. Healing
2. Coalescence
3. Steeling
Part II. The Practice of Comradeship, 1939–1945
4. Assimilation
5. Megalomania
6. Nemesis
Part III. The Decline of Comradeship
7. Privatisation
8. Integration
9. Demonisation
Conclusion
protean masculinity and Germany's twentieth century
Index.