The Price of Exclusion ─ Ethnicity, National Identity and the Decline of German Liberalism, 1898-1933

Kurlander (modern European history, Stetson U.) examines the precedents to the rise of nazism and finds that the argument that liberalism failed is not enough. He shows that German liberalism was actually caught between conflicting and openly competing forces of national identity, tracing the changes of 1898 to 1918 in the Volkisch liberalism of Schleswig-Holstein, including its univeralist paradigms of regional identity, the Volkisch nationalism of Silesia, including its attitudes about Jews, Poles, and others in the region, and the republican particularlism of the Alsatian liberal counterculture, including the intellectual shift in unity and the concept of progress. He then shows how each party or movement changed in the period from 1918 to 1933 as overall German political cultural shifted and how the resulting challenges to preserving liberal democracy engendered increasingly exclusionary practices, which liberals only exaggerated by embracing the Republic. Annotation c2006 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Eric Kurlander received his PhD from Harvard University and is now Assistant Professor of Modern European History at Stetson University. He has published articles on liberalism, anti-Semitism and political culture in Imperial and Weimar Germany, and is currently working on a book studying the fate of bourgeois republicans in the Third Reich, Living With Hitler: Liberal Democrats Between Resistance and Collaboration, 1933-1945 (Yale UP, fortcoming).