Weimar Radicals: Nazis and Communists Between Authenticity and Performance (Monographs in German History, 28)

"Brown's [innovative study] makes a vital contribution to an understanding of the Weimar Republic as a set of competing political stages, where radicalism was not the direct result of social or economic circumstances, but part and parcel of a deliberate dramatization of political speech." - German History "This is a remarkable, provocative, and eloquent study of the mutual suspicion, mutual citation, and mutual competition between Communists and Nazis who defined radicalism in terms of authenticity as well as ideology and thereby found themselves to be political intimates as well as adversaries. Timothy Brown provides an entirely new perspective on the end of the Weimar Republic and the beginning of the Third Reich." - Peter Fritzsche, author of Life and Death in the Third Reich ..". exciting and informative." - H-Soz-u-Kult "This splendid book offers a fresh look at the extraordinarily violent cultural-political radicalism of the post-World War I era, which has long been obscured by the Manichean dualism of anticommunism/antifascism and the Cold War. Brown shows convincingly that the multitude of militant-male mass-based radical movements of Weimar Germany cannot be understood simply as dichotomous pre-fascist and pre-communist antecedents to Hitler and Stalin.... [A] sophisticated cultural interpretation." - Diethelm Prowe, Carleton College