Eric Kurlander

Modern Germany: A Global History places Germany in a global and transnational context, while offering a broad scope of chronological and thematic coverage. The authors present German-speaking lands in relation to the rest of the world, rather than as discrete entities, bringing global and transnational linkages and interdependencies into focus.

The definitive history of the supernatural in Nazi Germany—the occult ideas, esoteric sciences, and pagan religions touted by the Third Reich in the service of power“[Kurlander] shows how swiftly irrational ideas can take hold, even in an age before social media.”—Michael Dirda, The Washington Post“A careful, clear-headed, and exhaustive examination of a subject so lurid that it has probably scared away some of the serious research it merits.”—National Review The Nazi fascination with the occult is legendary, yet today it is often dismissed as Himmler’s personal obsession or wildly overstated for its novelty. Preposterous though it was, however, supernatural thinking was inextricable from the Nazi project. The regime enlisted astrology and the paranormal, paganism, Indo-Aryan mythology, witchcraft, miracle weapons, and the lost kingdom of Atlantis in reimagining German politics and society and recasting German science and religion. In this eye-opening history, Eric Kurlander reveals how the Third Reich’s relationship to the supernatural was far from straightforward. Even as popular occultism and superstition were intermittently rooted out, suppressed, and outlawed, the Nazis drew upon a wide variety of occult practices and esoteric sciences to gain power, shape propaganda and policy, and pursue their dreams of racial utopia and empire.

"The failure of Liberalism" in Germany and its responsibility for the rise of Nazism has been widely discussed among scholars inside and outside Germany. This author argues that German liberalism failed because of the irreconcilable conflict between two competing visions of German identity. In following the German liberal parties from the Empire through the Third Reich Kurlander illustrates convincingly how an exclusionary racist Weltanschauung, conditioned by profound transformations in German political culture at large, gradually displaced the liberal-universalist conception of a democratic Rechtsstaat. Although there were some notable exceptions, this widespread obsession with "racial community [Volksgemeinschaft]" caused the liberal parties to succumb to ideological lassitude and self-contradiction, paving the way for National Socialism.