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Ever since the collapse of the Third Reich, anxieties have persisted about Nazism's revival in the form of a Fourth Reich. Gavriel D. Rosenfeld reveals, for the first time, these postwar nightmares of a future that never happened and explains what they tell us about Western political, intellectual, and cultural life. He shows how postwar German history might have been very different without the fear of the Fourth Reich as a mobilizing idea to combat the right-wing forces that genuinely threatened the country's democratic order. He then explores the universalization of the Fourth Reich by left-wing radicals in the 1960s, its transformation into a source of pop culture entertainment in the 1970s, and its embrace by authoritarian populists and neo-Nazis seeking to attack the European Union since the year 2000. This is a timely analysis of a concept that is increasingly relevant in an era of surging right-wing politics.
The first comprehensive history about how the idea of a Fourth Reich - the nightmare of a Nazi return to power - has shaped postwar Western life
Probes the question of whether a Fourth Reich has been an alarmist vision unlikely to be realized, or whether it ever could have been - or still could become - a reality
The arguments in the book are linked to today's political landscape of surging right-wing politics
Introduction
1. Between fantasy and nightmare: inventing the Fourth Reich in the Third Reich
2. From werewolves to democrats: the Fourth Reich under Allied occupation
3. The Fourth Reich turns right: renazifying Germany in the 1950s
4. From Germany to the United States: universalizing the Fourth Reich in the turbulent 1960s
5. Hitler in Argentina: fictionalizing the Fourth Reich in the long 1970s
6. Re-Germanizing the Fourth Reich: from reunification to the Reich Citizens' Movement
Conclusion.
Description
Ever since the collapse of the Third Reich, anxieties have persisted about Nazism's revival in the form of a Fourth Reich. Gavriel D. Rosenfeld reveals, for the first time, these postwar nightmares of a future that never happened and explains what they tell us about Western political, intellectual, and cultural life. He shows how postwar German history might have been very different without the fear of the Fourth Reich as a mobilizing idea to combat the right-wing forces that genuinely threatened the country's democratic order. He then explores the universalization of the Fourth Reich by left-wing radicals in the 1960s, its transformation into a source of pop culture entertainment in the 1970s, and its embrace by authoritarian populists and neo-Nazis seeking to attack the European Union since the year 2000. This is a timely analysis of a concept that is increasingly relevant in an era of surging right-wing politics.
The first comprehensive history about how the idea of a Fourth Reich - the nightmare of a Nazi return to power - has shaped postwar Western life
Probes the question of whether a Fourth Reich has been an alarmist vision unlikely to be realized, or whether it ever could have been - or still could become - a reality
The arguments in the book are linked to today's political landscape of surging right-wing politics
