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Commentary

Empire, Ideology and the East: Thoughts on Nazism’s Spatial Imaginary

  • Chapter
Heimat, Region, and Empire

Part of the book series: The Holocaust and Its Contexts ((HOLC))

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Abstract

The twelve essays in this impressively crafted volume cohere strongly around a particular set of approaches to the spatial aspects of Nazi Germany’s expansionist drive, with its binary ambitions both to recast the social order ‘at home’ and to remap the ethno-cultural geographies and territorial sovereignties of Europe as a whole. Of course, in the throes of such a drive, the very meanings of ‘home’ itself — its cultural coordinates, its political geographies, its existential borders and their entailments — would be thrown inevitably into flux, as most of the contributors explicitly point out, so that one of this book’s signal achievements is to illuminate exactly that process. Perhaps the strongest consensus in Third Reich historiography at large still accepts the inherence of expansionism at Nazism’s essential core, seeing the drive for a‘new order’ as inscribed in the regime’s dynamism from its beginning. Consistent with that now well-established pattern of interpretation, moreover, these essays focus overwhelmingly on the war years themselves rather than the earlier contexts of the regime’s consolidation in 1933–1936. Only two, those by Detlef Schmiechen-Ackermann and Martina Steber, are devoted mainly to the regime’s peacetime histories.1

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Notes

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  1. Geoff Eley
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Loughborough University, Leicestershire, UK

    Claus-Christian W. Szejnmann (Professor of Modern History) (Professor of Modern History)

  2. University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK

    Maiken Umbach (Professor of Modern History) (Professor of Modern History)

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© 2012 Geoff Eley

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Eley, G. (2012). Commentary. In: Szejnmann, CC.W., Umbach, M. (eds) Heimat, Region, and Empire. The Holocaust and Its Contexts. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-39111-6_14

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-39111-6_14

  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-349-35146-6

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