ANATOMY OF A HATCHET JOB
Anatomy of a hatchet job: a look at Richard Grunberger's A Social History of the Third Reich (1971)
A Social History of the Third Reich (1971) by Richard Grunberger (1924-2005) can be numbered among the few real evergreens of Third Reich historiography. (NOTE 1) The initial popularity of this work, which has spawned numerous editions over thirty-five years and translations into four different languages, can be attributed to its pioneering role as the first comprehensive overview of German social history in the Hitler era. However, its enduring popularity seems best explained by its ideological goal, the fact that the work seeks to inoculate students against the possible appeal of Hitler and the Nazis by systematically denigrating their every achievement in the social and economic sphere. For A Social History of the Third Reich is everything most teachers and professors seem to expect a book about Nazi Germany to be: a hatchet job.
The organizing principle of Grunberger's work - which runs to nearly 600 pages, thereby creating an unwarranted impression of scholarliness - is the idea that the Nazis' achievements were more illusory than real. Yet it is doubtful that Grunberger can be classed as genuinely knowledgeable about his subject. Born in Vienna in 1924, Grunberger left Austria in December 1938, that is to say, nine months after Germany annexed Austria. Although Grunberger therefore experienced life under the Third Reich for nine months, he knew nothing about the Germany that is the subject of the book. Nor can Grunberger claim to be in any sense objective: after he arrived in London in the spring of 1940 the 16-year-old joined Young Austria, a communist youth group that met at a Belsize Park church. As both a Jew and a Communist, Grunberger was doubly biased against the Nazis.
This post offers a short critique of Grunberger's most successful book with a view to exposing its corrupt modus operandi, which is that of the anti-Nazi fanatic rather than the objective historian. On nearly every occasion on which his subject matter forces him to acknowledge a Nazi achievement, Grunberger finds a means of eclipsing it. Almost invariably, he does so by means of fatuous comparisons: he implies either that life had been a good deal better under the Weimar Republic or had been better in another country (almost invariably, he means the vast, resource-rich United States or the United Kingdom, whose living standards were propped up by the world's largest empire - there are no comparisons with other resource-poor continental countries such as Switzerland or Hungary).
In order to pursue his Jewish-Communist vendetta against the long-defunct regime, Grunberger assigns literally every piece of information political significance: as a result of treating each and every social datum as a manouevre in a larger war, he cannot allow the Nazis to score any victories at all. If a fact or figure makes Nazi rule look successful, he seems compelled to find a means of transforming its significance in a negative sense - a strategy which, of course, is that of the propagandist not the historian. Indeed, Grunberger even treats German margarine consumption as an opportunity to indulge in a posthumous duel with Hitler.
By begrudging his enemy any victories at all, no matter how minor, Grunberger manages what probably ranks among the most carping and quibbling examples of social history ever published in English. If the subject was anything other than Nazi Germany, the author would have been pilloried for his unsound methodology. But this is a book about the Third Reich, the one subject on which historians enjoy carte blanche to be as unfair as they like, indeed, Nazi Germany is the one subject where being unfair is perceived by many as a moral obligation.
I: The false benchmark year of 1928
One of Grunberger's strategies is his recurring use of the year 1928 as if it were a typical year in the existence of the Weimar Republic, and therefore an appropriate year by which to measure Nazi achievements. This approach is entirely misconceived. For a start, 1928 was the apogee of the Weimar Republic's so-called 'golden years,' not a typical Weimar year.
What's more, as the socialist G.D.H. Cole recognised in 1933 - even before there was any question of evaluating the Nazis' achievements - Germany's prosperity in 1928 was artificial. "Between 1924 and 1928 Germany had maintained an illusory internal prosperity by means of heavy borrowing of capital from overseas. The withdrawal of this capital, chiefly on account of the American boom, left her for the first time since the Dawes Plan faced with the necessity of living upon her own attenuated resources, and at the same time meeting the heavy claims both of her late enemies for reparations and of foreign capitalists for interest on the large sums which she had borrowed." Conditions deteriorated because "the politicians at the head of the Weimar Republic ceased to be able to maintain tolerable living conditions for the mass of the German people, including the middle classes as well as the manual workers." (NOTE 2)
In short, the relative prosperity of 1928 owed itself to a short-lived credit boom. In no sense did it offer a benchmark for Nazi performance because the Nazi achievement consisted precisely in being able to refurbish living standards without an influx of foreign capital. As the economic commentator Henry C. K. Liu wrote recently in an article published on the Asia Times website, 'The Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, at a time when its economy was in total collapse, with ruinous war-reparation obligations and zero prospects for foreign investment or credit.' Clearly, it is unfair to compare Nazi Germany with the Weimar Republic of the late 1920s, which enjoyed access to substantial amounts of foreign investment and credit, or with countries which had never been reduced to the bankrupt condition in which Germany had found itself in 1932-33. (NOTE 3)
II: Living standards
To repeat, the central thesis of A Social History of the Third Reich is that the Nazis' achievements were more illusory than real. Accordingly, Grunberger introduces his chapter on "Consumption" (pp. 261-81) by trotting out - not for the first time - the idea that the German people had been no good judges of their own condition under Hitler. By 1938, "The average citizen of the Third Reich ... was hardly in a mood to make retrospective comparisons," he declares. (p. 261) Grunberger would have us believe that his views on the subject are more legitimate than those of the people who were actually there.
While he is prepared to concede that average Germans were better off than they had been in 1932, the worst year of the Depression, Grunberger is loath to admit that they might have been better off in any way that they had been in 1928. The satisfaction with which most Germans viewed their condition in the late 1930s is explained away as the product of the regime's "propaganda" and popular "auto-suggestion." Germans were, apparently, so determined to believe in the myth of Nazi success that they were willing to delude themselves as to the extent of that success. They were so grateful for that success that they entirely banished from their minds the prosperity of a decade before. We are apparently expected to believe that for most Germans 1932 had been Stunde Null.
Grunberger's methodology therefore depends at least partly upon a naive idealisation of the Weimar Republic. Whenever possible, he compares the Nazi Germany of the late 1930s to the Weimar Republic of the late 1920s and invites the conclusion that the Nazis either managed very little advance on the Weimar Republic or even lost ground. An example is when he discusses housing. Although the Nazis created far more housing units each year than the Weimar Republic had done - he states that the Nazis built 300,000 units annually compared to the Republic's 200,000 - Grunberger determines, on the basis of statistics concerning the city of Magdeburg, that the Nazis' housing was cheaper and therefore of lower quality. (p. 278) A Nazi-era Volkswohnung was also smaller (34 sq. m. for a family of four) than a comparable Weimar-era apartment (40 sq. m.) or the average laid down by Britain's 1936 Housing Act (50 sq. m.).
Grunberger does not concern himself with such details as whether the poorer quality of the housing in Magdeburg was typical of Nazi Germany, or whether many apartments built in Britain after 1936 actually conformed to the 1936 standard. Grunberger's approach is so jaundiced, however, that one cannot be sure, when he generalises from a single case, as he does with Magdeburg, whether he has chosen a typical or only the most unflattering example.
The British 50 sq. m. requirement would be more impressive, if the British government had built a comparable amount of housing units to Germany with these dimensions. In fact, the British government provided very little housing, leaving everything to the building societies, which just happened to have a lot of money to lend at the time. (NOTE 4) In Germany, such propitious conditions did not exist. In the wake of the Depression, the initiative had to come from the government, and it was their ability to achieve as much as they did in extremely adverse conditions that constitutes the true measure of the Nazis' numerous successes. (NOTE 5) Such historical perspectives are altogether absent from Grunberger's jaundiced work. After all, his aim is to bury Nazi Germany, not give it its due.
One of the more amusing passages in A Social History comes when Grunberger addresses the subject of that staple food, bread. Although bread consumption increased in Germany between 1932 and 1938 without any increase in price - indeed, he says the price fell "fractionally" - for Grunberger the salient fact is rather that "the quality of bread deteriorated." This was due, he explains, to the fact that the rye and wheat content of the bread declined by five percent and was replaced by "an increased mixture of maize and potato flour." Grunberger is undaunted by the subjectivity of the concept of deterioration: after all, the question of whether the change in the mix of flours, which was in any case relatively minor, represented a deterioration in quality would seem a matter that could only be resolved by German consumers circa 1938. Today, many consumers actually pay more for bread that contains an admixture of maize or potato.
For Grunberger's purposes, it is not sufficient simply to assert that the quality of the bread declined in Nazi Germany. While he concedes that Germans ate a great deal of bread - four times more, he states, than contemporary Americans - the fact he wishes to impress upon us is that they only ate three-fifths as much wheaten bread. (p. 263) Clearly, Grunberger is a believer in a hierarchy of grains, according to which wheat bread is self-evidently superior to rye bread. He also seems to have something against the addition of fibre. Grunberger hastens to point out, that during the war bread quality "deteriorated" through the addition of bran; this, he says, caused "widespread flatulence, which became an unpleasantly noticeable phenomenon in public places." (p. 263) Today, of course it is generally accepted that bran makes a desirable supplement to a diet which is deficient in fibre.
By the way, Grunberger does not provide a reference for this curious piece of information, which implies that someone using research techniques I would probably prefer not to know about had succeeded in quantifying German flatulence levels during the war. Casting my eye over the works cited in the footnotes, the most probable source is Wallace R. Deuel's People Under Hitler: What Personal Life is Like Where the Nazis Rule (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1942) which devotes a chapter to bread. Published in February 1942, this was a work of unadulterated propaganda written by a member of the Council of Foreign Relations. It was also based, as Deuel admits (p. v), almost exclusively on anonymous sources - which almost certainly means disinformation provided by the OSS or resistance propaganda organisations. Grunberger's use of such an obvious piece of junk as a source for a social history of Nazi Germany is, in itself, an indictment of his modus operandi.
Given the cultural biases which throughout history have made it into a rough and ready index of popular prosperity, meat consumption is inevitably an area in which Grunberger tries the Nazis and finds them wanting. Grunberger states that "[b]y 1938 the Germans were eating only one eighth more meat than during the Depression." (p. 263) Annual per capita consumption was only 48.6 kg. compared to 57 kg in the US and 64 kg in the UK. Given what is known today about the dangers of excessive meat consumption, it is hard not to feel that the German people were not doing too badly.
In any case, fish consumption increased dramatically - by 40 percent between 1932 and 1938. Yet, despite the fact that eating fish is considerably healthier than eating meat, Grunberger treats it simply as a "substitute for meat." (p. 263) The possibility that many Germans might actually have preferred to consume extra calories in the form of fish rather than meat, is absent from Grunberger's mental world, a world in which facts are only serviceable if they can be used to discredit the Nazis. Finally, Germans actually ate more chicken than Americans in this period: all in all, it sounds like during the Third Reich, Germans enjoyed the blessings of a diet that was considerably more varied than that available to most Americans and Britons at the same time, while also being significantly healthier.
By way of conclusion, it is worth reinforcing the point that many of Grunberger's sources for his chapter "Consumption" are of doubtful reliability. Several items were published in the United States during the war for propaganda purposes. In addition to the aforementioned People Under Hitler, which accounts for seven references, ten references are to two books by Jews who left Germany in 1933 and 1935 respectively: Max Seydewitz (1892-1987), Civil Life in Wartime Germany: The Story of the Home Front (New York: Viking Press, 1945) and Hilde Oppenheimer-Blum (1906-89), The Standard of Living of German Labour under Nazi Rule (New York: New School of Social Research, 1943). Since neither writer had any personal experience of Nazi Germany during its heyday from 1936-40, and both writers were heavily biased against the regime, it is hard to see how either work could be regarded as a useful source for the country's social history. Several other items published shortly after the war, including a number published by the GDR, are no less likely to be shot through with propagandistic motives.
NOTE 1: "Obituary: Richard Grunberger – historian of the people." WWW:
http://www.camdennewjournal.co.uk/031005/n031005_06.htm All biographical information about Grunberger has been garnered from this notice.
NOTE 2: George D. H. Cole and Margaret I. Cole, The Intelligent Man's Review of Europe To-Day, London: Victor Gollancz, 1933, p. 644.
NOTE 3: Henry C. K. Liu, "Nazism and the German economic miracle," Asia Times Online (May 24, 2005)
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/GE24Dj01.html
NOTE 4: According to Alan Crisp, "The Working-Class Owner-Occupied House of the 1930s," Britain built over two million low-priced houses between 1933 and 1939. This is almost exactly the same number of housing units built in Germany in the same period. However, it is surely important to note that the housing growth in Britain in this period was due to the building societies, which were flush with cash at the time and extremely keen to lend.
NOTE 5: The regime funded housing development indirectly through a system it inherited from Chancellor Bruening: 'State support for housing construction rested above all on public securities (Buergschaften) given for private mortgages - a policy initiated by Bruening before 1933. Direct investment of public funds was restricted to small houses intended for owner occupation (Kleinsiedlungen), and to very small flats for rental (Volkswohnungen). Public subsidies were limited in their extent and confined to just a small part of construction costs. This system of mainly indirect support proved to be surprisingly effective.' (Karl Christian Fuehrer, "Managing Scarcity: The German Housing Shortage and the Controlled Economy 1914-1990," German History, 13, 1995, p. 338)
