Shelley Baranowski

On her book Nazi Empire: German Colonialism and Imperialism from Bismarck to Hitler

Cover Interview of February 20, 2011

In a nutshell

As German nationalists conceived it, the German “nation” was for most of its history an empire. It was first embodied in the Holy Roman Empire; later in the “second” empire, Imperial Germany, between 1871 and 1918; and finally in the Third Reich (Reich meaning “empire”) between 1933 and 1945. Even the post-World War I Weimar Republic retained the name German “Reich.”

Yet because of the extraordinary violence of the Nazi regime, which culminated in the Holocaust, German history has usually been studied apart from the broader history of European empires and imperialism.

In Nazi Empire, I argue that Nazi imperialism was distinctive—and still it was imperialism.

Rather than pursuing an empire that coped with ethnic and religious diversity, which characterized empires historically, the Nazis grounded theirs in the principle of racial homogeneity. Nevertheless, the Nazi determination to acquire “living space” to enable the biological cleansing and survival of the German Volk arose from the comparisons that Nazi leaders drew between their own aims, those of their contemporary imperial rivals, including the United States, and empires of the past, especially imperial Rome.

In addition, in imperial fashion, Nazi leaders claimed that an expanded German Lebensraum or “living space” in eastern Europe would anchor Germany as a world power. This would avoid what the Nazis perceived as the fatal weakness of previous German empires, the insufficient commitment to racial purity.

history / polemics / violence / germany / holocaust / empire / genocide / arendt hannah / imperialism / stoler laura ann /

[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.

Carolyn J. Dean,
Interview of February 01, 2011

The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.

Jerome Kagan,
Interview of September 17, 2009