For most people who have not lived in Germany, the essence of Nazism remains a riddle. Americans, Russians, Frenchmen, and the British usually try to interpret it in terms of militarism, anti-Semitism, extreme nationalism, and imperialism. All these were elements in Nazism, yet they existed in other countries as well. I suspect that some of the obstacles to understanding are linguistic in character; for whenever one tries to describe and analyze what was unique in Nazism—the voelkisch ideology, the blood and soil doctrine, the whole Nordic hero myth—one runs into a language barrier and communication breaks down. The very word voelkisch, for instance, is untranslatable. Read more...
From The Roots of Nazism, by Walter Laqueur, a review of The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich (George L. Mosse) ) and The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria, (Peter G.J. Pulzer) as reviewed in the New York Review of Books, January 14, 1965.
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