David Cesarani
Passive Resistance
Living With Hitler: Liberal Democrats in the Third Reich
By Eric Kurlander
Yale University Press 288pp £25 order from our bookshop
There can be few more thankless tasks than chronicling the fate of liberals and democrats under Hitler. Thankless not because it is a tale of horror and tragedy, but because there can have been few political activists who laid claim to the ideals of liberalism and democracy who were more confused, spineless, dilatory and myopic. Which is not to say that Eric Kurlander’s sedulous research is pointless: on the contrary, his study is immensely valuable for the light it sheds on the weakness of liberalism in the Weimar Republic, the ease with which the Nazis manipulated redundant democrats, and the vexed question of whether the Third Reich endured more by consent than coercion.
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'Unlike much that was extracted from India, these paintings were not plunder, and those who created them were properly remunerated and often received due credit.'
@PParkerWriting on 'Forgotten Masters: Indian Painting for the East India Company'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/artists-for-hire
‘"I feel", Lowell told Hardwick ... "as if I were pulled apart and thinning into mist, or rather being torn apart and still preferring that state to making a decision."'
Richard Davenport-Hines on the letters of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/yours-unfaithfully-2
'To me, Elmore Leonard is as comforting in extremity as Pym, and as safe, in the last resort, as Wodehouse. The guys with the best lines are going to come out the other side; the dumb fucks are going to get it in the head or chest.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-spoonful-of-elmore