Introduction

Summary

This collection represents a distillation of recent scholarship and commentary on the German resistance problem - on the historical phenomenon itself, its legacy, and the ways it has been interpreted over the past forty years. For those who like their history neat and tidy, who want a unified view of the past that might be serviceable in the present and future, this volume may be a disappointment. In advancing varying approaches to and assessments of the topic at hand, it reflects the extent to which the resistance question is still an open one, still productive of lively (and often quite passionate) debate. This book's chief purpose is to define - or redefine - the issues that academic historians and laymen alike will need to keep in mind as they grapple with the endlessly complicated question of resistance in the Third Reich. But the issues raised here have meaning beyond the history of National Socialism. As Fritz Stern notes in his introductory comments, the German experience in the Third Reich tells us much about how people behave in times of stress - about their self-delusions and petty evasions, as well as their occasional moments of heroism and self-transcendence. And though Hitler may be long gone, the problem of resistance to tyranny “is alive in many battered countries today; it is a subject that, properly understood, can instruct all of us.”