7 - The Kreisau Circle and the Twentieth of July

Summary

For Arthur G. Haas

Since the publication of Hans Rothfels's pioneering work on the German resistance to National Socialism some thirty years ago, the conceptualization of “resistance” has undergone a profound transformation, a transformation strikingly illustrated by the contributions to this volume. In addition to essays focusing on those well-known groups and individuals whose actions culminated in the attempted coup of July 20, 1944, we have essays on women in the resistance, the Jewish resistance, working-class resistance, as well as forms of resistance or opposition in everyday life. This broadened conceptualization of resistance, or opposition, or dissent, in the Third Reich is a vivid reflection of major departures in the historiography of the Nazi regime that began in the last decade. The heightened attention to social history, most successfully realized in the Institut fur Zeitgeschichte's ambitious Bavaria project, with its thematic emphasis on “resistance and persecution,” and in the growing body of research in Alltagsgeschichte associated with Detlev Peukert, Ian Kershaw, and others, has most certainly provided a fresh and revealing perspective from which to examine the relations between state and society, conformity and nonconformity, collaboration and dissent in the Third Reich.