Nazi Empire: German Colonialism and Imperialism from Bismarck to Hitler

Drawing on recent studies of the links between empire, colonialism, and genocide, Nazi Empire, 1871-1945 examines German history from 1871 to 1945 as an expression of the aspiration to imperialist expansion and the simultaneous fear of destruction by rivals. Acknowledging the important differences between the Second Empire, the Weimar Republic, and the Third Reich, Shelley Baranowski nonetheless reveals a common thread: the drama of German imperialist ambitions that embraced ethnic homogeneity over diversity, imperial enlargement over stasis, and "living space" as the route to the biological survival of the German Volk.


About the Author
Baranowski, Shelley: - Shelley Baranowski is Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Akron. She is the author of Strength through Joy: Consumerism and Mass Tourism in the Third Reich (2004), The Sanctity of Rural Life: Nobility, Protestantism, and Nazism in Weimar Prussia (1995) and The Confessing Church, Conservative Elites and the Nazi State (1986) and the co-editor, with Ellen Furlough, of Being Elsewhere: Tourism, Consumer Culture, and Identity in Modern Europe and North America (2001).