‘Not Nazis′ in a Participatory Dictatorship: A Cultural Family History of the Bourgeois Kinship Network of Heinrich and Annemarie Brenzinger in Nazi Germany

This thesis is a relational history of the Third Reich based on the family archive of Annemarie and Heinrich Brenzinger from Freiburg im Breisgau. It draws on the couple’s extensive collection of letters, as well as archival evidence of the correspondents’ private and professional lives, the cultural productions with which they engaged, the insights of contemporary scholars, and family history testimonies to create a ‘thick description’ of the lifeworld of a bourgeois kinship network, whose members straddled all four racial categories of the Nuremberg Laws. By embedding this microhistory in the relevant macrohistorical contexts and their historiographies, the thesis establishes the productivity of family history as a new field of research for studying the shifting mental horizon that accompanied the redistribution of power in the Third Reich and made the Holocaust thinkable and, thus, ultimately possible.
The thesis approaches the family archive from a range of angles to create a multi-dimensional history of the Third Reich that examines participation and persecution through the subjective lens of private letters. Building on the growing scholarship that emphasises bottom-up consent for the dictatorship, it testifies to the considerable good will among the right-leaning, non-Jewish correspondents towards the Nazi transformation of German society due to their worldview affinities, whilst also highlighting the role played by their fear of the forcefield created by Nazi ideology, and their transactional business logic in shaping their responses and actions. By analysing the impact of this ambivalence, manifest most notably in the correspondents’ self-perception as different from ‘the Nazis’, this thesis elucidates how the distinction between ‘Nazis’ and ‘not Nazis’ developed from a relatively minor difference during the Third Reich into an important part of a post-war apologetics that salvaged ethnonationalist interpretations of Germanness and belonging from the ruinous impact of the Nazi crimes. Engaging critically with the family archive’s rich empirical evidence of the bourgeois experience of the Nazi dictatorship, the thesis concludes that the Third Reich was continuously constructed through the affirmations and contestations of its citizens in their private, associational, and professional lives.