592   Book Reviews

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Kristallnacht 1938. By Alan E. Steinweis. Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press. 2009. 214 pp. £23.95 (hardback).

Kristallnacht, the ‘Night of Broken Glass’ on 9 November 1938, was the most brutal attack on Germany’s
Jews before the outbreak of the Second World War. More than one thousand Jews died and about 26,000
Jewish men were detained in concentration camps. Synagogues and Jewish property were destroyed
throughout Germany. In this remarkably lucid and refreshingly concise book Alan Steinweis tells the
apparently familiar story of Kristallnacht from a new perspective. He goes beyond the existing literature that
has overwhelmingly focused on top-level decisions and, more recently, on Jewish fates and circumstances.
Steinweis’s book, oscillating between analysis and narrative, argues that Kristallnacht was an expression
of popular antisemitism. For Steinweis, it was not simply the result of the Nazi radicalization of anti-Jewish
policy in the late 1930s, a time when the Third Reich became more extreme in its domestic and foreign
policy. Steinweis begins the book with a competent discussion of the immediate background to Kristallnacht,
the shooting in Paris of the German diplomat Ernst vom Rath by Herschel Grynzspan, and then moves on
to outbreaks of grassroot antisemitic violence in Electoral Hesse. Steinweis turns our attention to the
perpetrators of Kristallnacht in German towns and villages. To great effect he narrates some case studies,
based on his careful and in-depth research into postwar West German legal trials. A more explicit
discussion of the epistemological limits of legal evidence presented to postwar West German courts would
have been helpful, although Steinweis is clearly aware of the biases of his sources. After all, most West
German legal officials had been deeply complicit with the Third Reich. But this is perhaps a minor
criticism as Steinweis ends his book with a cogent discussion of Kristallnacht in postwar history and memory.
Steinweis’s book significantly enhances our understanding of antisemitism and anti-Jewish violence in the
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Third Reich and adds to a growing field of literature that includes Michael Wildt’s pioneering study
Volksgemeinschaft als Selbstermächtigung. Most of the perpetrators, Steinweis shows, knew their Jewish
neighbours, who had been discriminated against since 1933. Ideological and personal issues were key
motives for people, mostly men, but also women and children, to participate in the orgy of violence on the
night of 9 November 1938, which included beatings, murder, looting and the destruction of Jewish homes
and businesses. Yet were these perpetrators ordinary Germans? In other words: how popular was this
outburst of antisemitic violence? An important qualification has to be made because in many if not most
cases, those who participated in the violence, stirred up by Hitler, the Nazi party and Goebbels’s
propaganda, were probably members of one Nazi party organization or another such as the SA, the SS
and the Hitler Youth. As Steinweis points out, only a minority of Germans participated in anti-Jewish
violence during Kristallnacht. In fact, the author offers an extremely nuanced and subtle portrayal of
Germans’ reactions to Kristallnacht which ranged from active participation to moral indignation—the latter

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very much to the Nazi party’s annoyance and disappointment. This moral indignation of Germans,
Steinweis insists, must not be confused with a general German opposition to Nazi racial policy. It was
rather a reflection of traditional moral ideas of right and wrong that the Nazis had not managed to destroy
by 1938. Yet Steinweis is aware of the limitations of the available evidence on German attitudes towards
Nazi racial policy and Kristallnacht. It would have been exciting to see where Steinweis locates his findings
vis-à-vis Peter Fritzsche’s important work that tries to overcome the analytical distinction between
Germans and Nazis.
All in all, Steinweis has delivered a highly readable and fascinating book that sheds new light on the
short-term and long-term causes and effects of Kristallnacht.
doi: 10.1093/gerhis/ghq059 Christian Goeschel
Advance Access published on 6 August 2010 Birkbeck College, London