Criticism
Whereas nearly all American journalists praised the book, scholars were split. Some acknowledged Shirer's achievement but most condemned it. The harshest criticism came from those who disagreed with the Sonderweg or "Luther to Hitler" thesis.
Klaus Epstein listed "four major failings": a crude understanding of German history; a lack of balance, leaving important gaps; no understanding of a modern totalitarian regime; and ignorance of current scholarship of the Nazi period.
Elizabeth Wiskemann concluded in a review that the book was "not sufficiently scholarly nor sufficiently well written to satisfy more academic demands... It is too long and cumbersome... Mr Shirer, has, however compiled a manual... which will certainly prove useful."
Forty years later, historian Richard J. Evans, author of The Third Reich Trilogy (2003 to 2008), conceded that Rise and Fall is a "readable general history of Nazi Germany" and that "there are good reasons for success." But Shirer worked outside of the academic mainstream, Evans noted, and his account was not informed by the historical scholarship of the time (1960).
In West Germany, the "Luther to Hitler" interpretation was almost universally rejected in favor of the view that Nazism was simply one instance of totalitarianism that arose in various countries. Gavriel Rosenfeld asserted in 1994 that Rise and Fall had been unanimously condemned, and considered dangerous to relations between America and West Germany, as it might inflame anti-German sentiments in the United States.
Read more about this topic: The Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men’s genius. By virtue of style, criticism can itself become literature. But usually this occurs only when the writer is acting as critic of his own work or as outrider to his own poetics, when the criticism of Coleridge is work in progress or that of T.S. Eliot propaganda.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)
“... criticism ... makes very little dent upon me, unless I think there is some real justification and something should be done.”
—Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962)
“Cubism had been an analysis of the object and an attempt to put it before us in its totality; both as analysis and as synthesis, it was a criticism of appearance. Surrealism transmuted the object, and suddenly a canvas became an apparition: a new figuration, a real transfiguration.”
—Octavio Paz (b. 1914)