Every member had to be careful, he advised, "toappear before the Slavic peoples as a master and show them thathe was a German.

The Jews had instigatedthe American boycott that had damaged Germany,

From the perspective of the regime, lettersfrom the front served to justify the war and to bind together the na-tion in a common purpose. Military officials underscored the im-portance of writing home; letters from the battle front supplied “akind of spiritual vitamin” for the home front and reinforced its “at-titude and nerves.

Lettersand photographs, and the effort to archive them, indicated the ex-tent to which soldiers deliberately placed themselves in world his-tory and adopted for themselves the heroicizing vantage of theThird Reich

Setapart from the familiar social contexts of family, work, and school,the closed camp was designed to break down identifications withsocial milieus and to promote Entbürgerlichung (purging bourgeoiselements) and Verkameradshaftung (comradeship) as part of theprocess of Volkwerdung, “the making of the people,” as the pecu-liar idiom of National Socialism put it.

Anti-semitism did not arrive on the scene as something completely new,but it acquired much greater symbolic value when people associ-ated it with being German.

part of a larger struggle to protect what so many Ger-mans regarded as the wounded, bleeding body of the nation.

one of the key purposes of popu-lar entertainment in the Third Reich: the creation of a commonlyshared culture to define Germans to one another and mark themoff from others.

“Hei hatte sagt, wer non ganz un gar nichwolle, vor dän in Deutschland keine Raum”—“he said there is noroom in Germany for people who simply refuse to take part.”

In September 1939, after the invasion of Po-land, unter uns became legally enforced Aryan space when a decreeprohibited Jews from owning or listening to radios;

Thecalamity of the unexpected surrender, the “bleeding borders” re-drawn in the postwar settlement at Versailles, and the overwhelm-ing chaos of the inflation in the early 1920s were collective experi-ences that made the suffering of the nation more comprehensible.During the Weimar years, the people’s community denoted the be-leaguered condition Germans shared, while expressing the politicalunity necessary for national renewal.

Arbeitsdienstmänner worked together as a unit, marched toget-her, and relaxed together, an unending group existence designed topull together the people’s community.

Boththe Hitler Youth and the Reich Labor Service aimed to mix bour-geois and working-class youths in order to pull down social barriersto the formation of national race consciousness.

Nazi pedagogues extolled das Lager, “the camp,”as the privileged place where the “new generation was finding itsform.”

But it also made demands on ordinary Germans, who neededto visualize the Volk as a vital racial subject, to choose appropriatemarriage partners, and to accept “limits to empathy.”

Racial thinking presumed thatonly the essential sameness of the German ethnic community guar-anteed biological strength. For the Nazis, the goal of racial puritymeant excluding Jews, whom they imagined to be a racially alienpeople who had fomented revolution and civil strife and divided theGerman people.

In place of the quarrels of party, the contests of inter-est, and the divisions of class, which they believed compromised theability of the nation to act, the Nazis proposed to build a unified ra-cial community guided by modern science. Such an endeavor wouldprovide Germany with the “unity of action” necessary to surviveand prosper in the dangerous conditions of the twentieth century

In other words, biology appeared to provideGermany with highly useful technologies of renovation. The Na-zis regarded racism as a scientifically grounded, self-consciouslymodern form of political organization.

As a result, Germans could imagine one another infront of the radio listening to the same program: “Sunday isWunschkonzert,” wrote one soldier to his family back home; “youcertainly will be listening too.”

He believed Germans feltthat “it’s just us now” when they lived without Jews. “Just us” alsoexpressed the closed circle in which Germans could see and experi-ence “ourselves” as “we are” and as “we have become.”

With the cheerful slices of German life they broadcastand the national audience they pulled together, radio plays recrea-ted the people’s community. It produced the effect of being unteruns, “just us.”

In what it touted as the triumph of “socialism ofthe deed” over “private capitalism” and “economic liberalism,” in1933 the Propaganda Ministry pressed a consortium of radio man-ufacturers to design and produce a Volksempfänger, or “people’sradio,” for the mass market.

Nazis wanted the Germanpeople to comprehend events on the order of grand history by hear-ing broadcasts on the radio, seeing the reassembly of marchers onfilm, and taking photographs of their own part in the making of thepeople’s community

Germans even went to warwith preprinted diaries that left space for snapshots. All this was anacknowledgment of the desire to be part of and to share the Ger-man history that was being made.

Radio helped to create the collective voice of thenation.

“People looked to Nazism as a great and radical sur-gery or cleansing” and therefore saw “the movement as a sourceof rejuvenation” in public life.

The Day of Potsdam and May Day indi-cated that there was considerable desire among Germans to partici-pate in rituals of national renewal

One-potmeals on the first Sunday of every month provided opportunitiesfor party representatives to go from door to door in the evening asthey collected the pfennigs that had been “saved,” and to snoop.

these auxiliary organiza-tions gave Germans semiofficial responsibilities as they collecteddonations, distributed coal, or trained as air-raid wardens.

Themedicalization of politics pulled thousands of new professionalsinto state service as nurses, teachers, health-care administrators.Newly opened public-health offices dotted the cities and country-side, building on the social-welfare accomplishments of the repub-lic.

a“Machbarkeitswahn,” modernity’s heady sense of the possible thatepitomized National Socialism as it charged into the future.

This is thesignificance of the Day of Potsdam: the images of unity were madeavailable for national consumption. The growth in radio ownershipespecially in 1933 and 1934 indicates how great the desire was topartake in Nazi spectacle, although the fact that radios remainedmuch less common in rural areas

Hitler repeatedly addressed workers as patriotswho had built Germany’s industrial strength and served honorablyin the war, but who had been unjustly oppressed by liberal eco-nomic orthodoxies. He employed a rhetoric of understanding andcompassion that recognized the perspective of the working class.Reviving the Nation • 47

Socialists around the worldhad celebrated May Day as a festival of labor since the 1880s; butin Germany they had failed to get the official recognition the Nazisnow offered. So strong were the hopes for national unity that theGerman Free Trade Unions welcomed the Nazi gesture and encour-aged members to participate in the celebrations.

National Socialism offered acomprehensive vision of renewal, which many Germans found ap-pealing, but they combined it with the alarming specter of nationaldisintegration.

He repeatedly described Ger-many as a nation that had come home to itself. While Erich hatedthe Nazis, he loved the Third Reich.

the desire to be part ofnational unity was so strong that it pulled even an anti-Nazi such asErich into the new political community

In the national broadcast, selected party members spoke out thescripted reactions of “ordinary citizens,” who, appearing from allwalks of life, expressed support for Hitler.

Held on 21 March 1933 in Potsdam’s Garnisonkirche, whereFrederick the Great lay buried, the Day of Potsdam aligned Hit-ler with revered Prussian traditions, the Hohenzollern dynasty andthe founding of the German Reich some sixty years earlier, andthe heroic sacrifices of the Great War, represented by the “hero ofTannenberg,” President Paul von Hindenburg,

“I was overcomewith a burning desire to belong to these people for whom it was amatter of life and death.” Maschmann herself was drawn to the“socialist tendency” of the Nazi movement, the idea of the people’scommunity,

the “August Days” of 1914, when thou-sands of Germans rallied in the streets to support the national causein time of war, revealed extraordinary emotional investment in thepromise of national unity.

The enduring popularity of the Nazis rested on the idea of theVolksgemeinschaft, or people’s community.

the officially organized boycott of Jewish businesses on 1April 1933 required a more considered answer. Elisabeth beganwith a concession, contrasting the “happiness” of the world-histor-ical events taking place in Germany with her “sympathy” for “thefate of the individual.”