The Coming of the Third Reich by Richard J. EvansReview by: Stanley HoffmannForeign Affairs, Vol. 83, No. 5 (Sep. - Oct., 2004), p. 174Published by: Council on Foreign RelationsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20034101 .

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Recent Books Conservatism in the United States, they conclude, is another example of American exceptionalism. With its think tanks, intellectual quarterlies, mega-churches, policy entrepreneurs, and factional rivalry, the American conservative movement has no parallel in the conservative parties of Europe. On this point, it is hard to miss the wistful tone of these trenchant British observers.

DANIEL CASSE

Western Europe STANLEY HOFFMANN

The Coming of the Third Reich. BY RICHARD J. EVANS. New York:

Penguin Press, 2004, 6S6 pp. $34.95. This first part of what will be Evans' three-volume history of Hitler's regime is the most comprehensive and convinc ing work so far on the fall of Weimar and Hitler's rise to power. Unlike past accounts suggesting that things could have turned out differently had some of the key players been less foolish, Evans builds, stone by stone, a monument to prove that Hitler's ascent was the only possible outcome even though the Nazi Party never captured an absolute major ity of votes. He begins with the legacy of the past: how "mainstream parties" adopted anti-Semitic ideas; how pseudoscientific notions of racial hygiene developed starting before 1914; how Germany's defeat in World War I allowed Nazism to emerge as a serious political force by causing Germans to seek "an authoritarian alternative to the civilian politics that seemed so signally to have failed Germany in its hour of

need." He finds the Weimar Constitution no worse than many others, but "the fatal lack of legitimacy from which the Republic suffered magnified the consti tution's faults many times over." With that lack of legitimacy compounded by hyperinflation, depression, and cultural clashes, the Nazis managed to prevail through a deadly combination of violence and propaganda, both unprecedented in their intensity.

The last part of the book is a detailed, depressing account of Hitler's transfor mation of Germany in a few months in

1933, including the "cultural revolution" in which both Martin Heidegger and storm troopers played key roles. The Nazi "revolution," Evans concludes, was meant to be "the world-historical negation of its French predecessor," offering "a synthesis of the revolutionary and the restorative." Unconcerned with over throwing the social system, Nazism focused on "race, culture and ideology"-and on creating "a dictatorship the like of which had never yet been seen."

Visions ofAmerica and Europe: September 11, Iraq, and Transatlantic Relations. EDITED BY CHRISTINA V. BALIS

AND SIMON SERFATY. Washington:

Center for Strategic and International Studies Press, 2004, 248 pp. $22.95.

Of the many books analyzing the clash between the Bush administration and much of Europe, this one, based on a conference held in 2003, is among the

most valuable. This is so not only because of shrewd analyses by its coeditors, Serfaty (who provides a disenchanted introduc tion on "multidimensional ambivalence" on both sides of the Atlantic) and Balis (who takes on "elite Europhobia" in the

[174] FOREIGN AFFAIRS* Volume83No.s

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