The nationalization of the masses: political symbolism and mass movements in Germany from the Napoleonic wars through the Third Reich

Nazism was the culmination of a movement that had begun in Germany over a century belore Hitler and steadily gained in power and definition. Using fascinating examples from the arts,philosophy, politics, athletics, and many other aspects of the social organism, Professor George L. Mosse shows how early 19th-century nationalism was transformed into a popular political religion. In this landmark study of the evolution of political ideas, he dissects the forces of unreason that gave Nazism its undeniable hold on the German imagination and still haunt the human mind and spirit in this age of mass man.