RSSDate of Show: Sat, August 4, 2001
The historian Michael Burleigh talks about his acclaimed one-volume comprehensive history of Nazi Germany.
Winner of the Samuel Johnson prize for Non-Fiction 2001, and already awarded the status of a classic, The Third Reich — in the author's words — 'deals with the progressive, and almost total, moral collapse of an advanced industrial society at the heart of Europe, many of whose citizens abandoned the burden of thinking for themselves, in favour of what George Orwell described as the tom-tom beat of a latterday tribalism'.
Michael Burleigh discusses The Third Reich with Clive James, whose collection of essays Even As We Speak contains his exemplary review of Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners. Their conclusion: that bourgeois democracy, however boring, is infinitely preferable to the devastating consequences of messianic totalitarianism.
—from presentation material published by the ABC