How It Happens: Talk About the German People, 1914–1933
New York: The John Day Company, 1947. First Edition. 8vo. 276 pp. A fine copy in very good dust jacket (darkening to spine; light wear to extremities). Item #23330
An important postwar examination of the origins of German fascism and National Socialism, presented as a series of conversations between Pearl S. Buck and Erna von Pustau, a German anti-Nazi woman who had broken with her aristocratic family over antisemitism and Hitler. Pustau recounts her experiences and observations of German society from the First World War through the rise of Hitler, providing a contemporary German perspective on the political and social conditions that produced National Socialism.
The book forms part of Buck's series of conversational works intended to promote international understanding. Its subject is particularly significant in the immediate aftermath of World War II, when the question of how ordinary Germans responded to the rise of Nazism was of pressing political and historical importance. The work was subsequently translated into German in 1948.
Price: $75.00