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German Nationalism, National Socialism and Postwar Reconstruction 1918–1949
Introduction
BACKGROUND
The initial impulse for the present project occurred nearly twenty years ago. In 1983, I began work in my
present position as Berkeley’s Librarian for the Germanic Collections. Although that post had been vacant for
a number of years following the illness and death of my distinguished predecessor, Jane Pulis, it nonetheless
became clear to me upon assuming my new responsibilities that I was following in the footsteps of many
talented and dedicated individuals who had built Germanic collections of uncommon depth and breadth at
Berkeley for over one hundred years. In that period the university library had become the locus of a number of
remarkable collections on subjects in my area of responsibility, ranging from the German Baroque to Dutch
underground publications of World War II.
One of the most intriguing of these collections was also one of our most problematic: an uncatalogued
backlog of over 1,000 books and pamphlets from the period of National Socialism in Germany, many of them
of an ephemeral nature, and all of them essentially unavailable to users in a “temporary cataloguing pool”
with only an accession number and a brief title entry (often inaccurate) in our staff shelf list catalogue. Known
as the NSDAP Propaganda Collection locally, it nonetheless included a wealth of material on subjects other
than propaganda, and indeed contained a significant number of items which could even be described as “anti-
Nazi propaganda.” Over the first few months of my tenure in the Library, I investigated these materials and
concluded that they represented a largely untapped body of primary resource materials for the study of Nazi
rule, and I resolved to find some means to make them available to scholars and researchers in some more
generally accessible form.
Thus began an effort which was to last over 18 years to find funding and support for producing full
cataloguing records for this material. Since much of it was printed on highly acidic paper and at least part had
apparently come into the Library’s possession in deteriorated condition, a second priority was to provide
conservation of the contents before the materials experienced further degradation or possible disintegration.
(Conversely, the maintenance of the collection in an inaccessible state for over fifty years was a major
stabilizing factor in its preservation.) And, finally, I believed so strongly that this material would be a useful
resource for studying the period that I felt it needed to be brought to the attention of scholars as a coherent
whole.
The difficulties of organizing financial and institutional support for such a large undertaking, as well as the
crush of other duties over the years, have contributed to the long gestation of this project. In that intervening
period, however, I have been able at some expense of effort to collect other similar types of material from the
period which has served to round out and amplify the collection. The final result, of which the present printed
catalogue is the culmination, makes available the full range of these materials in microform and also provides
complete AACR2 cataloguing records, including full Library of Congress subject and name authority control,
for each item in the collection. It is thus that I hope to have provided access to a body of hitherto-overlooked
or scarce materials from the period to students and academics.
PROVENANCE
The 1,423 titles in this collection have been chosen from a much larger body of materials in the Berkeley
library dealing with the rise and demise of National Socialism in Germany. They derive from a variety of
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