Where ghosts walked

The capital of the Nazi movement was not Berlin but Munich. So said the Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler, of this handsome Bavarian town on the banks of the Isar River. Munich, the city of baroque buildings, fine art museums, and Oktoberfest, was where Hitler felt most at home. It was the birthplace of Nazism and became the chief cultural shrine of the Third Reich. Why did Nazism flourish in the "Athens of the Isar"? In exploring this question, David Clay Large has written a compelling narrative account of the cultural roots of the Nazi movement. His focus on Munich allows us to see that the conventional explanations for the movement's rise are not enough. Large's account begins in Munich's "golden age," the four decades before World War I, when the city's artists and writers produced some of the outstanding works of the modernist spirit. But there was a dark side, a protofascist cultural heritage that would tie Hitler's movement to the soul of the city. Large prowls this volatile world, its eccentric poets and publishers, its salons and seamy basement meeting places. In this hothouse atmosphere attacks on cosmopolitan modernity and political liberalism flourished, along with a virulent anti-Semitism and German nationalism.