11 Facts About David Schoenbaum

David Schoenbaum was born on 1935 and is an American historian writing on a wide range of subjects, including German political history, European and global cultural history, and US diplomatic history.

David Schoenbaum retired from the University of Iowa in 2008.

In Hitler's Social Revolution David Schoenbaum challenged the then prevailing notion that the National Socialist regime was a backwards looking, reactionary anti-modernizing dictatorship, and instead argued that, in effect at least, the Nazi regime was a modernizing dictatorship.

In particular, David Schoenbaum argued that the Nazi regime was able to destroy the traditional class barriers that had divided German society, and for most Germans, the increased social mobility offered by the Nazi regime was sufficient compensation for the destruction of democracy.

David Schoenbaum's book proved to be highly influential, and set off an important debate about both the intentions and the effects of Nazi social policies, and the nature of social change during the Nazi period.

David Schoenbaum has written books about other aspects of modern German history.

In 1968, David Schoenbaum published a book about the Spiegel Affair scandal of 1962, in which he sought to set the affair into the context of the history of the Federal Republic and the wider context of German history.

David Schoenbaum argued that the affair revealed different aspects of the German Empire, and argued that the Zabern Affair was the exception that proved that the rule that Imperial Germany was no more or less liberal or illiberal then other Western nations.

In 1996, David Schoenbaum wrote a highly critical book review in the National Review of Daniel Goldhagen's bestseller Hitler's Willing Executioners where he charged Goldhagen with grossly simplifying the question of the degree and virulence of German Antisemitism, and of only selecting evidence that supported his thesis.

Furthermore, David Schoenbaum complained that Goldhagen did not take a comparative approach with Germany placed in isolation, thereby falsely implying that Germans and Germans alone were the only nation that saw widespread anti-semitism.

Finally, David Schoenbaum argued that Goldhagen failed to explain why the anti-Jewish boycott of April 1,1933 was relatively ineffective or why the Kristallnacht needed to be organized by the Nazis as opposed to being a spontaneous expression of German popular anti-semitism.