Play Audiobook Sample
The Death of Democracy: Hitler's Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic Audiobook
Play Audiobook Sample
(0.00) - 0 listener ratings
Quick Stats About this Audiobook
Total Audiobook Chapters:
Longest Chapter Length:
Shortest Chapter Length:
Average Chapter Length:
Audiobooks by this Author:
Publisher Description
"[Narrator Steven Crossley's] British accent gives his narration an academic-sounding quality fitting for the text. He is clear and precise in pronunciation and enunciation and is suitably expressive throughout." — AudioFile Magazine The Death of Democracy is a riveting audiobook account of how the Nazi Party came to power, and how the failures of the Weimar Republic and the shortsightedness of German politicians allowed it to happen. Why did democracy fall apart so quickly and completely in Germany in the 1930s? How did a democratic government allow Adolf Hitler to seize power? In this dramatic audiobook, Benjamin Carter Hett answers these questions, and the story he tells has disturbing resonances for our own time. To say that Hitler was elected is too simple. From the late 1920s, the Weimar Republic’s very political success sparked insurgencies against it, of which the most dangerous was the populist anti-globalization movement led by Hitler. But as Hett shows, Hitler would never have come to power if Germany’s leading politicians had not tried to coopt him, a strategy that backed them into a corner from which the only way out was to bring the Nazis in. Hett lays bare the misguided confidence of conservative politicians who believed that Hitler and his followers would willingly support them, not recognizing that their efforts to use the Nazis actually played into Hitler’s hands. They had willingly given him the tools to turn Germany into a vicious dictatorship. Benjamin Carter Hett is one of America’s leading scholars of twentieth-century Germany and a gifted storyteller whose portraits of these feckless politicians show how fragile democracy can be when those in power do not respect it. He offers a powerful lesson for today, when democracy once again finds itself embattled and the siren song of strongmen sounds ever louder.
Download and start listening now!
"Steven Crossley gives a near-perfect narration of Hett's well-written and researched account of how the German experiment in democracy, the Weimar Republic, came to be replaced by the Nationalist Socialists, the Nazis. ...Crossley's British accent gives his narration an academic-sounding quality quite fitting for the text. He is clear and precise in pronunciation and enunciation and is suitably expressive throughout."
— AudioFile
Quotes
-
“Steven Crossley gives a near-perfect narration of Hett’s well-written and researched account…Crossley’s British accent gives his narration an academic-sounding quality quite fitting for the text. He is clear and precise in pronunciation and enunciation and is suitably expressive throughout.”
— AudioFile -
“[An] extremely fine study…With careful prose and fine scholarship, with fine thumbnail sketches of individuals and concise discussions of institutions and economics…[Hett] sensitively describes a moral crisis that preceded a moral catastrophe.”
— New York Times Book Review -
“A fast-paced narrative enlivened by vignette and character sketches…Hett reminds us…that Hitler did not prevail because Weimar was doing badly. On the contrary, it was doing remarkably well in tough conditions: the end came because conservative elites thought they could use the Nazis for their own purposes and realized their mistake too late.”
— Financial Times (London) -
“Intelligent, well-informed…Provides a lesson about the fragility of democracy and the danger of that complacent belief that liberal institutions will always protect us.”
— Times (London)
Awards
-
An Amazon.com bestseller in European politics
-
A New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice
The Death of Democracy Listener Reviews
Be the first to write a review about this audiobook!
About Benjamin Carter Hett
Benjamin Carter Hett is the author of The Death of Democracy, Burning the Reichstag, Crossing Hitler, and Death in the Tiergarten. He is a professor of history at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He holds a PhD in history from Harvard University and a law degree from the University of Toronto.
About Steven Crossley
Steven Crossley, a graduate of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, has built a career on both sides of the Atlantic as an actor and audiobook narrator, for which he has won more than a dozen AudioFile Earphones Awards and been a nominee for the prestigious Audie Award. He is a member of the internationally renowned theater company Complicite and has appeared in numerous theater, television, film, and radio dramas.