Charles Lansing, From Nazism to Communism: German Schoolteachers under Two Dictatorships. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. 340 pp

Common as it is to refer to the German Democratic Republic (GDR) as the “second German dictatorship” of the twentieth century, few scholars have compared the Communist and Nazi regimes. This is likely because of the discomfort many feel about comparing a regime that undertook the Holocaust with one that, whatever its flaws, did not plunge the world into war or commit genocide. Although a few German scholars insist that to compare (vergleichen) is not necessarily to treat as equivalent (gleichsetzen), many have been loath to compare the two dictatorships for fear of being seen to equate them. As a case in point, the Hannah Arendt Institute for the Study of Totalitarianism at the Technical University of Dresden has not been at the forefront of historical discourse on the GDR, in part because the mandate suggested in its name seems to apply more closely to the...