Labnet: Book Ann.: American in Hitler's Berlin: Abraham Plotkin's Diary, 1932-1933

[labnet at lists.labourhistory.net]

[Cross-posted, with thanks, from H-Labor. AB]

From:  	Catherine Collomp <catherine.collomp at orange.fr>

Publication, 

An American in Hitler's Berlin: Abraham Plotkin's Diary, 1932-1933, edited and with an Introduction by Catherine Collomp and Bruno Groppo, University of Illinois Press,  Urbana and Chicago, 2009, paperback $25.

This is the first edition of the diary of Abraham Plotkin, an American labor leader of Jewish origin who lived in Berlin between November 1932 and June 1933. A firsthand account of the Weimar Republic's final months and the early rise of Nazi power in Germany. Plotkin's diary focuses on the German working class, the labor movement and the plight of German Jews. Plotkin investigated Berlin's social conditions with the help of German Social-Democratic leaders whose analyses of the situation he records alongside his own. 

Compared to the writings of other American observers of the Third Reich, Plotkin's diary is unique in style, scope, themes and time span. Plotkin is especially attentive to socio-economic factors, providing an alternative view from the left that stems form his own experience as a labor activist and his access to key German labor and socialist leaders. Chronologically, the diary reports on the moment when Hitler's seizure of power was not yet inevitable and when leaders on the left believed in a different outcome of
the crisis, but it also includes Plotkin's account of the complete destruction of German labor in May 1933. 

Catherine Collomp

 " We have almost no eyewitness accounts of this period from non journalist observers and certainly none from the perspective of an American working  class observer. This work adds significantly to our knowledge on the history of internationalist trade unionism in the U.S. During the 1920's and 1930's which is under-researched for this period. Highly recommended".
Dorothée Schneider.

"Plotkin's diary if a remarkable analysis "from the bottom up" of German society, working class institutions, and politics in the period of transition from the Weimar Republic to the rise of Hitler. A very important book". 
Fraser Ottanelli