Pierpaolo Barbieri

First up I'm going to admit that when I learned that Niall Ferguson was the author's mentor (Ferguson's evolution from superstar scholar to political hack is a cautionary tale in its own right), I considered setting this book aside.

That said when one of the great ironies of history is that Europe finds itself again sitting in the shadow of German economic predominance, after having fought two general wars in large part to stave off this turn of events, an examination of German informal empire in the Thirties is a useful thing indeed. The only problem Barbieri concludes is that the older men intent on state-building (economic manager Hjalmar Schacht being the main protagonist of this story) truly could not control Hitler and his vision of racialist empire. Thus leading to the eternal regret of the neoconservative mind that the survival of the West entailed the bad-faith deal of allying with Stalinist Russia. Under these circumstances it certainly makes the policy of Appeasement with Berlin seem so much more sensible.

Apart from that Barbieri also writes quite eloquently about the deep origins of the Spanish Civil War for a modern audience; the book would be worth one's time on that basis alone.… (mehr)