Introduction

Abstract

Abstract Much careful scholarship in recent years has emphasized the extent to which National Socialism should be analysed within a broader continuum, stressing the need to examine social and cultural continuities running from the 1920s and early 1930s into the early years of the regime, and pointing to the impact of developments under National Socialism whose effects can be traced in the early post-war years. National Socialism did, indeed, emerge in the context of a modern industrial society and mobilized the potential of that society to pursue its goals; it is unsurprising, therefore, that certain aspects of it went with the grain of, and even accelerated, existing secular trends in specific spheres of society. For example, some scholars have argued that the absence of trade unions under National Socialism, and thus the lack of possibility of open collective working-class action, encouraged the emergence of an individualistic, upwardly mobile attitude amongst workers, who now sought advancement by exploiting their individual position within the labour market in a manner which prefigured the family-centred worker-as-consumer of the 1950s and 1960s.