An engrossing account of the city where Nazism took root, the place that put Hitler on the road to power.The capital of the Nazi movement was not Berlin but Munich. So said the Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler, of this handsome Bavarian town on the banks of the Isar River. Why did Nazism flourish in the "Athens of the Isar"?In exploring this question David Clay Large begins in Munich's "golden age", the four decades before World War I when its culture generated some of the outstanding works of the modernist spirit. But here he finds a dark side, a protofascist cultural heritage that proved fertile soil for Hitler's movement. From the violent experience of the Munich Soviet in 1918-19 through Hitler's failed Beer-Hall Putsch of 1923 and on to his appointment as German chancellor in 1933, Large weaves a harrowing narrative of the rise of Nazism. As he did in his previous book, Between Two Fires: Europe's Path in the 1930s (Norton), Large succeeds here in "putting the story back into history for these dreadful years" (Choice).-- "David Clay Large knows how to write.

He has a sense of drama equal to that of another popular historian, William Manchester".--Frank J. Prial, New York Times Book Review.