Strength Through Joy: Consumerism and Mass Tourism in the Third Reich . By Shelley Baranowski. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2004. Pp. xvii + 254. $65.00. ISBN 0-521-83352-3.

For all the books that appear each year on the Third Reich, historians know surprisingly little about the dreams and desires of the regime's racial "insiders" or even the degree to which National Socialism's intention to create a militarized but prosperous racial community found popular acceptance. Over the past twenty years, there has been much more recognition that the Third Reich rested on broad legitimacy, but little advance on how to assess or qualify that legitimacy. Shelley Baranowski's study of the Strength through Joy movement and of consumer culture in the years 1933 to 1945 more generally is thus extremely welcome. It is an important and successful analysis of how the racial community became compatible with personal pleasure. This well-written and finely researched investigation is all the more valuable because Baranowski places Nazi leisure in a broad twentieth-century frame, making comparisons with similar "event planners" in fascist Italy and Popular Front France; examining competing discourses of Fordism, Americanism, and Soviet Communism; and bracketing her analysis with examinations of leisure in Weimar Germany and in the two post-1945 German states.