Audio: "The Third Reich": Michael Burleigh in conversation with Clive James | clivejames.com
[Invisible line of text as temporary way to expand content column justified text width to hit margins on most viewports, simply for improved display stability in the interval between column creation and loading]

"The Third Reich": Michael Burleigh in conversation with Clive James

Date of Show: Sat, August 4, 2001

This space, on the original clivejames.com page dating from 2008, held an audio player which summoned on demand a sound recording of this conversation from a remote media-streaming server. On rebuilding the site for this archive after its untimely disappearance in 2018, I found most of the old media files had vanished, including this one. Perhaps a previous custodian had overlooked the need for backups. Furthermore, other websites formerly hosting this material had switched some time ago to simply linking back to clivejames.com, a location they might reasonably have expected to remain a safe and permanent repository for Clive's work. Should copies turn up, I'll not hesitate to include them here, but for now this introduction is all that remains:
— Archive editor, July 2020

The historian Michael Burleigh talks about his acclaimed one-volume comprehensive history of Nazi Germany.

Winner of the Samuel Johnson prize for Non-Fiction 2001, and already awarded the status of a classic, The Third Reich — in the author's words — 'deals with the progressive, and almost total, moral collapse of an advanced industrial society at the heart of Europe, many of whose citizens abandoned the burden of thinking for themselves, in favour of what George Orwell described as the tom-tom beat of a latterday tribalism'.

Michael Burleigh discusses The Third Reich with Clive James, whose collection of essays Even As We Speak contains his exemplary review of Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners. Their conclusion: that bourgeois democracy, however boring, is infinitely preferable to the devastating consequences of messianic totalitarianism.

—from presentation material published by the ABC