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David Schoenbaum is an American historian highly regarded for his writing on a wide range of subjects, including German political history, European and global cultural history, and U.S. diplomatic history.
Schoenbaum, for many years a professor of History at the University of Iowa, is best known for his 1966 book, "Hitler's Social Revolution." He received his BA from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and, in 1965, his D.Phil from Oxford University. During his tenure at the University of Iowa he published additional books on German history and US-Israeli relations. He retired from the University of Iowa in 2008. His most recent book is The Violin: A Social History of the World's Most Versatile Instrument, published by W. W. Norton and Company in December 2012.
In "Hitler’s Social Revolution" Schoenbaum challenged the then prevailing notion that the National Socialist regime was a backwards looking, reactionary anti-modernizing dictatorship, and instead argued that, in effect at least, the Nazi regime was a modernizing dictatorship. Schoenbaum argued that the Nazi revolution was a "double revolution...of means and ends". In order to accomplish its foreign policy goals, namely war, the Nazi regime was forced to encourage modernization and industrialization, despite the anti-modernist nature of Nazi ideology. Schoenbaum wrote that "The revolution of ends was ideological—war against bourgeois and industrial society. The revolution of means was its reciprocal. It was bourgeois and industrial since in a industrial age, even a war against industrial society must be fought with industrial means and bourgeois are necessary to fight the bourgeoise".
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