Takeover

• One of Foreign Affairs’ “Best Books of 2024″ • 2025 Prose Award Winner, Government and Politics

“How does a flawed republic become something entirely different? We know how the Nazi regime ended, but think too little about how it began. This admirable account shows us how fragile and avoidable were those beginnings, and helps us to reflect upon our own predicaments.” –Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny

“An expert account of the dizzying months when Hitler solidified his power in Germany… A masterfully narrated story of how a democracy committed suicide, with lessons for today.” –Kirkus Reviews, starred review

“Timothy W. Ryback’s choice to make his new book, Takeover… an aggressively specific chronicle of a single year, 1932, seems a wise, even an inspired one. Ryback details, week by week, day by day, and sometimes hour by hour, how a country with a functional, if flawed, democratic machinery handed absolute power over to someone who could never claim a majority in an actual election… Democracy doesn’t die in darkness. It dies in bright midafternoon light… Precise circumstances [in history] never repeat, yet shapes and patterns so often recur.” –Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker

“[A] riveting blow-by-blow account of the six months leading up to Adolf Hitler’s January 1933 appointment as Germany’s chancellor….[A] propulsive narrative… [with] a chilling climax. It’s a dire and remarkably astute depiction of how fickle and contingent the forces of history can be.”–Publisher’s Weekly, starred review*

“That history is not as inevitable as most might believe forms an unsettling undertone throughout the book . . . Takeover is startlingly relevant history, well-wrought and splendidly researched, that reveals how democracies can die democratically.” –Peggy Kurkowski, Shelf Awareness

“Timothy Ryback has written an engrossing clock-ticker of a narrative about the behind-the-scenes machinations and open politicking that vaulted Hitler and the Nazi party to power. Nothing was inevitable about their triumph, and plenty of contemporary observers were caught off-guard by it, as Ryback shows to chilling effect. The relevance to authoritarianism today is urgent and unmistakable. Takeover is a vital read for anyone who cares about the future of democracy.” –Margaret Talbot, staff writer, The New Yorker

“If you ever thought that history is only moved by big, sweeping forces, whether of economics or creed or nature itself, think again. In this riveting, intimate account of the final months in Hitler’s rise to power, Tim Ryback makes it plain that simple luck, bald ambition and fallible human hearts can be drivers of earth-changing events. Focusing on the crucial personalities at the pinnacle of politics in the very twilight of Weimar Germany, and drawing on a wealth of primary sources, from diaries to gossip columns to newsreels, he shows that Hitler’s capture of the German state did indeed in large part represent a triumph of the Führer’s own perverse will. But Ryback also reveals the extent to which the petty scheming, petty jealousies, petty prejudices and sheer exhaustion of the other ‘men in the room’ opened a path to calamity.” –Max Rodenbeck, Berlin bureau chief, The Economist

“Refreshingly candid . . . Ryback admirably capture[s] the shifting moods, political stances, and risk-taking as well as the speculations, uncertainties, and confusion of the political figures who did not know how the story he narrates would end . . . Ryback’s narrative and his portraits of major figures are riveting.”–New York Review of Books

“Tim Ryback tells a grippingly important tale. His meticulous detailing of the dramatic days before Hitler assumed power make for salutary reading in our times. Will the tragic failure of civil courage and political will be repeated – Germany, 1933, America 2024? It’s hard not to imagine.” – Philippe Sands, author of East West Street