Bloch's principal use of the term "non-simultaneity" was in an essay from 1932 which attempted to explain the rise and popularity of Nazism in Germany in the light of the capitalist economic crisis of the Great Depression and which became a chapter of his influential 1935 study Heritage of our Times (Erbschaft dieser Zeit). The essay's central idea is that heterogeneous stages of social and economic development coexist simultaneously in 1930s Germany. Because of uneven modernization, Bloch argues, there remained in Germany, "this classical land of non-simultaneity", significant traces of pre-capitalist relations of production: