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The German Right from Weimar to Hitler: Fragmentation and Coalescence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 April 2015

Geoff Eley*
Affiliation:
University of Michigan

Extract

As archival scholarship on National Socialism moved under way during the later 1960s, study of the Right's broader intellectual history relied on a small number of then canonical works—by Klemens von Klemperer (1957), Otto E. Schüddekopf (1960), Fritz Stern (1961), Hans-Joachim Schwierskott (1962), and Kurt Sontheimer (1962), shadowed by Armin Mohler's Die konservative Revolution in Deutschland 1918–1932. Grundriβ ihrer Weltanschauungen (1950)—soon to be joined by George Mosse (1964), Herman Lebovics (1969), and Walter Struve (1973). At this stage, with the exception of Fritz K. Ringer's The Decline of the German Mandarins (1967) and Reinhard Bollmus's study of Alfred Rosenberg's office and its opponents (1970), there was virtually nothing taking a broader social or institutional approach to the contexts of Nazi ideology and the sociology of knowledge under the Third Reich. Gerhard Kratzsch's Kunstwart und Dürerbund. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Gebildeten im Zeitalter des Imperialismus (1969) stood very much alone as a nuanced, archivally researched case study alive to the complex ambivalences of cultural nationalism in the Wilhelmine years.

Type
Review Essay
Copyright
Copyright © Central European History Society of the American Historical Association 2015 

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References

1 Scholdt, Günter, Autoren über Hitler. Deutschsprachige Schriftsteller 1919–1945 und ihr Bild vom “Führer” (Bonn: Bouvier, 1993), 35Google Scholar.

2 Mommsen, Hans, The Rise and Fall of Weimar Democracy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Pess, 1989), 311Google Scholar.

3 In suggesting that “fewer graduate students in modern German history in North America and the United Kingdom are being initiated into the techniques of archival research as opposed to less empirical and more theoretical methodologies appropriated from ancillary disciplines such as literary and film criticism, anthropology, and gender studies” (4), Jones creates an entirely false and unnecessary antinomy. The idea that only older-style political historians see the inside of an archive betrays a narrowness of understanding. Broadening our definition of politics certainly entails theory as well as creative empirical research, and once we start finding politics in other places, the archive we seek will be different. But studying the shifting forms of political subjectivity, the political symbolics of constitutional patriotism, or the gendered grounds of German citizenship will demand no less archival learning than the history of the parties and Verbände as gathered by Jones into this new volume. To reserve the legitimacy of “true” archival research for the one, while denying it to the other, seems myopic at best.

4 Canning, Kathleen, Barndt, Kerstin, and McGuire, Kristin, eds., Weimar Publics/Weimar Subjects: Rethinking the Political Culture of Germany in the 1920s (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010)Google Scholar. The quoted phrase is from the back cover.

5 “The purpose of this collection is not so much to challenge the new master narrative on the history of the German Right in the Weimar Republic as to underpin it with examples of some of the most recent scholarship” (Jones, 3).

6 See the large number of monographs, from Leopold, John A., Alfred Hugenberg: The Radical Nationalist Campaign against the Weimar Republic (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977)Google Scholar and Holzbach, Heidrun, Das “System Hugenberg”. Die Organisation bürgerlicher Sammlungspolitik vor dem Aufstieg der NSDAP (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1981)Google Scholar, through the plenitude of the recent German scholarship recorded by Jones in his Introduction, to Jackisch, Barry A., The Pan-German League and Radical Nationalist Politics in Interwar Germany, 1918–39 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012)Google Scholar.

7 See Childers, Thomas, The Nazi Voter: The Social Foundations of Fascism in Germany, 1919–1933 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983), 64102Google Scholar; Idem, The Social Bases of the National Socialist Vote,” Journal of Contemporary History 11, no. 4 (1976): 2021Google Scholar.

8 Fritzsche, Peter, Rehearsals for Fascism: Populism and Political Mobilization in Weimar Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 191–93Google Scholar.

9 Friedrich Edler von Braun, campaigning in Bavaria in 1919 on a joint DNVP-DVP ticket: “The Jewish question is one of the most momentous problems of the current scene, which cannot be ignored when formulating guidelines for policy. The Jews are a people without a home and destroy every national body in which they gain a decisive influence, for they are international and cosmopolitan in their disposition and historical development and must therefore necessarily disrupt the processes of national development. Proof of this can be seen in their close connection with Social Democracy, whose teachings come from Marx and Lassalle and are therefore born from the Jewish spirit. So also were the majority of the leaders of the revolution in Russia and Germany Jews” (Jones, 81).

10 See especially Wildt, Michael, Hitler's “Volksgemeinschaft” and the Dynamics of Racial Exclusion: Violence against Jews in Provincial Germany, 1919–1939 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2012)Google Scholar; Confino, Alon, A World without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014)Google Scholar; Steber, Martina and Gotto, Bernhard, eds., Visions of Community in Nazi Germany: Social Engineering and Private Lives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Westarp was accused by his völkisch adversaries of such “abstractness,” on the grounds that he shied away from specific legislative measures. Yet, in November 1919, he accused “the German worker” of “placing himself under the influence of an alien people when he accepts the leadership of a Cohn and a Hirsch, a Haase and a Wurm and all the countless Jews in Social Democracy”; he professed adherence to the racial theories of Hans F. K. Günther, and he commissioned an ancestry certificate absolving himself and his family from contamination by Jews (Gasteiger, 55-56).

12 Fritzsche, Rehearsals for Fascism, 166–89; Idem, From Germans into Nazis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 137214Google Scholar.

13 The one essay that comes remotely close—Bendersky's treatment of Carl Schmitt— bizarrely renders the latter as the last defender of the Weimar Constitution.

14 Jones, Larry Eugene, German Liberalism and the Dissolution of the Weimar Party System, 1918–1933 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988)Google Scholar.