In a succinct and highly readable text, Alan E. Steinweis presents a synthesis of classic and recent research on the origins, development, and downfall of Nazi Germany. Rooted in nationalism and racism, and commanded by a charismatic leader, the Nazi movement created a populist and authoritarian alternative to a democratic republic plagued by unemployment and political fragmentation. A one-party dictatorship was achieved quickly after Hitler became chancellor in January 1933. In the years before World War II, the Nazi regime achieved popularity by restoring Germany to great-power status and by presiding over an economic recovery fueled by rearmament. Simultaneously the regime set in place an apparatus of coercion to marginalize Jews and other groups deemed objectionable by Nazi ideology, as well as to quell domestic opposition to the declared goals of the German “People’s Community.” Nazi ideology formed the basis for Germany’s goals and actions in World War II, which aimed at German hegemony and a racial transformation of Europe. Despite considerable internal dissent and some active resistance, the Nazi regime mobilized German society behind the war effort. In the end, Nazism was defeated from the outside by a superior military alliance.

Chapter 2 analyzes the origins and growth of the Nazi movement against the general background of the history of the Weimar Republic, 1918–33. Weimar had to overcome numerous challenges: a lack of German experience with parliamentary democracy; an association with the hated Treaty of Versailles; the fragmentation of the German polity; the monetary inflation of the early 1920s; and the massive levels of unemployment during the Great Depression. The last of these factors fueled the popularity of the forces at the ideological extremes – the Nazi Party and the Communist Party – which rejected the Republic altogether, making the formation of parliamentary majorities more difficult, in turn resulting in the use of presidential emergency powers to govern the country. The Nazi Party (NSDAP) began as a revolutionary organization but turned to an electoral strategy after its failed coup (putsch) of 1923. Although its electoral support remained low before 1930, it developed under Hitler into a movement of highly motivated members and activists. After an electoral breakthrough in 1930, the NSDAP became Germany’s largest party in the July 1932 election. It did not enjoy a parliamentary majority, however, and Hitler’s appointment to the chancellorship was ultimately made possible by support from German conservatives who saw the NSDAP as an anti-Communist bulwark.

In a succinct and highly readable text, Alan E. Steinweis presents a synthesis of classic and recent research on the origins, development, and downfall of Nazi Germany. Rooted in nationalism and racism, and commanded by a charismatic leader, the Nazi movement created a populist and authoritarian alternative to a democratic republic plagued by unemployment and political fragmentation. A one-party dictatorship was achieved quickly after Hitler became chancellor in January 1933. In the years before World War II, the Nazi regime achieved popularity by restoring Germany to great-power status and by presiding over an economic recovery fueled by rearmament. Simultaneously the regime set in place an apparatus of coercion to marginalize Jews and other groups deemed objectionable by Nazi ideology, as well as to quell domestic opposition to the declared goals of the German “People’s Community.” Nazi ideology formed the basis for Germany’s goals and actions in World War II, which aimed at German hegemony and a racial transformation of Europe. Despite considerable internal dissent and some active resistance, the Nazi regime mobilized German society behind the war effort. In the end, Nazism was defeated from the outside by a superior military alliance.

The collapse of the Weimar Republic and the ensuing rise of the Nazi dictatorship in Germany serve to this day as a “warning from history.” The precise lessons to be drawn from this episode remain controversial. Did the first German republic collapse from a lack of popular support or from institutional weakness? These questions were far from the minds of Republican elites. Arnold Brecht and Hans Staudinger regarded problems of stability as primarily administrative. Territorial reform and the creation of public–private partnerships were their creative attempts creating some much-needed breathing space for the young Republic. These initiatives tell us much about the reasons why elites overestimated the robustness of their own institutions. At the same time this ill-founded confidence was necessary for such administrative experiments. Paradoxically, assuming stability can be important in encouraging elites in new democracies to engage in necessary reforms. The administrative rationale also had a dark side, however. It led to a myopic focus on technical detail while ignoring the larger political context and in particular, underestimating the systemic threat from political extremism.

Chapter 2 provides an overview of the development of Norway’s and Germany’s national school systems up to the 1950s, with the aim of setting the scene for the analysis of the postwar reform period. The narrative focuses on comprehensive school reforms, but also on other much-debated reforms of primary and secondary schooling. The chapter sheds light on how dominant cleavages came to expression in school politics over time and on how political playing fields developed, forming the school as an institution. It provides the necessary context to understand the conditions actors faced during the postwar reform period.

The Weimar Republic, established in Germany at the end of World War I, was not a success and led to the rise of radical politics and the birth of the Nazi party. The racial antisemitism of Nazi ideology is discussed, as is Hitler’s control of Germany and his quest for a “Final Solution” to the so-called Jewish problem, leading to the creation of ghettos, Einsatzgruppen (killing squads), concentration camps, and the killing centers of the Holocaust.

Chapter 13 reappraises the difficult attempts made by those who sought to break with Wilhelminian power politics and develop both a western-orientated peace agenda and a new, progressive foreign policy on behalf of the defeated German state and, eventually, the fledgling Weimar Republic. It argues that while the core aim of the new protagonists, the social democratic leaders Friedrich Ebert and Philipp Scheidemann and the new republic’s first foreign minister Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau, was to negotiate a lenient Wilsonian “peace of justice” they also came to develop forward-looking Atlanticist policies designed to integrate a republican Germany into a reconfigured Atlantic order – and the League of Nations. It elucidates the prevalent maxims and assumptions of the new German peace agenda that was elaborated after the armistice. And it examines how far the new German key actors had drawn more far-reaching lessons from the war and Germany’s catastrophic yet only partially acknowledged defeat – and how far the new priorities and conceptions they advanced went beyond tactical considerations and could actually contribute to the creation of a peace-enforcing Atlantic order after the Great War.

The consumption of alcohol was widely criticized in the early Weimar years as wasteful of essential resources and as morally wrong. Teetotalists, social reformers, and high-ranking politicians demanded new restrictions on alcohol consumption. This anti-alcohol momentum caught the German brewing industry, which had greatly struggled during World War I, by surprise. The chapter looks at the challenges German brewers faced in the 1920s and their reactions to them. The German Brewers Association (Deutscher Brauer-Bund) tried to counter criticism with the help of pseudoscientific arguments regarding beer’s nutritious value. They also significantly increased their public relations efforts by adopting new methods of communication with consumers and legislators via paid newspaper articles, tradeshow exhibitions, and image films. Thus, the anti-alcohol and anticapitalist discourse led to new capitalist strategies. The chapter also sheds light on how industries criticized for producing “bad” products react to such criticism and adapt to changing circumstances.

Who should pay the costs of civil unrest? Germans confronted this dilemma in the aftermath of the First World War, as thousands of claimants petitioned the government to compensate for varied losses, from stolen crops to medical bills for bullet wounds. By far the greatest demand for redress came from businesses who described “catastrophic” damages caused by looting crowds. To make their case, claimants invoked a seventy-year-old Prussian law that aimed to suppress protest by making the “community” financially liable for “tumult.” And yet the Weimar Republic owed its very existence to the tumult of agitated crowds. This chapter explores how the Weimar Republic and later the Nazi regime staked their legitimacy on their ability to provide sufficient public order to sustain capitalism. But when the costs grew too high, both tried to extricate themselves from liability: the Weimar Republic by citing economic crisis, the Nazi regime by implementing a racial solution.

Did capitalism, including the ethics of some of its leaders, go astray as a result of the upheavals of World War I and democratic politics? Did one witness a new phase of “political capitalism,” a term sociologist Max Weber coined originally with respect to ancient and premodern forms of capitalism? These questions not only reflected anticapitalist resentments but were a way to describe the close cooperation of political and economic interests and some of the more excessive forms of “booty” and “adventure capitalism,” including political and economic corruption. They also addressed certain enterprises, social groups, and individuals. Although not outright antisemitic, “political capitalism” always provided a springboard for antisemitic agendas. With the onset of the Great Depression, the latter was to become crucially important in the context of efforts not just to restore forms of a “rational” neoliberal economic order but also to purge the excesses of the previous years, including the persons who appeared to represent this “political capitalism.” These purges lasted well into the National Socialist period, which at the same time witnessed new and excessive forms of booty capitalism directed against the “enemies” of the Volksgemeinschaft and later also the occupied countries.

Based on a case study on Germany in the first half of the twentieth century, this chapter addresses the administrative dimension of liberal-democratic backsliding by examining the role the state bureaucracy played in the process of system transformation from the Weimar Republic to the Nazi regime. It shows how the state bureaucracy in Germany was approached and transformed by illiberal politicians in the late Weimar Republic and under Hitler. Despite the existence of a professional Weberian bureaucracy with strong regulative barriers against politicization in the Weimar Republic, the civil service did not function as a safeguard of the democratic system. Instead, many civil servants welcomed the roll-back of democratic principles, which facilitated the radical transformation and politicization of the bureaucracy in a short time. This case study underlines the significance of institutionalizing democratic values in the civil service in processes of democratization in order to strengthen its resilience to attempts of eroding liberal democratic institutions.

This chapter examines Brecht’s approach to film not as a mimetic means of reproducing reality but as an indexical means of producing reality. It considers key passages of “The Threepenny Trial” and several interwar fragments in order to elucidate Brecht’s distinction between actual and functional reality and to elaborate the concept of the cognitively capable masses, whose collective perception made recognition of actual reality possible. It then offers brief analyses of the key films Brecht worked on, Kuhle Wampe and Hangmen Also Die!, which provide examples of the strategies Brecht employed to bend film to his aims of modeling mass-based cognition and reality production. These attempts opposed industrial norms, cultural convention, and the regulatory force of the state. They succeeded infrequently if at all, as Brecht himself acutely realized. Assessing the success and failure of these experiments allows greater insight into the potential of the medium of film in the second quarter of the twentieth century and creates potentially useful points of comparison to the complex relationship between representational media and the networked production of reality in our own times.

This essay provides an overview of Brecht’s engagement with photography. His early fascination with the medium developed, in the context of the burgeoning illustrated media landscape and the German “New Photography,” into theoretical reflections in dialogue with Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer. He also began to use photography, especially press photography, in his own work: as a source for the analysis of social behavior and a way of fixing Gestus. In due course he became more and more sensitive to the politics of representation and employed photography directly and innovatively in his own works, the Journal and the “photoepigrams” of War Primer.

This chapter examines Bertolt Brecht’s complicated and fraught relationship with his homeland Germany. Brecht was always attracted by the adventure of foreign lands and was particularly fascinated by the cultures of the United States and East Asia. He was devastatingly critical of Germany and its cultural traditions, and during the Hitler dictatorship he was one of the fiercest intellectual opponents of Nazism, producing some of the most articulate and best-known literary and cultural attacks on Hitler’s Third Reich. Brecht also severely criticized what he, together with Friedrich Engels, referred to as “deutsche Misere” (German misery), i.e. the slavish fealty of German intellectuals to political power. However, during the Third Reich and later Brecht also insisted on the hope for a certain kind of German normality and nonjingoistic patriotism that recognized the qualities and achievements of other nations and peoples. For this reason, Brecht’s conception of a national feeling that is also open toward other cultures has the potential to be of use in today’s multicultural Germany.

This article provides an introduction to the volume, briefly relating the primary aspects of Bertolt Brecht’s life and writing and exploring particularly his importance as a writer for the German language. Brecht was the most influential playwright of the twentieth-century worldwide, and modern theater would be unthinkable without his plays and theoretical concepts such as estrangement/distanciation. Brecht was also one of Germany’s greatest poets and a distinguished writer of prose. As a prime example of Brecht’s cultural influence, the article explores the impact that Brecht and his use of language had on Bob Dylan, the Nobel Prize-winning singer-songwriter from the US, who testifies eloquently in his memoirs to the extraordinary effect that Brecht had on him as a young man. The introduction also examines some of the key controversies involving Brecht, including above all controversies about his revolutionary politics and his approach to collaboration and sexual morality. Brecht was not a hero but a flawed human being, and he himself was well aware of his own imperfections. He wanted to use his art and his work in order to create a world in which flawed human beings, in spite of their imperfections, could still lead decent lives of dignity and humanity.

This chapter explores the normative background for the Weimar Republic’s demise, paying particular attention to the shortcomings in the Weimar Constitution (governance by presidential emergency decrees, based on Article 48; and the absence of a constitutional court with clear competencies for judicial review) that abetted democracy’s collapse. We closely examine the controversy in fall 1932 over whether the president, as the “guardian of the constitution,” was ex officio beyond judicial control, as Carl Schmitt claimed, or if such a viewpoint contradicted the spirit of the democratic Weimar Constitution as Hans Kelsen claimed. Kelsen’s critique of Schmitt’s views on the normative position of the president’s normative position and powers in late 1932 was one of the last forceful theoretical defenses of Weimar democracy.