Hitler & the Collapse of Weimar Germany

 

Broszat, Martin.  Hitler and the Collapse of Weimar Germany. Trans. V. R. Berghahn. Leamington Spa: Berg, 1987.

This is a thin, but important book of political history.  In it, Broszat traces the complex political trends of the Weimar era, as well as the intricate deals forged by Germany’s leading politicians and economic elite at the time.  Though this is primarily a political history, Broszat does offer some glances into larger socio-cultural developments during the 1920s and 1930s.  He hints at what Detlev Peukert takes as the central issue of his own book: the effects of modernization and the rise of mass culture on German politics.  Ultimately, Broszat sees this new, mass culture as the key to the Nazis’ success in gaining control of the German government in 1933.

Broszat opens his book with a brief history of the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP or Nazi Party) and shows that it was only one among many right wing, nationalist parties.  “What marked [Hitler] out among the speakers of the political Right was the way in which he put his message across” (2).  This point epitomizes Broszat’s larger argument that it was not Nazism’s message itself that made it unique or successful, but instead the manner in which the message was expressed and distributed.  NSDAP leadership – and Hitler in particular – recognized that the masses could not be ignored in any new political system.  Consequently, the Nazis saw the masses as a source of power that should be tapped into through modern technology and political aesthetics.  In this light, the National Socialists were a truly modern political party, not the culmination of an older German character.  “Nazi ideology was almost totally a product of mass culture and political semi-illiteracy which proliferated since the late nineteenth century” (38).

After demonstrating that National Socialism was a modern creation, Broszat lays out the conditions that allowed for the rise of the Nazi Party.  National Socialism emerged in Germany after the First World War during a period of worldwide economic recession and against the background of a general crisis of modernity and civilization” (37).  The SPD-led Weimar Coalition enjoyed success only during times of material improvement or stability (53); otherwise, it was attacked from all sides: the Communists on the Left and conservative nationalists like the Nazis on the Right.  The election of Paul von Hindenburg as Reich President in 1925 was a “symptom of backward looking tendencies,” Broszat claims (67).

While the election of Hindenburg symbolized a shift to the Right in Weimar mentality, the Republic was not destroyed until Chancellor Brüning was forced to resign in May 1932.  The new chancellor led a coup against Prussia, trying to separate its government from the Reich’s, and the SPD did nothing to protest, thus paving the way for an authoritarian, nationalistic government (120, 146).  The rest of the book is dedicated to revealing the political maneuvering that led to Papen’s ousting, Schleicher’s short chancellorship, and finally Hitler’s appointment as Reich Chancellor in January 1933.

Throughout the book, Broszat reveals how the NSDAP was able to gather followers.  Nazism “seemed to offer a strong determined leadership, a pseudo-democratic mobilization of the masses and their participation in the promised national revival; it looked like a ‘third way’ between democracy and the state authoritarianism of the olden days. Herein lay the lure of Nazism” (94).  As the NSDAP gained more success, its more radical messages were toned down, thus appealing to a wider audience among the working class, bourgeoisie, and old elite.  The old conservative elites lacked this mass appeal and that is why they compromised and agreed to place the Nazis in power, hoping they could keep Hitler and his party on a short leash.

To see more books on the history of modern Germany, see my full list of book reviews. 

Lustmord: Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany

Tatar, Maria.  Lustmord: Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany.  Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995.

In her short but dense book, Tatar examines the role of Lustmord (sexual murder) in Germany during the Weimar period.  She reveals that violent murders of women took a central place in this era.  The media chronicled – in often grizzly detail – the acts of serial killers and the subsequent trials of the murders.  Tatar goes beyond actual murders to show that the mutilated bodies of women cropped up as the subjects of many works of art in several genres: canvases, novels, and on the screen.  What can we make of all this violence? What does it mean that the victims were always women?  These are the questions that Tatar tackles in her provocative work.

First, Tatar focuses on a number of real-life serial murderers that dominated the German headlines in the 1920s.  The cases of Fritz Haarmann, Wilhelm Grossmann, Karl Denke, and Peter Kürten reveal how the media and public reacted to the existence of such violent murderers (whose victims were always women or children).  Tatar explains the public’s frenzied reaction to the murders and the simultaneous “pathologization” of criminality (56). “The population at large was thus seen as duplicating the psychosis of the murderer, partaking of his sexualized frenzy in its desperate attempt to defuse the general sense of anxiety by finding scapegoats” (46).  The press contributed to this frenzy by boosting the “toxic” effect of killer and giving them the attention they wanted.  Moreover, the attention provided incentive for copy-cat killers (47).

Tatar’s analysis of particular novels, paintings, and movies is interesting, particularly for someone interested in art or cultural history of the Weimar Republic.  But what I find more interesting, convincing, and ultimately useful is her discussion of perpetrators and victims.  One of the main threads throughout the book is her claim that in cases of real or fictional Lustmord, the perpetrator (artist/murderer) often transitions into victim by the end. This is only understandable within the larger context of modern German culture.  Tatar argues that a flux of hostile female images in art “gives vivid testimony to an unprecedented dread of female sexuality and its homicidal power” (10).  World War One had destroyed the traditional social order: it redrew national boundaries, destroyed the earth in the trenches, maimed bodies, and also transformed mores.  Men, Tatar argues, saw the emancipation of women, as a devastating event.  There was a short step from the sexual empowerment of the femme fatale to her overstepping her bounds and destabilizing society (11).  Therefore, portraying women as the causes of social disorder allowed for her murder to become an act of self-defense or sacrifice.  “The murderous agent takes on the role of victim, who has sacrificed his life by killing” (172).  This act of turning the aggressor into victim through sacrifice (Tatar notes that in German Opfer means both victim and sacrifice) was also used in the racial demonization of the Jews in Nazi Germany.  In both cases, repression and projection operate in such a way as to turn the target of murderous violence into a peril of monstrous proportions, one that threatens to sap the lifeblood of the “victims” and thereby authorizes a form of unrestrained retaliatory violence marked by frenzied excess” (152).

Through this process of demonization of the Other and transformation from aggressor to victim, Tatar draws an important connection between Lustmord culture in the Weimar era to the policies of the Third Reich.  Moreover, she shows the importance of the Great War in shaping this murderous view of women (and “the other”).  In doing that, Tatar reveals that Weimar can’t be seen as a “glamorized…period of alluring decadence” between two dark periods of German history.  Instead, it is a bridge between the two world wars.

Tatar’s book is interesting and provocative, but I am left with several questions, the main one being: What about women artists in the Weimar era?  How did they feel about these Lustmord paintings?  Did they make paintings in which men’s bodies were mutilated?

For more books on modern German history, see my full list of book reviews. 

The Weimar Republic (Peukert)

Peukert, Detlev J. K.  The Weimar Republic: the Crisis of Classical Modernity.  Trans. Richard Deveson.  New York: Hill and Wang, 1993.

             As a fourteen-year window of constitutional democracy between the German Empire and the Nazi Third Reich, the Weimar Republic has justifiably received much scholarly attention.  But in this study, Peukert argues that scholars have too often focused only on the tumultuous and fragile origin of the Republic and its collapse in the face of National Socialism.  “‘Weimar’ is more than a beginning and an end,” he writes (xii). The rest of his book is dedicated to exploring this Weimar Era, utilizing social history to offer insights into cultural, political, and social aspects of Weimar Germany. Peukert ultimately concludes that the downfall of the Republic should not be seen as some specific failure of German modernity, but instead a warning of the fragile nature of modernity itself.

Peukert’s entire book places him squarely in opposition to the idea of a German Sonderweg, or “special path” of modernization that led to the Nazis and the Holocaust.  To substantiate his argument, he asserts that historical conditions surrounding Weimar Germany’s modernization process, not some old elites trying to stave off modernization, are responsible for the Republic’s failure.  To begin with, the “Weimar Republic was born out of national defeat…That, rather than the severe yet ultimately tolerable terms of the peace settlement, was the root cause of the revanchist Versailles myth” that so profoundly shaped the directions Weimar’s modernization process would follow (278).  Additionally, the Weimar Republic was founded in a time of global upheaval and instability.  Upheavals in demographics led to conflicts between generations, and the sick economy could not sustain attempts to create a new order in industry (83). Moreover, the effects of the global economic crises of 1929 were felt especially hard in Germany, exposing the limits and fault of the welfare state. As times got tough, more people needed the benefits, but because times were tough, the state needed to cut its own costs.  When times were good and the state could afford to pay out, not as many people needed it.  Weimar’s critics railed against such discrepancies as indicative of a deeply flawed system (129).  All of these factors combined to create conditions that the young, fragile Republic, which was constantly in a crisis of legitimacy, simply could not overcome. “Germany’s experiment in modernity was conducted under the least propitious circumstances” (276).

This conclusion is important because it suggests that any nation going through modernization during such conditions would fail, thus meaning there was nothing particularly German about Weimar’s failure.  In fact, Peukert argues that classical modernity itself (defined as “the form of fully fledged industrialized society that has been with us from the turn of the century until the present day,” 81) was going through a crisis of its own.  “No sooner had modern ideas been put into effect than they came under attack, were revoked or began to collapse (276).   And since “crisis and modernization seemed to be going hand in hand, modernity itself became the issue” (85).

This also has implications for how we understand the rise of the Nazis and the death of the Republic.  The conservative elites were able to destroy the Weimar constitutional order, but were unable to understand or control the new masses and return to a pre-war order.  The Nazis presented themselves as a modern, dynamic party of the masses, and in 1933, “the Nazis were handed over the keys of power by the old elites” (279).  In this light, the Nazis can be seen as a last ditch effort to control the effects of modernization rather than an inevitable conclusion of German history.

For more books on modern German history, see my full list of book reviews, here. 

Weimar Germany: Promise & Tragedy

Weitz, Eric D.  Weimar Germany: Promise & Tragedy.  Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007.

In this survey of the German Weimar era that is both open to a non-academic audience and helpful to scholars, Weitz offers a well-written and engaging look into a vibrant, bygone age.  The majority of the book is dedicated to studying Weimar’s vivacious, multi-faceted and lively culture.  That is not to say that Weitz ignores politics, but he does aim to show that the Weimar Republic was more than just unstable politics, more than just a prelude to the Third Reich (5).

A main theme of Weitz’s book is the Weimar Republic’s perceived relationship to modernity.  He convincingly shows that the idea of modernity was on Germans’ minds and at the heart of political debates, artistic movements, and even city planning.  In one chapter, Weitz leads readers on a leisurely stroll through Weimar Berlin, letting them experience the hustle and bustle of Berlin life “first hand.”  He refers specifically to the Romanische Café, what he calls the “perfect symbol of Weimar politics and society.”  It’s “lively, democratic, engaged, and divided and divisive, unable to speak beyond its own circle” (77-78).  People of different backgrounds and political loyalties met in the café, yet each gravitated to their own tables and corners; they were democratic and diverse, yet broke themselves into small cliques.  To Weitz, this was how the Weimar Republic itself worked.

During the Weimar period, artists and architects attempted to create Gesamtkunstwerke (synthetic works of complete artwork), like Bruno Taut and Martin Wagner’s “Hufeisen,” an apartment complex shaped like a horseshoe so that every occupant could see all other apartments, thus fostering a sense of community (181).  Other artists believed that architecture and paintings could fundamentally change society for the better.  Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus school, for example, felt filling society with modern architecture would take mankind into the modern world by transforming and harmonizing society (194).  Department stores helped usher in the New Woman by carving out a “safe” space for women in the public sphere (55).  New technology allowed for classic operas and symphonies to be presented to the new “masses,” while also creating new forms of artwork and consumption: films.  But not everyone was happy with this new culture, with its new gender norms, economic system, and modes of authority.  Conservatives of all colors protested on the streets and in the Reichstag.

This cultural vitality coexisted alongside (and also contributed to) political instability.  The republic was hit by a series of crises, and the Great Depression in particular became a crisis of the republic’s legitimacy (122).  The warding off of groups into smaller fractions was a symbol of the inefficiency, not vitality of democracy.  By 1928, there were forty-eight parties in the Reichstag, rendering it difficult to legislate.  A series of constitutional articles, (particularly Article 48) gave the Federal President (who otherwise had no direct power on the daily governmental business) unprecedented authority over the Chancellor and Parliament, setting up a “presidential dictatorship,” that for Weitz signaled a political overthrow of democracy in Germany five years before the Nazis took power (351).  The Nazis, Weitz argues, simply tapped into the new rhetoric of the radicalized Right, gaining success only by using mass mobilization and new inventions to spread their message of a return to stability and prosperity.  Ultimately, Weimar’s failure came from its instability, the fact that scores of factions were taking stabs at it from every angle.  The final blow came when a handful of conspirators (conservative government men and big, industrial businessmen) helped the Nazis to power (358).