From Popular Liberalism to National Socialism

Religion, Culture and Politics in South-Western Germany, 1860s-1930s

Oded Heilbronner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317194552
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del siglo XIX

'Long live liberty, equality, fraternity and dynamite' So went the traditional slogan of the radical liberals in Greater Swabia, the south-western part of modern Germany. This book investigates the development of what the author terms 'popular liberalism' in this region, in order to present a more nuanced understanding of political and cultural patterns in Germany up to the early 1930s. In particular, the author offers an explanation for the success of National Socialism before 1933 in certain regions of South Germany, arguing that the radical liberal sub-culture was not subsumed by the Nazi Party, but instead changed its form of representation. Together with the famous völkish fraction and the leftist fraction within the chapters of the Nazi Party, there were radical-liberal associations, ex-members of radical-liberal parties, sympathizers with these parties, and notables with a radical orientation derived from family and regional traditions. These people and associations believed that the Nazi Party could fulfil their radical - liberal vision, rooted in the local democratic and liberal traditions which stretched from 1848 to the early 20th century. By looking afresh at the relationship between local-regional identities and national politics, this book makes a major contribution to the study of the roots of Nazism.

PART I

Introduction

Chapter 1

The Argument

Interest in liberalism as a historical, cultural and ideological phenomenon has certainly increased in recent decades. Although there has always been a widespread interest in liberalism, the focus has been on national politics and particularly on constitutional issues. In recent years, however, in the context of the new school of historiography, cultural history has exercised a new fascination.¹ For example, debates about the relationships between religion and state, or men and women, take on a different meaning when we realize the full complexity of the relationship between liberalism and religion or gender.² Accordingly, there is a real need for some fresh ideas concerning liberalism as a mass movement.

One of the new arguments concerning liberalism is that, like socialism and Catholicism in continental Europe, liberalism in nineteenth-century Europe was a mass movement, and sometimes a radical one.³ This argument, however, is not applied to Germany. Liberalism as a mass movement, it was said until recently, only existed in Germany until 1849, or, some will say, until the early 1870s.⁴ In this study, however, I would like to speak of German nineteenth- and early twentieth-century liberalism not in terms of crisis and collapse, but in terms of a success story, or – to put it in a more guarded manner – of limits and paradoxes. I would like to offer new interpretations of the strength and peculiarities of liberalism in Germany by introducing the term “popular liberalism”. Until recently this term has usually been applied to a British political and social phenomenon which was one, although not the only, pattern of political behaviour of urban and rural societies in mid and late nineteenth-century Britain.⁵

By using the term “popular liberalism” in the context of German liberalism, I seek to understand political and cultural patterns in Germany up to the early 1930s. I argue that popular-radical liberal pressure groups and parties persistently focused their criticism on the need to change the political system of the Second Reich and the Weimar Republic in a more radical direction. By studying this political and cultural formation, I believe I can prove the existence of German popular liberalism in a specific region: Greater Swabia in south Germany. There, local liberals (mostly members of the National Liberal Party and peasants’ organizations) were proudly conscious of their radical identity and strongly determined to survive as an electoral and social force. It can even be said that in some southern regions, popular liberalism, together with popular Catholicism, were the movers and shakers of the local political culture, and at election time, the local National Liberal dominated the school, the pub, the local Verein and the Old Catholic church.⁶

In short, the existence of a long tradition of plebeian radicalism, and its cultural and institutional expression, are certainly significant features.

My study also has a major goal. I would like to offer a new explanation for the success of National Socialism before 1933 in certain regions of south Germany: one connected with the fact that there was a substantial continuity in popular liberalism throughout the second half of the nineteenth and the first third of the twentieth centuries. Now, one of the difficulties with discussing National Socialism is that it is a subject we seem to know so well that we are unable to reconsider its historical roots. Here I wish to examine the relations between popular liberalism and National Socialism from a new angle, in the hope that a different viewpoint will produce a deeper understanding of the Nazi success before 1933. My argument is based on the continuity of radical-liberal politics, which in this period continued to be dominant in many parties, pressure groups and associations. According to this interpretation, National Socialism of the post-1920s had a variety of cultural sources. It was eclectic especially before 1933, drawing on many different traditions and reacting pragmatically to changing circumstances.⁷ It is further argued that National Socialist thought and action did not just emerge from within the Nazi Party itself, but also grew up autonomously and at the same time within the various subcultures and regions of Weimar Germany which mostly had liberal traditions. For example, I think we need to look afresh at the relationship between local-regional identities and national politics, which is illustrated by the fact that a rural liberalism with a radical legacy existed in certain regions where the Nazi Party won massive electoral success. In contrast to prevailing beliefs, I suggest that this radical-liberal subculture was not submerged by the Nazi Party, but changed its form of representation.

Together with the famous völkisch faction and the Leftist (Strasser) faction within the chapters (Ortsgruppen) of the Nazi Party,⁸ there were radical-liberal associations, ex-members of radical-liberal parties, sympathizers with these parties and notables with a radical orientation derived from family and regional traditions. These people and associations believed that the Nazi Party could fulfil their radical-liberal vision, rooted in the local democratic and liberal traditions which stretched from 1848 to the early twentieth century. Until the late 1920s, liberal and peasants’ parties, organizations and associations were the socio-political representatives of this vision and culture. From the late 1920s to the beginning of the 1930s, the representatives of these organizations formed the Nazi Party chapters in many towns and villages. By the early 1930s, at least in south Germany and as a result of the Strasser–Himmler organizational reforms within the Nazi Party, this unique radical-liberal legacy within the Nazi Party had started to disintegrate and lose its radical appeal.⁹

To sum up my previous arguments: it is well known that in most regions which were the strongholds of German liberalism in the decade before 1914 (Schleswig-Holstein, Oldenburg, Hannover, Pfalz, Hessen, Baden, Franconia, southern Swabia), the Nazi Party won massive support from the late 1920s. Many explanations have been offered in recent decades for Nazi success in these regions.¹⁰ The terms “Proto-Fascism”, “folkism”, “demagogy” and “populism” have very frequently been used to explain this continuity in these and other regions from (national) liberalism to National Socialism. I would like to add another dimension: I wish to exonerate the provincial liberals from the accusation of being proto-fascists and völkisch-nationalists, and explain the dual nature of south German liberalism and National Socialism before 1933. In order to do this, I shall examine neglected radical-liberal elements in the south German liberalism of the late nineteenth century in regions which were strongholds of National Socialism in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and draw attention to the continuity and similarity between radicalism within liberal organizations of the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and National Socialism before 1933. Here I should like to follow the advice of the German political historian Karl Rohe: “One is in a better position to estimate the Nazi Party’s regional strength if one knows not only the social composition of the regional electorate but its voting behaviour in the Kaiserreich, that is to say its political-cultural composition.”

This book is divided into four parts. The first is a methodological introduction where, after a historiographical survey, I define key concepts such as “popular liberalism”, “Catholic rural bourgeoisie”, “voluntary association” (Verein – a key term in this study), “marginality” and “subculture”, and locate them in the particular conditions of the Greater Swabian region from the 1860s to the late 1920s. In the second part, I describe the unique radical-liberal subculture in Greater Swabia. Here I concentrate on two key players: the local bourgeoisie and the local Vereine which, in the name of historical-cultural slogans such as “progress”, “freedom”, “people’s community” (Volksgemeischaft) and the “people” (Volk), fought and challenged the local Catholic-Ultramontane forces. In the third part, I describe the principal stages in the development of popular liberalism in south Germany from the mid nineteenth century to the final years of the Weimar Republic. In the final part, I show how this unique radical-liberal subculture changed its form of representation from popular liberalism to National Socialism.

Notes

¹ Ivan Zoltan Denes (ed.), Liberty and the Search for Identity: Liberal Nationalism and the Legacy of Empires (Budapest, 2006); Domenico Losurdo, Liberalism: A Counter History (London, 2013).

² For the case of Germany, see Oliver Zimmer, Remaking the Rhythms of Life: German Communities in the Age of the Nation State (Oxford, 2012); Dagmar Herzog, Intimacy and Exclusion: Religious Politics in Pre-Revolutionary Baden (Princeton, 1996); Michael B. Gross, The War Against Catholicism: Liberalism and the Anti-Catholic Imagination in Nineteenth-century Germany (Ann Arbor, MI, 2004); Manuel Borutta, Antikatholizismus: Deutschland und Italien im Zeitalter der europäischen Kulturkämpfe (Göttingen, 2009); Helmut W. Smith, German Nationalism and Religious Conflict: Culture, Ideology, Politics, 1870–1914 (Princeton, 1995); Oded Heilbronner, “Freiheit, Gleichheit, Brüderlichkeit und Dynamit”: Populäre Kultur, populärer Liberalismus und Bürgertum im ländlichen Süddeutschland von den 1860ern bis zu den 1930ern (Munich, 2006); Thomas Mergel, “Für eine bürgerliche Kirche: Antiultramontanismus, Liberalismus und Bürgertum 1820–1850. Rheinland und Südwestdeutschland im Vergleich”, Zeitschrift für die Geschichte des Oberrheins, 144 (1996): 397–427; Rebecca Bennette, Fighting for the Soul of Germany: The Catholic Struggle for Inclusion after Unification (Cambridge, MA, 2012); Barbara Stambolis, “Nationalisierung trotz Ultramontanisierung oder: ‘Alles für Deutschland. Deutschland aber für Christus’. Mentalitätsleitende Wertorientierung deutscher Katholiken im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert”, Historische Zeitschrift, 269 (1999): 57–97. For European perspectives, see Paul Seeley, “O Sainte Mère: Liberalism and the Socialization of Catholic Men in Nineteenth-century France”, Journal of Modern History, 70/4 (1998): 862–891; Carol Harrison, The Bourgeois Citizen in Nineteenth-century France: Gender, Sociability, and the Uses of Emulation (Oxford, 1999); Jon Lawrence, Speaking for the People: Party, Language and Popular Politics in England, 1867–1914 (Cambridge, 1998), chapter 3; G.R. Searle, Morality and the Market in Victorian Britain (Oxford, 1998); Anthony Howe, Free Trade and Liberal England 1846–1946 (Oxford, 1998); Eugenio F. Biagini, Liberty, Retrenchment and Reform: Popular Liberalism in the Age of Gladstone, 1860–1880 (Cambridge, 1992); Andrew Gould, Origins of Liberal Dominance: State, Church and Party in Nineteenth-century Europe (Ann Arbor, MI, 1999); Chris Otter, “Making Liberalism Durable: Vision and Civility in the Late Victorian City”, Social History, 27/1 (2002): 1–13; Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-century British Liberal Thought (Chicago and London, 1999); Paul Leontovitsch, The History of Liberalism in Russia (Pittsburgh, 2012).

³ Dieter Langewiesche, “Liberalism and the Middle Classes in Europe”, in J. Kocka (ed.), Bourgeois Society in Nineteenth Century Europe (Oxford, 1992), 40–69.

⁴ For example, this is the main argument of some works on south Germany: see Paul Nolte, Gemeindebürgertum und Liberalismus in Baden 1800–1855 (Göttingen, 1994); idem, “Republicanism, Liberalism, and the Market Society: Party Formation and Party Ideology in Germany and the United States, c. 1825–1850”, in Jürgen Heideking et al. (eds), Republicanism and Liberalism in America and the German States, 1750–1850 (Cambridge, 2002), 187–207; see also Lothar Gall, “Die partei- und sozialgeschichtliche Problematik des badischen Kulturkampfes”, Zeitschrift für die Geschichte des Oberrheins, 113 (1965); idem, Der Liberalismus als regierende Partei: Das Grossherzogtum Baden zwischen Restauration und Reichsgründung (Wiesbaden, 1968); Gerd Zang (ed.), Provinzialisierung einer Region. Zur Entstehung der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft in der Provinz (Frankfurt am Main, 1978); Dieter Hein, “Die bürgerlich-liberale Bewegung in Baden 1800–1880”, Historische Zeitschrift. Beihefte, new series 19 (1995): 19–39; Geoff Eley, “Liberalism, Europe, and the Bourgeoisie 1860–1914”, in David Blackbourn and Richard Evans (eds), The German Bourgeoisie (London, 1990), 307; Dieter Langewiesche, “Deutscher Liberalismus im europäischen Vergleich: Konzeption und Ergebnisse”, in idem (ed.), Liberalismus im 19. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 1988), 16–17; Jürgen Heideking, Republicanism and Liberalism in America and the German States, 1750–1850 (Cambridge, 2001).

⁵ The classic study on popular liberalism is still John Vincent, The Formation of the British Liberal Party (London, 1966).

⁶ For a general history of part of the region, see Martina Steber, Ethnische Gewissheiten: Die Ordnung des Regionalen im bayerischen Schwaben vom Kaiserreich bis zum NS-Regime (Göttingen, 2010).

⁷ Later, the party went through several organizational reforms initiated by Gregor Strasser and Heinrich Himmler to eliminate independent and anti-cent...