What are the contexts for understanding the rise of Nazism? Immediately after 1945, Nazismâs origins were sought straightforwardly in the far regions of the deeper German past: âNazi Germany [was] seen as the culmination of German history, the logical endpoint of a malign potential nurtured in that culture for centuriesâ (Caplan 2008, 4). This characterized most of the public commentary after the warâs end, from the reportage and reflections of journalists and academics through the moralizing of critics and clergymen to the rhetoric of politicians and the popular common sense. Without some grappling with those deeper origins, it seemed, the disastrous turn in German history would never be explained. The Nazis were thought to have drawn upon beliefs deemed characteristic of German culture stretching back through the nineteenth century to the Lutheran Reformation, and even the Middle Ages. Only by relating Nazismâs appeal to a set of deepâseated and pervasive dispositions â militarism, deference to authority, veneration of the state, weakness of liberalism â could it be rendered intelligible. If such traditions of thought set Germany sharply apart from the liberalâdemocratic West, then perhaps Nazi success could begin to make sense.
An origins narrative had already emerged from the war itself. A prime instance was A.J.P. Taylorâs Course of German History (completed in September 1944), initially commissioned by Britainâs Political Warfare Executive for the advice of the future occupying administration of Germany. Expanding an essay on the Weimar Republic into a fullâscale account of what we now call the long nineteenth century, Taylor related German national character to the geopolitical determinism of Germanyâs central European location: âit was no more a mistake for the German people to end up with Hitler than it is an accident when a river flows into the seaâ (Taylor 1961, vii). Likewise, having published as a medievalist in 1938, Geoffrey Barraclough produced three books in rapid succession after the war, each placing the twentieth century in the strongest possible relationship to earlier times (Barraclough 1938, 1946a, 1946b, 1950). In The Roots of National Socialism, 1783â1933 (1941), to cite a third example, Rohan DâOlier Butler, a British civil servant and official historian, presented Nazism as merely the political climax of a longâseeded intellectual tradition. âThe exaltation of the heroic leaderâ; âthe racial mythâ; antisemitism; âthe concept of the allâsignificant totalitarian stateâ; âthe community of the folkâ; âthe full program of economic autarkyâ; âthe tradition of militarismâ; the idea of âthe dynamic originality of German culture in contrast to the superficial civilization of the Westâ; âthe polemic against reasonâ; âthe supernatural mission of German cultureâ; âlivingâspaceâ; âPanâGermanismâ; âlaw as folkâlawâ; âthe abasement of the individual before the stateâ â each of these was taken to be distinctively German, descending by linear continuity from the late eighteenth century. As Butler put it: âThe Nazis said that might is right; Spengler said it; Bernhardi said it; Nietzsche said it; Treitschke had said as much; so had Haller before him; so had Novalisâ (Butler 1941, 277â278).
This reflex of explanation marked the immediate postâwar decades. Because Germany produced Nazism, ipso facto its history was singular, with peculiarities deeply embedded in the German past. Germanyâs âpath to modernityâ had been distorted or stalled. The intellectual outlook of Germans broke radically from the West â not only from the Enlightenment and its values, but also in a romanticânationalist counterâreaction against the French Revolution. If the deeper conditions for Germanyâs difference were found in earlier periods, from the Reformation and Thirty Years War to the rise of BrandenburgâPrussia, then the main crucible remained the nineteenth century. Wars against Napoleon; SteinâHardenberg era; Holy Alliance and Metternichian reaction; failure of the 1848 revolutions; Bismarckâs ârevolution from aboveâ and policy of âblood and ironâ; creation of the unified PrussoâGerman state â these became the markers of Germanyâs divergence from Britain and France. âAuthoritarianâ, âmilitaristâ, bureaucraticâ, âPrussianâ were the adjectives commonly in use. Well into the 1960s, this was the default understanding of Nazismâs place in the longer arc of Germanyâs past. An imposing 1955 UNESCO anthology, The Third Reich, was one key reference point, William Shirerâs The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960) another (Vermeil 1955; Shirer 1960).1
There was a stronger socioâpolitical version of this deepâhistorical account. Until the new start after 1945, it ran, the ground had yet to be laid for a viable German liberalism, whether via constitutional restraints on royal and aristocratic power, the growth of parliamentary government and civil liberties, or the political culture of an active and responsible citizenry. In contrast with Britain and France, where liberalism wrested power from monarchy and aristocracy through violent revolution, liberalism in Germany lacked comparable success. Germanyâs tragedy, Max Weber liked to say, was that, unlike the Stuarts and Bourbons, no Hohenzollern had ever had his head chopped off: standing before a decisive breakthrough in the 1848 Revolution (Taylorâs âturningâpointâ where German history âfailed to turnâ), German liberals failed the test (Taylor 1961, 69). Weber explained this sociologically: neither as forthrightly liberal nor indeed as fully âbourgeoisâ as its British counterparts, the German bourgeoisie proved incapable of developing the political culture that Germanyâs âmodernizingâ capitalist economy required. In his concise rendition of Weberâs views, Anthony Giddens (1972, 16â17) puts it like this: âin Germany, the liberal bourgeoisie did not engineer a âsuccessfulâ revolution. Germany achieved political unification as a consequence of Bismarckâs promotion of an aggressively expansionist policy; and industrialization was effected within a social structure in which power still devolved upon traditionally established elite groups.â
In failing to conquer the past, Germany became vulnerable to the future: with the authoritarianism of âpreâindustrial traditionsâ still intact, the conflicts of a rapidly âmodernizingâ society became harder to absorb. When that same authoritarianism outlasted even the German Revolution of 1918â1919, the old elites felt disastrously empowered in undermining Weimarâs new democratic order. In Edgar Feuchtwangerâs words (1973, 21), âthe very class which should have been the buttress of liberalism and stability [the educated bourgeoisie] became a prey to extremismâ, supporting democracyâs rightâwing enemies instead. German liberalismâs apparent weakness was derived from a sociology of deference and accommodation (a soâcalled feudalization of the bourgeoisie), which bolstered the precedence of preâindustrial elites. The failed Revolution of 1848 became the pivotal event â or nonâevent â for the longer term future. No one put this more clearly than Theodor Hamerow (1966, vii), the classic historian of German unification: âThe penalty for the mistakes of 1848 was paid not in 1849, but in 1918, in 1933, and in 1945.â
Through the 1960s, for Marxists and liberals alike, this perspective proved remarkably resilient. No less disparaging than Weber, Karl Marx bequeathed an indictment of the German bourgeoisie to later generations of adherents, from the preâ1914 SPD (Social Democratic Party) to the Weimar Republicâs wider leftâwing intelligentsia.2 It was shared by an assortment of younger historians open to Marxism â a disconnected network of talented outsiders fleeing Nazism in the 1930s, including Eckart Kehr, Hans Rosenberg, Georg W.F. Hallgarten, Alfred Vagts, Gustav Mayer, and Veit Valentin â who were later adopted by the critical West German historians discussed below.3 Postâ1945 Marxist philosophers and sociologists took the same view of German bourgeois deficiencies, from Georg LukĂĄcs (1980, excerpted 1966) to Leo Kofler (1979) and Ernst Bloch (2009). âJust as England is the eternally âfinishedâ country in Europeâ, Kofler pronounced (1979, 537, 739), âso Germany is the one eternally stuck halfway.â And: âThe historical chain of failures on the part of the bourgeoisie in Germany is the cause of âPrussianismâ pure and simple.â Isaac Deutscher (1972, 169) was especially blunt:
By the early 1970s, two prevailing versions had coalesced.5 On the one hand, a strong typification of the âGerman caseâ for purposes of comparison â as an authoritarian syndrome of preâindustrial traditions and arrested liberalism â became central to social science literatures on political development, especially when dealing directly w...
