Did Weimar Fail? Peter Fritzsche The Journal of Modern History, Volume 68, Issue 3 (Sep., 1996), 629-656. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0022-2801%28199609%2968%3A3%3C629%3ADWF%3E2.0.CO%3B2-S STOR Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance

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For more information on JSTOR contact jstor-info@umich.edu. ©2002 JSTOR http://www.jstor.org/ Tue Aug 6 18:06:21 2002 Review Article Did Weimar Fail?* Peter Fritzsche University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign What is Weimar without the Republic? Not much, it seems, since for most German historians the plot that holds the story together has been fragile democracy and its demise. "Weimar” is, as numerous subtitles inform us, the "history of the first Ger- man Democracy," the site where democracy surrendered or failed.¹ The drama of twentieth-century Germany has largely turned on the failure of the Weimar Repub- lic. All the grand scholarly investments in the study of big-business relations, small- town clubs, East Elbian provinces, and a staggering variety of interest groups and political parties have been undertaken to explain more successfully the frailties of the Republic. This focus has been meritorious since it has guided political self- understandings in postwar Germany and indicated possible limits to the legitimacy of modern democracies generally. Even the notable political guru Kevin Phillips has invoked Weimar to warn his Republican clients not to forget "Middle America."² But preoccupation with the fate of the Republic has been so single-minded that it * I would like to thank Fred Jaher, Harry Liebersohn, Glenn Penny, and Joe Perry for their helpful readings of this article. The following books are under review: Frank Bajohr, Werner Johe, and Uwe Lohalm, eds., Zivilisation und Barbarei: Die widersprüchliche Potentiale der Moderne (Hamburg, 1991); Shelley Baranowski, The Sanctity of Rural Life: Nobility, Protestantism, and Nazism in Weimar Prussia (New York, 1995); Richard Bessel, Germany after the First World War (Oxford, 1993); Jürgen Falter, Hitlers Wähler (Munich, 1991); Donna Harsch, German Social Democracy and the Rise of Nazism (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1993); Elizabeth Harvey, Youth and the Welfare State in Weimar Germany (Oxford, 1993); Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimend- berg, eds., The Weimar Republic Sourcebook (Berkeley, 1994); Alf Lüdtke, Eigen-Sinn: Fabrikall- tag, Arbeitererfahrungen und Politik vom Kaiserreich bis in den Faschismus (Hamburg, 1993); Hans Mommsen, Die verspielte Freiheit: Der Weg der Republik von Weimar in den Untergang 1918 bis 1933 (Berlin, 1989); Mary Nolan, Visions of Modernity: American Business and the Modernization of Germany (New York, 1994); Jonathan Osmond, Rural Protest in the Weimar Republic: The Free Peasantry in the Rhineland and Bavaria (New York, 1993); Gerhard Paul, Aufstand der Bilder: Die NS-Propaganda vor 1933 (Bonn, 1990); Wolfram Pyta, Gegen Hitler und für die Republik: Die Auseinandersetzung der deutschen Sozialdemokratie mit der NSDAP in der Weimarer Republik (Düsseldorf, 1989); Cornelie Usborne, The Politics of the Body in Weimar Germany: Women's Reproductive Rights and Duties (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1992); and Heinrich Au- gust Winkler, Weimar, 1918-1933: Die Geschichte der ersten deutschen Demokratie (Munich, 1993). ¹ Winkler; Karl Dietrich Erdmann and Hagen Schulze, eds., Weimar: Selbstpreisgabe einer De- mokratie (Düsseldorf, 1980); Ian Kershaw, ed., Weimar: Why Did German Democracy Fail? (New York, 1990). 2 Juan Linz, "Political Space and Fascism as a Late-comer: Conditions Conducive to the Success or Failure of Fascism as a Mass Movement in Inter-war Europe," in Who Were the Fascists: The [The Journal of Modern History 68 (September 1996): 629-656] © 1996 by The University of Chicago. 0022-2801/96/6803-0005$01.00 All rights reserved. 630 Fritzsche has tended to assign Germany the part of the twentieth-century delinquent whose role is to certify the basic political virtue of France, Britain, and the United States, in what might be dubbed "NATO history." This assignment not only misconstrues political developments in the West but also reduces politics in the Weimar era to the question of support for or opposition to parliamentary liberalism, thereby turning the 1920s into a political universe that revolves around the Reichstag on the Platz der Republik. Did the Republic really mean that much to Germans after World War I? There is considerable evidence that it did not. In the first place, politicians and voters repeat- edly averred that the crucial questions facing Germany did not turn on a formal choice between republicanism or monarchism but rather on the quality of social relations that made up the nation. A look at the political discourse of the 1920s, when contenders peddled concepts such as "economic democracy" (Wirtschaftsdemokra- tie), “national community" (Volksgemeinschaft), or a more conservative "corporate state" (Ständestaat), suggests that neither liberalism nor illiberalism provides a help- ful benchmark. An intense reexamination of social groups, cultural representations, and political institutions in the last fifteen years has fundamentally challenged the extent to which historical change may be usefully judged against normative concep- tions of liberalism. A great deal of the political dynamic in the 1920s is obscured by the telos of Weimar's collapse. At the grassroots level, Weimar's favorite sons and daughters-working-class socialists-now appear more attracted to nationalist sentiments and mass-cultural diversions, while history's muggers-middle-class in- surgents-appear far less pathological and much more social reformist. Moreover, growing numbers of historians acknowledge the broad popularity of the Nazis, who are no longer simply understood as creatures of crisis and dislocation. At the same time, the left-liberal reformers who constructed Europe's most elaborate social- welfare state in the years after 1918 were by no means consistently guided by repub- lican ideals. In fact, they shared common assumptions about collective responsibility and national health with their right-wing challengers, who, for all the noxiousness of their beliefs, were not nearly as backward-looking as scholars once assumed.5 Social Roots of European Fascism, ed. Stein Ugelvik Larsen, Bernt Hagtvet, and Jan Petter Myklebust (New York, 1980), pp. 153-89; and Kevin Phillips, Post-conservative America: People, Politics, and Ideology in a Time of Crisis (New York, 1982). ³ See Michael Geyer and Konrad H. Jarausch, "The Future of the German Past: Transatlantic Reflections for the 1990s," and Michael Geyer, "Historical Fictions of Autonomy and the Europe- anization of National History," Central European History 22 (1989): 232–34, 326-33. See also David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany (New York, 1984). 4 The liberal Republic remains central to most approaches to Weimar, although the normative standard of liberalism has been under attack for more than ten years. See Konrad Jarausch, "Illiber- alism and Beyond: German History in Search of a Paradigm," Journal of Modern History 55 (1983): 268–84; as well as Blackbourn and Eley. The concepts of liberalism and illiberalism are most closely associated with Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology (Berkeley, 1961), and The Failure of Illiberalism: Essays on the Political Culture of Modern Germany (New York, 1972). 5 A similar trend can be detected in American historiography. See Michael Kazin, “The Grass- Roots Right: New Histories of U.S. Conservatism in the Twentieth Century," American Historical Review 97 (February 1992): 136-55. Did Weimar Fail? 631 It is not surprising that the red thread of progress is easy to lose when matters are described as being "not nearly" so clear-cut, so reactionary, so liberal. Indeed, the provocative consequence of recent Weimar histories has been to disconnect modernism from liberalism and to rethink what really is modern or antimodern. Radical nationalists, right-wing aesthetes, illiberal jurists, and even National So- cialists now jostle with Social Democrats, Bauhaus architects, and Communist in- tellectuals as hyphenated modernists. In turn, classical terms like political reaction- ary and social progressive have increasingly lost their resonance; historical actions appear more indeterminate and open-ended. And once the protagonists and re- tardants of progress can no longer be identified with certainty, it becomes more difficult to see the Weimar Republic as a failure or to deny the Third Reich status as a legitimate, if extreme, outcome of twentieth-century civilization. Just how much the narrative of the Weimar years has strayed from the well-marked path of creation, crisis, and collapse is evident in the newly cherished vocabulary that draws attention to the proliferation of "political blueprints," "cultural experiments," and "social initiatives" on the Left and the Right and summarizes Weimar as the laboratory of "classical modernity." Mostly minted by Detlev Peukert in the mid- 1980s, and widely circulated since, this language calls into question the whole notion of failure. If Weimar is conceived in terms of experiments designed to man- age (however deleteriously) the modern condition, then the failure of political de- mocracy is not the same as the destruction of the laboratory. Indeed, the Third Reich can be regarded as one possible Weimar production. Perhaps the long- awaited "new paradigm” for German history has arrived in the form of the dis- avowal of the master narrative of the Republic in the name of the eclectic experi- mentalism of Weimar. Scholarly revaluations of aesthetics and power have prepared the new frame- work for interpreting the Weimar years. On the one hand, the political aspirations of social groups are no longer regarded in simple terms of class. The "linguistic turn" has indicated the extent to which subjects think about the political world in ways that are not accurate reflections of social reality. These representations bear the traces of past traditions, linguistic conventions, and cultural media, and they became constituent parts of that reality. Moreover, individuals entered the public sphere in a variety of social identities. Metalworkers, to take one example dis- cussed at length by Alf Lüdtke, were not simply trade unionists and (often) Social 6 Kaes, Jay, and Dimendberg, eds., p. xviii; and Detlev Peukert, The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity, trans. Richard Deveson (New York, 1989). 7 William Sheridan Allen, "Farewell to Class Analysis in the Rise of Nazism: Comment," Cen- tral European History 17 (1984): 54-62; Peter Baldwin, "Social Interpretations of Nazism: Re- newing a Tradition," Journal of Contemporary History 25 (1990): 5–37. 8 The best effort for German history is still Thomas Childers, "The Social Language of Politics in Germany: The Sociology of Political Discourse in the Weimar Republic," American Historical Review 95 (1990): 331-58. See also the broader statements by Kathleen Canning, "Feminist His- tory after the Linguistic Turn: Historicizing Discourse and Experience,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 19 (1994): 368-405; Roger Chartier, "Texts, Printings, Readings," in The New Cultural History, ed. Lynn Hunt (Berkeley, 1989), pp. 154–75; and John E. Toews, "Intellec- tual History after the Linguistic Turn: The Autonomy of Meaning and the Irreducibility of Experi- ence," American Historical Review 92 (1987): 879-907. 632 Fritzsche Democrats, but also husbands and fathers, veterans and Germans, gymnasts and gardeners. As such, they responded to any number of compelling visions about the legitimate order of society, the proper roles for men and women, and the future of the nation. Emotional affinities to the nation, in particular, mobilized considerable political sentiment. It is now clear that substantial numbers of workers, including longtime Social Democrats, voted for the Nazis in 1930 and 1932, and those who did not still responded positively to nationalist appeals in the years that followed and accommodated themselves more or less easily to the National Socialist regime. The reach of various nationalist mobilizations was far greater than classic social interpretations of the Weimar Republic have suggested. In the hands of "new cul- tural” historians, postwar politics is as much the product of desire and imagination as of function and interest. Intricate webs of contingency now obscure from view the previously conspicuous Sonderweg, the peculiarly German path of illiberal modernization that oriented most historians in the 1960s and 1970s.⁹ The imagination of the nation is central as well to the "new political" history that has eschewed strictly party-political questions about the rise of National So- cialism or the collapse of liberalism or the fate of Social Democracy and expanded the very concept of political power. Innovative studies of social welfare, education, and health during the Weimar period have focused on the ways in which individual bodies were worked on in the name of the national body, or Volkskörper. While the emancipatory potential of social legislation is not overlooked, the central theme of this scholarship (and many more studies are in press) is the regimentation and discipline of citizens in often dangerously imaginative ways. A Foucauldian per- spective on the links between individual and national bodies not only establishes significant continuities between the Weimar era and the Third Reich but also indi- cates how malleable postwar social life had become. Rather than a model battle- ground between modern liberals and antimodern authoritarians, Weimar is the fas- cinating foreground against which to track the dark shadows of modernity. The Weimar that emerges from recent historiography is strikingly open-ended. This is not to suggest that democracy as such could have survived. Gerald Feldman is probably right to argue that the Republic was, from the beginning, a "gamble which stood virtually no chance of success." ¹0 But much more than parliamentary democracy was at stake. An astonishing variety of dreamers and adventurers pros- pered in the postwar years. The fact that Weimar came without operating instruc- ⁹ The classic statements of the Sonderweg are Ralf Dahrendorf, Society and Democracy in Ger- many (Garden City, N.Y., 1967); and Hans-Ulrich Wehler, The German Empire, 1871–1918, trans. Kim Traynor (Leamington Spa, 1985). Blackbourn and Eley, Peculiarities, provided the most com- prehensive critique, and the resulting debate is recapitulated and assessed in Robert G. Moeller, "The Kaiserreich Recast? Continuity and Change in Modern German Historiography," Journal of Social History 17 (1984): 442–50; James N. Retallack, "Social History with a Vengeance? Some Reactions to H.-U. Wehler's 'Das Deutsche Kaiserreich,"" German Studies Review 7 (1984): 655-83; and Jürgen Kocka, “German History before Hitler: The Debate about the German Sonderweg," Journal of Contemporary History 23 (1988): 3-16. See also Helga Grebing, Der "deutsche Sonderweg" in Europa, 1806–1945: Eine Kritik (Stuttgart, 1986). ¹0 Gerald D. Feldman, "Weimar from Inflation to Depression: Experiment or Gamble?" in Die Nachwirkungen der Inflation auf die deutsche Geschichte, 1924-1933, ed. Gerald D. Feldman (Munich, 1985), p. 385./n Fritzsche Worksheet Worksheets in this course are intended to help prepare for discussion and to focus on how historians approach and "dissect" others' work. This gives me a way to provide feedback to you about your analytical skills. Responses are not intended to be a formal paper; rather, type a response that engages each of the questions separately (label your responses, please, as 1, 2, 3, etc.). Be careful in respect to rhetoric, however! 1. Explain the topic of the article, in at least 50 words. 2. Quote the central thesis (the author's interpretation or argument), and give a page number. 3. Paraphrase the central thesis, in your own words. 4. Within the article, what are major sub-points that support the thesis? List them, giving a sentence that explains teach sub-point, and give the page numbers. 5. How is this article primarily organized? (Chronological? Analytical? Narrative? Topical? A combination of more than one of these?) Explain the organization in no less than 50 words, with reference to the article. 6. What is the author's approach to the subject? What kinds of historical actors does Fritzsche look to? What kinds of events is he interested in? In no less than 75 words, explain his approach - and suggest a way to "classify" the article. (By this, I mean how would you in a sentence broadly explain his approach to someone who hadn't read it.) 7. In 50 words, describe his sources. What kinds of sources are used? How thoroughly is information documented? 8. What is the historiography of the article? Who are they responding to in other words, are they responding to other historians, or to a historical school of thought? (If this is not readily apparently, look carefully at the footnotes.) Describe this in no less than 50 words. 9. Compare the kind of article Fritzsche wrote to the Crim article you worked on for last week. The latter is a research article, the former is a review article (which is noted prominently at the top). In no less than 100 words, articulate the differences and similarities between the two kinds of work. Think about: the purpose of each kind, the necessary qualifications of the historian writing them, the use of sources, and why would the scholarly audience want either of them. Please type your responses to these questions, double-spacing your response. Your worksheet is due at the start of class, but you can retain this during the discussion to refer to it.