Joseph Lee on Nazi Germany
The German Dictatorship K. D. Bracher (Weidenfeld and Nicolson £8.00)
A spectre haunts the historiography of Nazism—the spectre of secular, uprooted mass man, prised loose from his moorings in traditional Christian morality, cast adrift on a turbulent industrial tide, helplessly lured to his Lorelei by the siren song of the great demagogue. This spectre is, of course, merely a figment of the overwrought con- servative imagination. Nazi electoral sup- port, in fact, derived from three main sources—peasants, the old petty bourgeoisie of artisans, the new petty bourgeoisie of white-collar workers. It was the rooted, stay- at-home peasants, not their migrant cousins, who swarmed into Hitler's camp. The artisans, far from being threatened by im- minent proletarianisation, as socialist theory predicted and subsequent historiography has asserted, more than held their own during Weimar. Civil servants constituted a substantial proportion of the white-collar workers, and in so far as some of the re- mainder may have been uprooted, it was more from a working class which had itself emerged only two generations previously than from traditional society. Not the nomadic urban workers, but the small towns and villages, repositories of traditional values, rolled up the majorities which made Hitler a serious contender for power. Several reasons can be assigned for the widespread failure to realise that Nazism roused its most enthusiastic response in the rooted, religious sectors of German society. The Catholic voters clung to their Centre party, but, as the Centre's main preoc- cupation was to find common ground with Hitler, this was but another instance of that abdication of moral responsibility charac- teristic of a tradition which owed more to Pilate than to Christ. Mr Grunberger's description of Nazism as `Catholicism without Christianity' could be applied more appropriately to the Centre party itself. The fashionable assertion that Nazism and Com- munism are but obverse sides of the same totalitarian coin fails to distinguish between leaders and followers, for however intriguing as an observation about the psychological characteristics of the elites of the two movements, it cannot explain why their sources of mass electoral support remained all but mutually exclusive. Conservative historians, like Gerhard Ritter, desperate to divert attention from conservative complicity
in Hitler's accession, at both the patrician and the popular levels, have fostered the
`uprooted' myth, attributing ultimate responsibility for Hitler to the rejection of the patriarchal, authoritarian concept of society, which they consider the core of the conservative tradition. Among the major contributions of that spoiled Junker, Sir Lewis Namier, to Anglo-Saxon misun- derstanding of Germany was the vilification of the Frankfurt parliamentary liberals of 1848 as the forerunners of the Nazis. This subtle shifting of attention from conservative responsibility ignores the fact that there was no tragedy of German liberalism, only of German conservatism. Even if German liberals faded away, German liberalism did not. Its survival as an essential component of social democracy helps to explain the central problem of Weimar history, for it was as much because of its liberal as because of its socialist heritage that the traditional left pro- ved so much more resistant to Communism than did the traditional right of Nazism. The rightward drift of the German liberal parties -in the later nineteenth century would have mattered as little as the defections in England of Hartington, or even Joseph Chamberlain, over Home Rule, had German conservatism evolved in the English manner. In electoral terms the continuity of German history resolves itself into the continuity of German conservatism, and Hitler introduced few measures, as Mr Grunberger's wide- ranging account of social policy shows, alien to conservative programmes.
One of the few omissions from Professor Bracher's magisterial study is its failure to subject the `rootless masses in a secularised world' myth to as searching a scrutiny as the other myths it demolishes in the course of a profound analysis of the nature of Nazism, its place in German history and its future prospects. It is nonetheless an unfortunate omission, for it would have added an extra dimension to the careful appraisal of the re- cent National Progressive Democrat upsurge. Professor Bracher emphasises what he con- siders the ominous similarity between the areas where the Nazis made their initial breakthrough in the late 'twenties and the areas of most marked NPD success in 1966-8. The similarity is, in fact, rather reassuring. The weight of these areas in German politics is declining. The contraction of the peasant sector, and the gradual spread, at last, of a genuinely secular society, deprives the radical right of its main potential base. It is, perhaps, unfair to ask for more from a work of such rare quality. Professor Bracher might, however, have elaborated his argu- ment that embourgeoisement will render the working classes vulnerable to the virus they have hitherto resisted so stubbornly by ex- amining the political implications not only of upward mobility into, but of increasing upward mobility out of, the lower middle classes. He might also have considered the possibility that the staunchest Nazi sup- porters among the new middle classes in Weimar came less from vertically mobile working-class recruits—from embourgeoise- ment in the strict sense—than from laterally mobile recruits from the old bourgeoisie. Nazism, an integral part of western civilisation, will always be with us, but both Professor Bracher and Dr Childs, in his ex- ceptionally useful and judicious introduction to recent German history, take an unwar- rantedly guarded view about the possible re- emergence of another Nazi regime. In fact the major discontinuity in German con- servatisnl occurred not in 1933, but in 1945 with the founding of the Christian Democratic Union. The most significant difference between Weimar and Bonn is that a responsible right—Adenauer's historic creation—has.at last emerged. This new con- servatism governed Germany from 1949 un- til 1969. Its coming of age has been signalised in the past two years by the dignity with which the CDU, in the peculiarly frustrating circumstances of being the big- gest party in parliament and of probably having a majority in the country, have discharged the reluctant role of the Federal Republic's loyal opposition.
Joseph Lee is a Fellow and Tutor of Peterhouse, Cambridge
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