Abstract
This chapter reconsiders developments in high politics in Germany in the period 1930–30 January 1933. It seeks in particular to review the manoeuvres that culminated in Hitler’s appointment as chancellor in the light of the two approaches which have underpinned much research on the Weimar Republic in general in recent decades. On the one hand, the Fischerites and Bielefeld School had argued that the fundamental problem of the Weimar Republic lay in its want of modernity, in the many hangovers from imperial Germany which characterised it, and most of all in the continuing and structurally determined power of Germany’s ‘old elites’ working together in a close ‘alliance’. This perspective was anchored in the Sonderweg thesis, which, positing a ‘Western’ norm of modernisation, held Germany to have been an aberrant exception. Detlev Peukert challenged this approach at its roots. In a seminal study first published in 1987 under the title Die Weimarer Republik: Die Krisenjahre der klassischen Moderne,1 he here asserted that Weimar Germany, far from having missed some kind of alleged opportunity to modernise, represented a paradigmatic, indeed a ‘classical’ case, of modernity. An advanced capitalist economy, a welfare state that was even enshrined in the constitution, a large and growing service sector, bureaucracy and administrative systems, a shared belief in science and scientificity as a kind of cure-all — these are among the hallmarks of ‘classical modernity’ as he defined it.
Keywords
- Centre Party
- Constitutional Reform
- Parliamentary Democracy
- Weimar Republic
- Nazi Party
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp Verlag. All further references are to the English translation: Detlev J. K. Peukert, The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity (London: Penguin, 1991).
Peukert, Grenzen der Sozialdisziplinierung: Aufstieg und Krise der deutschen Jugendfürsorge von 1878 bis 1932 (Cologne: Bund Verlag, 1986).
To name just a few of the more important contributions: David Crew, ‘The Ambiguities of Modernity: Welfare and the German State from Wilhelm to Hitler’, in G. Eley, ed., Society, Culture, and the State in Germany 1870–1930 (Ann Arbor: University Michigan Press, 1996), pp. 319–44.
idem, From Weimar to Hitler: Germans on Welfare, 1919–1933 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).
Young-Sun Hong, ‘The Weimar welfare system’, in Anthony McElligott, ed., Weimar Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 175–206.
E. Dickinson, ‘Welfare, Democracy and Fascism: The Political Crises in German Child Welfare, 1922–1933’, German Studies Review 22/1 (1999), 43–66.
idem, ‘Biopolitics, Fascism, Democracy: Some Reflections on our Discourse about “Modernity”’, Central European History 37/1 (2004), 1–48.
Elizabeth Harvey, Youth and the Welfare State in Weimar Germany (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993).
Paul Weindling, Health, Race and German Politics between National Unification and Nazism 1870–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
Paul Lerner, Hysterical Men: War, Psychiatry, and the Politics of Trauma in Germany, 1890–1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003).
See Larry Eugene Jones and James Retallack, eds, Elections, Mass Politics and Social Change in Modern Germany (Washington, DC: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
H. A. Turner, Hitler’s Thirty Days to Power (London: Bloomsbury, 1996).
Hans Mommsen, ‘Heinrich Brüning as Chancellor: The Failure of a Politically Isolated Strategy’, in idem, From Weimar to Auschwitz. Essays in German History (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), pp. 119–40; quotation at 119.
I. Kershaw, ‘Der 30. Januar 1933: Staatskrise und Staatsverfall’, in H. A. Winkler (ed.), Die deutsche Staatskrise 1930–1933 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1992), pp. 205–14.
Cf. Hans Mommsen, ‘Government without Parties: Conservative Plans for Constitutional Revision at the End of the Weimar Republic’, in Larry Eugene Jones and James Retallack (eds), Between Reform, Reaction and Resistance: Studies in the History of German Conservatism from 1789–1945 (Providence and Oxford: Berg, 1993), pp. 347–74.
Idem, The Rise and Fall of Weimar Democracy (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), pp. 287ff.
Stephan Malinowski, Vom Kŏnig zum Fŭhrer. Sozialer Niedergang und politische Radikalisierung im deutschen Adel zwischen Kaiserrich und NS-Staat (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2003), pp. 448–59, 312ff.
Andreas Rŏdder, ‘Dichtung und Wahrheit. Der Quellenwert von Brünings Memoiren und seine Kanzlerschaft’, Historische Zeitschrift 265 (1997), 77–116.
William Patch, ‘Heinrich Brŭning’s Recollections of Monarchism: The Birth of a Red Herring’, Journal of Modern History 70/2 (1998), 340–70.
idem, Heinrich Brŭning and the Dissolution of the Weimar Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
H. A. Winkler, Weimar 1918–1933. Die Geschichte der ersten deutschen Demokratie (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1993; 2nd edn, 1994), esp. pp. 376–476.
Jane Caplan, ‘Profession as Vocation: The German Civil Service’, in Geoffrey Cocks and Konrad H. Jarausch, eds, The German Professions, 1800–1950 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 163–182, 175–76; Hans Mommsen, ‘State and Bureaucracy in the Brüning Era’, in idem, From Weimar to Auschwitz, 79–118.
Mommsen, The Rise and Fall of Weimar Democracy (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), p. 317.
Pyta, Dorfgemienschaft und Parteipolitik. Die Verschränkung von Milieu und Parteien in den protestantischen Landgebieten Deutschlands in der Weimarer Republik (1996), 19.
Idem, ‘Vorbereitungen für den militärischen Ausnahmezustand unter Papen/Schleicher’, MGM 51/2 (1992), 385–428, 385.
Joachim Petzold, Franz von Papen. Ein deutsches Verhängnis (Munich and Berlin: Buchverlag Union, 1995), pp. 17–63.
U. Hörster-Philipps, ‘Conservative Concepts of Dictatorship in the Final Phase of the Weimar Republic: The Government of Franz von Papen’, in M. Dobkowski and I. Wallimann, eds, Towards the Holocaust: The Social and Economic Collapse of the Weimar Republic (1983), pp. 115–30, 123.
B. Hoppe, ‘Von Scheicher zu Hitler. Dokumente zum Konflikt zwischen dem Reichslandbund und der Regierung Schleicher in den letzten Wochen der Weimarer Republlik’, Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 45/4 (1997), 629–57.
Christopher Lloyd, The Structures of History (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1993), p. 46.
For a general and positive reception of ‘structurationist’ approaches, see Philip Pomper, ‘Historians and Individual Agency’, History and Theory 35 (1996), 281–308. Pomper argues for their particular applicability to periods — such as the first half of the twentieth century — in which structures and mentalities were in a state of flux so that the individual was relatively less prone to being ‘conditioned’ e.g., by his or her socialisation.
Turner, German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), esp. 324ff.
T. S. Hamerow, On the Road to the Wolf’s Lair. German Resistance to Hitler (1997), 90ff.
Translated into English as E. Eyck, History of the Weimar Republic, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964), pp. 482–3.
There has been no recent attempt to dispute that these were Scheicher’s and his collaborators’ motives. For more details, see F. L. Carsten, The Reichswehr and Politics 1918–1933 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), p. 391ff.
H. A. Winkler, Weimar 1918–1933. Die Geschichte der ersten deut– schen Demokratie (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1993; 2nd edn, 1994), p. 589. Cf. also H. Mommsen, The Rise and Fall of Weimar Democracy, 523.
Cf. K. D. Bracher, ‘Brüning’s unpolitische Politik und die Auflŏsung der Weimarer Republik’, Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 19/2 (1971), 113–23, esp. the remarks on 113.
Cit. after Larry E. Jones, ‘Von Weimar zu Hitler. Deutschlands konservative Eliten und die Etablierung des “Dritten Reiches” 1932–1934’, in Dietrich Papenfuβ and Wolfgang Schieder, eds, Deutsche Umbrŭche im 20. Jahrhuindert. Tagungsbeiträge eines Symposiums der Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung Bonn-Bad Godesberg (Cologne, Weimar, and Berlin: Bŏhlau Verlag, 2000), pp. 191–205, 201.
Copyright information
© 2013 Peter Lambert
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Lambert, P. (2013). The End of the Weimar Republic: Individual Agency, Germany’s ‘Old Elites’, and the ‘Crisis of Classical Modernity’. In: Mass Dictatorship and Modernity. Mass Dictatorship in the Twentieth Century. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137304339_12
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137304339_12
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-45446-4
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-30433-9
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)