The Coming of the Third Reich, page 17
Things were made worse from their point of view by the financial obligations that the state placed on them. In order to try and alleviate the worst consequences of the stabilization for workers, and to prevent the recurrence of the near-collapse of welfare provision that had occurred during the hyperinflation, the government introduced an elaborate scheme of unemployment insurance in stages in the years 1926 and 1927. Designed to cushion some 17 million workers against the effects of job losses, the most substantial of these laws, passed in 1927, required the same contributions from employers as employees, and set up a state fund to cope with major crises when the number of unemployed exceeded the figure with which it was designed to cope. Since this was only 800,000, it was obvious that the scheme would get into serious trouble should numbers go any higher. In fact, they had exceeded the limit even before the scheme came into effect.104 Not surprisingly, this welfare system represented a growing state intervention in the economy which business disliked. It piled on extra costs by enforcing employers’ contributions to workers’ benefit schemes, and it imposed an increasing tax burden on business enterprise and indeed on well-off businessmen themselves. Most hostile of all were the heavy industrialists of the Ruhr. Legal restrictions on hours of work prevented them in many cases from utilizing their plant round the clock. Contributions to the unemployment benefit scheme launched in 1927 were seen as crippling. In 1929 the industrialists’ national organization announced its view that the country could no longer afford this kind of thing and called for swingeing cuts in state expenditure accompanied by the formal ending of the bargain with labour that had preserved big business at the time of the 1918 Revolution. Claims that it was the welfare system rather than the state of the international economy that was causing their problems were exaggerated, to say the least; but the new mood of hostility towards the unions and the Social Democrats among many employers in the second half of the 1920s was unmistakeable none the less.105
Big business was thus already disillusioned with the Weimar Republic by the late 1920s. The influence it had enjoyed before 1914, still more during the war and the postwar era of inflation, now seemed to be drastically diminished. Moreover, its public standing, once so high, had suffered badly as a result of financial and other scandals that had surfaced during the inflation. People who lost their fortunes in dubious investments searched for someone to blame. Such scapegoating focused in 1924-5 on the figure of Julius Barmat, a Russian-Jewish entrepreneur who had collaborated with leading Social Democrats in importing food supplies immediately after the war, then invested the credits he obtained from the Prussian State Bank and the Post Office in financial speculation during the inflation. When his business collapsed towards the end of 1924, leaving 10 million Reichsmarks of debts, the far right took the opportunity to run a scurrilous press campaign accusing leading Social Democrats such as the former Chancellor Gustav Bauer of taking bribes. Financial scandals of this kind were exploited more generally by the far right to back up claims that Jewish corruption was exerting undue influence on the Weimar state and causing financial ruin to many ordinary middle-class Germans.106
What could business do to remedy this situation? Its room for political manoeuvre was limited. From the beginning of the Republic, business sought both to insulate industry from political interference, and to secure political influence, or at least good will, through financial donations to the ‘bourgeois’ parties, notably the Nationalists and the People’s Party. Large concerns often had a financial hold on major newspapers through their investments, but this seldom translated into a direct political input. Where the owner did intervene frequently in editorial policy, as in the case of Alfred Hugenberg (whose press and media empire expanded rapidly during the Weimar Republic), this often had little to do with the specific interests of business itself. By the early 1930s, indeed, leading businessmen were so irritated by Hugenberg’s right-wing radicalism that they were plotting to oust him from the leadership of the Nationalist Party. Far from speaking with one voice on the issues that affected it, business was split from top to bottom not only by politics, as the example of Hugenberg suggests, but by economic interest, too. Thus, while the Ruhr iron, steel and mining companies were furiously opposed to the Weimar welfare state and the Weimar system of collective bargaining, companies like Siemens or I.G. Farben, the giants of the more modern sectors of the economy, were more willing to compromise. Some conflict of interest also existed between export-oriented industries, which did relatively well during the years of stabilization and retrenchment, and industries producing mainly for the home market, which included, once again, the Ruhr iron and steel magnates. Even among the latter, however, there were serious differences of opinion, with Krupp actually opposing the hard-line stance taken by the employers in the 1928 lock-out.107 By the end of the 1920s, business was divided in its politics and hemmed in by the restrictions placed on it by the Weimar state. It had lost much of the political influence it had enjoyed during the inflation. Its frustration with the Republic was soon to erupt into open hostility on the part of some of its most influential representatives.
CULTURE WARS
I
The conflicts that rent Weimar were more than merely political or economic. Their visceral quality derived much from the fact that they were not just fought out in parliaments and elections, but permeated every aspect of life. Indifference to politics was hardly a characteristic of the German population.in the years leading up to the Third Reich. People arguably suffered from an excess of political engagement and political commitment. One indication of this could be found in the extremely high turnout rates at elections - no less than 80 per cent of the electorate in most contests.108 Elections met with none of the indifference that is allegedly the sign of a mature democracy. On the contrary, during election campaigns in many parts of Germany every spare inch of outside walls and advertising columns seemed to be covered with posters, every window hung with banners, every building festooned with the colours of one political party or another. This went far beyond the sense of duty that was said by some to have driven voters to the polls in prewar years. There seemed to be no area of society or politics that was immune from politicization.
Nowhere was this more obvious than in the press. No fewer than 4,700 newspapers appeared in Germany in the year 1932, 70 per cent of them on a daily basis. Many of them were local, with a small circulation, but some of them, like the liberal Frankfurt Newspaper (Frankfurter Zeitung), were major broadsheets with an international reputation. Such organs formed only a small part of the politically oriented press, which together made up about a quarter of all newspapers. Nearly three-quarters of the politically oriented papers owed their allegiance to the Centre Party or its equivalent in the south, the Bavarian People’s Party, or to the Social Democrats.109 The political parties set great store by their daily papers. Forwards (Vorwärts) for the Social Democrats, and the Red Flag (Rote Fahne) for the Communists were key parts of their respective parties’ propaganda apparatus, and headed up an elaborate structure of weekly magazines, local newspapers, glossy illustrated periodicals and specialist publications. A newspaper propaganda organizer like the Communist press chief Willi Münzenberg could win an almost mythical reputation as a creator and manipulator of the media.110 At the opposite end of the political spectrum, an equally legendary status was occupied by Alfred Hugenberg, who as chairman of the board of the arms manufacturer Krupps had purchased the Scherl newspaper firm in 1916. Two years later, he also acquired a major news agency through which he supplied large sections of the press with stories and leading articles during the Weimar years. By the late 1920s Hugenberg had in addition become owner of the mammoth film production company, the UFA. Hugenberg used his media empire to propagate his own, virulently German nationalist ideas across the land, and to spread the message that it was time for a restoration of the monarchy. Such was his reputation that by the end of the 1920s he was being referred to as the ‘uncrowned king’ of Germany and ‘one of the most powerful men’ in the land.111
Yet, whatever people thought, media power of this kind did not translate directly into political power. Hugenberg’s domination of the media had absolutely no effect in stopping the relentless decline of the Nationalists after 1914. Political papers in general had small circulations: in 1929, for instance, the Red Flag sold 28,000 copies a day, Forwards 74,000 a day, and Hugenberg’s The Day (Der Tag) just over 70,000. These were not impressive figures by any stretch of the imagination. Moreover, sales of the Red Flag dropped to 15,000 just as the Communist vote was beginning to increase in the early 1930s. Overall, the circulation of the overtly political press fell by nearly a third between 1925 and 1932. The up-market liberal quality dailies also lost circulation.112 The Frankfurt Newspaper, probably the most prestigious of the liberal quality dailies, slipped from 100,000 in 1915 to 71,000 in 1928. As newspaper editors realized only too well, many readers of the pro-Weimar liberal press voted for parties that were opposed to Weimar. The political power of editors and proprietors seemed limited here, too.113
What was undermining the political press in the 1920s was, above all, the rise of the so-called ‘boulevard papers’, cheap, sensational tabloids that were sold on the streets, particularly in the afternoons and evenings, rather than depending on regular subscribers. Heavily illustrated, with massive coverage of sport, cinema, local news, crime, scandal and sensation, these papers placed the emphasis on entertainment rather than information. Yet they, too, could have a political orientation, like Hugenberg’s Night Edition (Nachtausgabe), whose circulation grew from 38,000 in 1925 to 202,000 in 1930, or Münzenberg’s World in the Evening (Welt am Abend), which boosted its sales from 12,000 in 1925 to 220,000 in 1930. By and large, the pro-Weimar press found it hard to keep up with such competition, though the liberal-oriented Ullstein press empire did produce the successful Tempo (145,000 in 1930) and BZ at Midday (BZ am Mittag, 175,000 in the same year). The Social Democrats were unable to compete in this market.114 It was at this level that the politics of the press had a real impact. Scandal-sheets undermined the Republic with their sensational exposure of real or imagined financial wrongdoings on the part of pro-Republic politicians; illustrations could convey the contrast with Imperial days. The massive publicity the popular press gave to murder trials and police investigations created the impression of a society drowning in a wave of violent crime. Out in the provinces, ostensibly unpolitical local papers, often fed by right-wing press agencies, had a similar, if more muted effect. Hugenberg’s press empire might not have saved the Nationalists from decline; but its constant harping on the iniquities of the Republic was another factor in weakening Weimar’s legitimacy and convincing people that something else was needed in its stead. In the end, therefore, the press did have some effect in swaying the minds of voters, above all in influencing them in a general way against Weimar democracy.115
The emergence of the sensationalist popular press was only one among many new and, for some people, disquieting developments on the media and cultural scene in the 1920s and early 1930s. Experimental literature, the ‘concrete poetry’ of the Dadaists, the modernist novels of Alfred Döblin, the social-critical plays of Bertolt Brecht, the biting polemical journalism of Kurt Tucholsky and Carl von Ossietzky, all divided readers between a minority who rose to the challenge of the new, and the majority who regarded such work as ‘cultural Bolshevism’. Alongside the vibrant radical literary culture of Berlin there was another literary world, appealing to the conservative nationalist part of the middle classes, rooted in nostalgia for the lost Bismarckian past and prophesying its return with the longed-for collapse of the Weimar Republic. Particularly popular was Oswald Spengler’s The Fall of the West, which divided human history into natural cycles of spring, summer, autumn and winter, and located early twentieth-century Germany in the winter phase, characterized by ‘tendencies of an irreligious and unmetaphysical urban cosmopolitanism‘, in which art had suffered a ‘preponderance of foreign art-forms’.
In politics, according to Spengler, winter was recognizable by the rule of the inorganic, cosmopolitan masses and the collapse of established state forms. Spengler won many adherents with his claim that this heralded the beginning of an imminent transition to a new spring, that would be ‘agricultural-intuitive’ and ruled by an ‘organic structure of political existence‘, leading to the ’mighty creations of an awakening, dream-laden soul’.116 Other writers gave the coming period of revival a new name that was soon to be taken up with enthusiasm by the radical right: the Third Reich. This concept was popularized by the neo-conservative writer Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, whose book of this title was published in 1923. The ideal of the Reich had arisen, he proclaimed, with Charlemagne and been resurrected under Bismarck: it was the opposite of the government by party that characterized the Weimar Republic. At present, he wrote, the Third Reich was a dream: it would require a nationalist revolution to make it reality. The political parties that divided Germany would then be swept away. When the Third Reich finally came, it would encompass all political and social groupings in a national revival. It would restore the continuity of German history, recreating its medieval glory; it would be the ‘final Reich’ of all.117 Other writers, such as the jurist Edgar Jung, took up this concept and advocated a ‘conservative revolution’ that would bring about ‘the Third Reich’ in the near future.118
Below this level of somewhat rarified abstraction were many other writers who in one way or another glorified the alleged virtues that, in their view, the Weimar Republic negated. The ex-army officer Ernst Jünger propagated the myth of 1914, and in his popular book Storm of Steel exalted the image of the front-line troops who had found their true being only in the exercise of violence and the suffering, and inflicting, of pain.119 The Free Corps spawned a whole canon of novels celebrating the veterans’ hatred of revolutionaries, often expressed in blood-curdling terms, portraying murder and mayhem as the ultimate expression of a resentful masculinity in search of revenge for the collapse of 1918 and the coming of revolution and democracy.120 In place of the feeble compromises of parliamentary democracy, authors such as these, and many others, proclaimed the need for strong leadership, ruthless, uncompromising, hard, willing to strike down the enemies of the nation without compunction.121 Others looked back to an idyllic rural world in which the complexities and ‘decadence’ of modern urban life were wholly absent, as in Adolf Bartels’s novel The Dithmarshers, which had sold over 200,000 copies by 1928.122
All of this expressed a widespread sense of cultural crisis, and not just among conservative elites. Of course, many aspects of modernist culture and the media had already been in evidence before the war. Avant-garde art had impinged on the public consciousness with the work of Expressionists such as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, August Macke or Emil Nolde, and abstract painters such as the Russian-born but Munich-based Wassily Kandinsky. Atonal and expressionist music was emanating from the Second Viennese school of Schoenberg, Webern, Berg and Zemlinsky, while sexually explicit drama in the form of plays such as Spring’s Awakening by Frank Wedekind had already caused a major furore. There had been constant disputes under the Wilhelmine Reich about the limits of propriety in literature and the threat posed by allegedly unpatriotic and subversive, or pornographic and immoral books, many of which were subject to bans imposed by the police.123
The sense of cultural crisis which the emergence of modernist art and culture generated amongst the middle classes after the turn of the century was held in check under the Wilhelmine regime, and in its more extreme forms remained confined to a small minority. After 1918, however, it became far more widespread. The ending, or at least the scaling-down, of the censorship that had been so harsh during the war and always active during the Wilhelmine period, encouraged the media to venture into areas that had previously been taboo. The theatre became the vehicle for radical experimentation and left-wing agitprop.124 Cheaper reproduction and printing techniques made it easier to publish inexpensive illustrated papers and magazines for the mass market. Controversy swirled in particular around Weimar’s Bauhaus, created by the architect Walter Gropius in a merger of the Weimar Art Academy and the Weimar School of Arts and Crafts. An educational centre that sought to join high art with practical design, its staff included Wassily Kandinsky, Oskar Schlemmer, Paul Klee, Theo van Doesberg, and László Moholy-Nagy. Its bohemian students, both male and female, were unpopular with the townspeople, and its radically simple, clean and ultra-modern designs were condemned by local politicians as owing more to the art-forms of primitive races than to anything German. State funding was withdrawn in 1924 and the Bauhaus moved to Dessau, but it continued to be dogged by controversy, especially under its new director, Hannes Meyer, whose Communist sympathies led in 1930 to his replacement by the architect Mies van der Rohe. Mies expelled the Communist students and replaced the Bauhaus’s earlier communitarian ethos with a more structured, even authoritarian regime. But the Nazi majority elected to the town council in November 1931 closed it down following an official inspection by Paul Schulze-Naumburg, the ultra-conservative author of a book on Art and Race. It then moved to a factory site in Berlin, but from this time on was no more than a shadow of its former self. The fate of the Bauhaus illustrated how difficult it was for avant-garde culture to receive official acceptance even in the culturally relaxed atmosphere of the Weimar Republic.125
