The Coming of the Third Reich, page 57
The conquest of power requires insight. The conquest of power itself is easy, the conquest is only secure when the renewal of human beings is fitted to the new form ... The great task is now to regain control of the revolution. History shows more revolutions that have succeeded in the first run-up than those that have also been able to continue afterwards. Revolution must not become a permanent condition, as if the first revolution now had to be followed by a second, the second by a third. We have conquered so much that we will need a very long time to digest it ... Further development must take place as evolution, existing circumstances must be improved ...141
Fundamentally, therefore, while calling for a cultural and spiritual remaking of Germans in order to fit them to the new form of the Reich, he thought that this had to be done in an evolutionary rather than a revolutionary manner. He went on:
The present structure of the Reich is something unnatural. It is neither conditioned by the needs of the economy nor by the necessities of life of our people ... We have taken over a given state of affairs. The question is whether we want to retain it ... The task lies in keeping and reshaping the given construction in so far as it is useable, so that what is good can be preserved for the future, and what cannot be used is removed.142
The cultural transformation of the individual German that formed the most revolutionary aspect of the Nazis’ intentions could, by analogy, also be achieved by preserving or resurrecting what the Nazis thought of as the good aspects of the German culture of the past, and removing what they conceived of as alien intrusions.
Even the stormtroopers, whose self-proclaimed drive for a ‘second revolution’ Hitler was explicitly criticizing here, had no real concept of any kind of systematic revolutionary change. A survey of grass-roots Nazi opinion in 1934 showed that a majority of the rank-and-file activists who had been in the Party under the Weimar Republic expected that the regime would bring about a national renaissance, described by one as a ‘total reordering of public life’ in which Hitler would ‘purge Germany of people alien to our country and race who had sneaked into the highest positions and, together with other criminals, brought my German fatherland close to ruin’. A national renaissance in these men’s understanding meant above all the reassertion of Germany’s position in the world, the overturning of the Treaty of Versailles and its provisions, and the restoration, by war in all probability, of German hegemony in Europe.143 These men were not revolutionaries in any wider sense, therefore; they had little or no concept of an inner transformation of Germany beyond purging it of Jews and ‘Marxists’. The ceaseless activism of the brownshirts was to cause serious problems for the Third Reich in the months and years to come. In the second half of 1933 and the first half of 1934 it was frequently justified by claims that ‘the revolution’ had to continue. But the stormtroopers’ idea of revolution was in the end little more than the continuation of the brawling and fighting to which they had become accustomed during the seizure of power.
For the upper echelons of the Nazi Party, and, above all, for the leadership, continuity was as important as change. The grand opening of the Reichstag in the garrison church at Potsdam after the March elections in 1933, with its ostentatious display of the symbols of the old social and political order, including the presiding throne reserved for the absent Kaiser, and the ceremonial laying of wreaths on the tombstones of the dead Prussian kings, powerfully suggested that Nazism rejected the fundamentals of revolution and linked itself symbolically to key traditions from the German past. This may not have been the whole story, but it was more than a mere propaganda exercise or a cynical sop to Hitler’s conservative allies. Moreover, the fact that so many people went over to Nazism in the weeks and months after Hitler became Chancellor, or at least tolerated it and offered no opposition, cannot just be put down to mere opportunism. This might be an explanation for an ordinary regime, but not for one with such pronounced and radical characteristics as that of the Nazis; and the speed and enthusiasm with which so many people came to identify with the new regime strongly suggests that a large majority of the educated elites in German society, whatever their political allegiance up to that point, were already predisposed to embrace many of the principles upon which Nazism rested.144 The Nazis not only seized political power, they also seized ideological and cultural power in the opening months of the Third Reich. This was not only a consequence of the vague and protean quality of many of their own ideological statements, which offered all things to all people; it also derived from the way in which Nazi ideas appealed directly to many of the principles and beliefs which had spread through the German educated elite since the late nineteenth century. In the wake of the First World War, these principles and beliefs were held, not by an embattled revolutionary minority, but by major institutions of society and politics. It was those who rejected them, in part or in their totality, the Communists and the Social Democrats, who thought of themselves as revolutionaries, and were widely regarded as such by the majority of Germans.
All the great revolutions in history have rejected the past, even down to the point of beginning a new dating system with ‘Year I’, as the French Revolution did in 1789, or of consigning the previous centuries to the ‘dustbin of history’, to quote a famous phrase used by Trotsky in the Russian Revolution of 1917.145 Such fundamentalism could also be found on the far right, for example in Schonerer’s plan to introduce a German nationalist calendar instead of the Christian one. Yet even Schönerer’s dating system began in the distant past. And for the Nazis and their supporters, the very term ‘Third Reich’ constituted a powerful symbolic link to the imagined greatness of the past, embodied in the First Reich of Charlemagne and the Second of Bismarck. Thus, as Hitler said on 13 July 1934, the Nazi Revolution restored the natural development of German history that had been interrupted by the alien impositions of Weimar:
For us, the revolution which shattered the Second Germany was nothing more than the tremendous act of birth which summoned the Third Reich into being. We wanted once again to create a state to which every German can cling in love; to establish a regime to which everyone can look up with respect; to find laws which are commensurate with the morality of our people; to install an authority to which each and every man submits in joyful obedience.
For us, the revolution is not a permanent state of affairs. When a deathly check is violently imposed upon the natural development of a people, an act of violence may serve to release the artificially interrupted flow of evolution to allow it once again the freedom of natural development.146
Once more, revolution appeared here as little more than the conquest of political power and the establishment of an authoritarian state. What was to be done with power, once gained, did not necessarily fall under the definition of a revolution. Most revolutions have ended, even if only temporarily, in the dictatorship of one man; but none apart from the Nazi revolution has actually been launched with this explicitly in mind. Even the Bolshevik Revolution was meant to put in place a collective dictatorship of the proletariat, led by its political vanguard, until Stalin came along.147
Nazism offered a synthesis of the revolutionary and the restorative. A complete overthrow of the social system, such as was preached in Paris in 1789 or Petrograd in October 1917, was not what the Nazis had in mind. At the heart of the system that the Nazis created lay something else. For all their aggressively egalitarian rhetoric, the Nazis were relatively indifferent, in the end, to the inequalities of society. What mattered to them above all else was race, culture and ideology. In the coming years, they would create a whole new set of institutions through which they would seek to remould the German psyche and rebuild the German character. After the purges of artistic and cultural life were complete, it was time for those German writers, musicians and intellectuals who remained to lend their talents with enthusiasm to the creation of a new German culture. The Christianity of the established Churches, so far (for reasons of political expediency) relatively immune from the hostile attentions of the Nazis, would not be protected for much longer. Now the Nazis would set about constructing a racial utopia, in which a pure-bred nation of heroes would prepare as rapidly and as thoroughly as possible for the ultimate test of German racial superiority: a war in which they would crush and destroy their enemies, and establish a new European order that would eventually come to dominate the world. By the summer of 1933 the ground had been cleared for the construction of a dictatorship the like of which had never yet been seen. The Third Reich was born: in the next phase of its existence, it was to rush headlong into a dynamic and increasingly intolerant maturity.
Notes
Preface
1 Michael Ruck, Bibliographie zum Nationalsozialismus (2 vols., Darmstadt, 2000 [1995])
2 Norbert Frei, National Socialist Rule in Germany: The Führer State 1933-1945 (Oxford, 1993 [1987]); Ludolf Herbst, Das nationalsozialistische Deutschland 1933-1945 (Frankfurt am Main, 1996). Among many other shorter accounts, Hans-Ulrich Thamer, Verführung und Gewalt: Deutschland 1933-1945 (Berlin, 1986) is a smooth synthesis; Jost Dülffer, Nazi Germany 1933-1945: Faith and Annihilation (London, 1996 [1992]), and Bernd-Jürgen Wendt, Deutschland 1933-1945: Das Dritte Reich. Handbuch zur Geschichte (Hanover, 1995) are useful, crisp introductions.
3 Detlev J. K. Peukert, Volksgenossen und Gemeinschaftsfremde - Anpassung, Ausmerze, Aufbegehren unter dem Nationalsozialismus (Cologne, 1982); English edn., Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity, Opposition and Racism in Everyday Life (London, 1989).
4 Jeremy Noakes and Geoffrey Pridham (eds.), Nazism 1919-1945 (4 vols., Exeter, 1983-98 [1974]).
5 William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (New York, 1960); Klaus Epstein’s review is in Review of Politics, 23 (1961), 130-45.
6 Karl Dietrich Bracher, The German Dictatorship: The Origins, Structure, and Consequences of National Socialism (New York, 1970 [1969]).
7 Ian Kershaw, Hitler, I: 1889-1936: Hubris (London, 1998); idem, Hitler, II: 1936-1945: Nemesis (London, 2000).
8 Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich: A New History (London, 2000).
9 I am thinking here of works like Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891-1924 (London, 1996), or Margaret Macmillan, Peacemakers: The Paris Conference of 1919 and its Attempt to End War (London, 2001).
10 Starting with Martin Broszat’s Der Staat Hitlers: Grundlegung und Entwicklung seiner inneren Verfassung (Munich, 1969), another book which bears repeated rereading, and represented above all by Hans Mommsen’s brilliant essays, collected in his Der Nationalsozialismus und die deutsche Gesellschaft: Ausgewählte Aufsätze (Reinbek, 1991) and From Weimar to Auschwitz: Essays in German History (Princeton, 1991).
11 This follows and carries further the technique already used in my earlier books Death in Hamburg: Society and Politics in the Cholera Years 1830-1910 (Oxford, 1987) and Rituals of Retribution: Capital Punishment in Germany 1600-1987 (Oxford, 1996).
12 Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), in Lewis Feuer (ed.), Marx and Engels: Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy (New York, 1959), 360.
13 L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between (London, 1953), preface.
14 See Richard J. Evans, ‘History, Memory, and the Law: The Historian as Expert Witness’, History and Theory, 41 (2002) 277-96; and Henry Rousso, The Haunting Past: History, Memory, and Justice in Contemporary France (Philadelphia, 2002 [1998]).
15 Ian Kershaw, Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich: Bavaria 1933-1945 (Oxford, 1983), vii.
16 Konrad Heiden, Geschichte des Nationalsozialismus: Die Karriere einer Idee (Berlin, 1932); idem, Adolf Hitler: Das Zeitalter der Verantwortungslosigkeit. Eine Biographie (Zurich, 1936); Ernst Fraenkel, The Dual State (New York, 1941); Franz Neumann, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism (New York, 1942).
17 Friedrich Meinecke, Die deutsche Katastrophe (Wiesbaden, 1946), available in a comically literal English translation by Sidney B. Fay, The German Catastrophe: Reflections and Recollections (Cambridge, Mass., 1950). For a highly critical discussion, see Imanuel Geiss,‘Kritischer Rückblick auf Friedrich Meinecke’, in idem, Studien über Geschichte und Geschichtswissenschaft (Frankfurt am Main, 1972), 89-107. For a defence, see Wolfgang Wippermann, ‘Friedrich Meineckes “Die deutsche Katastrophe”: Ein versuch zur deutschen Vergangenheitsbewaltigung‘, in Michael Erbe (ed. Friedrich Meinecke heute: Bericht über ein Gedenk-Colloquium zuseinem 25. Todestag am 5. und 6. April 1979 (Berlin, 1981), 101-21.
18 Thus the catalogue of questions posed at the outset of Karl Dietrich Bracher’s classic Stufen der Machtergreifung, volume I of Karl Dietrich Bracher et al., Die nationalsozialistische Machtergreifung: Studien zur Errichtung des totalitdren Herrschaftssystems in Deutschland 1933/34 (Frankfurt am Main, 1974 [1960]), 17- 18.
19 Among many good discussions of the historiography of Nazism and the Third Reich, see especially the brief survey by Jane Caplan, ‘The Historiography of National Socialism‘, in Michael Bentley (ed.), Companion to Historiography (London, 1997), 545-90, and the longer study by Ian Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation (4th edn., London, 2000 [1985]).
20 Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (London, 1998).
21 For a good survey of Marxist interpretations, placed in their contemporary political context, see Pierre Ayçoberry, The Nazi Question: An Essay on the Interpretations of National Socialism (1922-1975) (New York, 1981 [1979]).
22 For East German work, see the discussion in Andreas Dorpalen, German History in Marxist Perspective: The East German Approach (Detroit, 1988). There is a representative selection, with a judicious commentary, in Georg G. Iggers (ed.), Marxist Historiography in Transformation: New Orientations in Recent East German History (Oxford, 1992). One of the finest and subtlest of Marxist historians of the Third Reich was Tim Mason: see in particular his Nazism, Fascism and the Working Class : Essays by Tim Mason (ed. Jane Caplan, Cambridge, 1995) and Social Policy in the Third Reich: The Working Class and the ‘National Community’ (ed. Jane Caplan, Providence, RI, 1993 [1977]).
23 Shirer, The Rise and Fall; Alan J. P. Taylor, The Course of German History (London, 1945); Edmond Vermeil, Germany in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1956).
24 Ayçoberry, The Nazi Question, 3-15.
25 Rohan d‘Olier Butler, The Roots of National Socialism 1783-1933 (London, 1941), is the classic example of such wartime propaganda; another was Fossey J. C. Hearnshaw, Germany the Aggressor throughout the Ages (London, 1940). For an intelligent contemporary response, see Harold Laski, The Germans - are they Human? (London, 1941).
26 For a general discussion of these issues, see Richard J. Evans, Rethinking German History: Nineteenth-Century Germany and the Origins of the Third Reich (London, 1987), esp. 1-54. There is an excellent brief collection of documents, with commentary, in John C. G. Rohl (ed.), From Bismarck to Hitler: The Problem of Continuity in German History (London, 1970). When I was an undergraduate, I was introduced to these controversies by the handy compendium of excerpts in John L. Snell (ed.), The Nazi Revolution - Germany’s Guilt or Germany’s Fate? (Boston, 1959).
27 This applies even to the relatively sophisticated writings of Germans exiled by the Third Reich, such as Hans Kohn, especially The Mind of Germany: The Education of a Nation (London, 1961), and Peter Viereck, Metapolitics: From the Romantics to Hitler (New York, 1941).
28 Keith Bullivant, ‘Thomas Mann and Politics in the Weimar Republic’, in idem (ed.), Culture and Society in the Weimar Republic (Manchester, 1977), 14-38; Taylor, The Course, 92-3.
29 Gerhard Ritter, ’The Historical Foundations of the Rise of National-Socialism‘, in Maurice Beaumont et al., The Third Reich: A Study Published under the Auspices of the International Council for Philosophy and Humanistic Studies with the Assistance of UNESCO (New York, 1955), 381-416; idem, Europa und die deutsche Frage: Betrachtungen über die geschichtliche Eigenart des deutschen Staatsgedankens (Munich, 1948); Christoph Cornelissen, Gerhard Ritter: Geschichtswissenschaft und Politik im 20. Jahrhundert (Düsseldorf, 2001); Ritter’s arguments can be dated back to 1937, when they were framed in rather less negative terms (ibid., 524-30). For a variety of other views, see Hans Kohn (ed.), German History: Some New German Views (Boston, 1954). An early, but only partially successful attempt by a German historian to break the mould was Ludwig Dehio, Germany and World Politics (London, 19 5 [1955]), which still emphasized the primacy of international factors.
30 See, among many other treatments of the topic, Karl Dietrich Bracher, Die totalitäre Erfahrung (Munich, 1987) and Leonard Shapiro, Totalitarianism (London, 1972). The classic, much-criticized exposition of the basic theory is by Carl J. Friedrich and Zbigniew K. Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (New York, 1963), the pioneering philosophical text by Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York, 1958).
31 Eckard Jesse (ed.), Totalitarismus im 20. Jahrhundert (Baden-Baden, 1996) and Alfons Söllner (ed.), Totalitarismus: Eine Ideengeschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts (Berlin, 1997).
32 See in particular the fruitful comparisons in IanKershaw and Moshe Lewin (eds.), Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison (Cambridge, 1997), and the useful and well-informed discussion in Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship, 20-46.
