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Introduction
Setting the Context
Germany’s defeat in World War I, the collapse of the Hohenzollern monarchy, and the founding of the Weimar Republic marked the beginning of a dramatic new phase in the history of the German Right. The question that faced the leaders of Germany’s conservative establishment as they reacted to the trau-matic events of 1918–19 was whether they would be able to adapt to the revolutionary changes that had taken place in the structure of German polit-ical life or whether they would retreat to the entrenched positions they had held in the last years of the Second Empire. The possibilities that faced Germany’s conservative leadership were open, and it was by no means certain–and certainly not in 1918–19–which of these two paths would be taken. Yet despite promising signs from within Germany’s conservative estab-lishment that something new might emerge from the ruins of the old order, the leaders of the German Right would consistently opt for policies over the course of the next decade that denied rather than affirmed the possibility of a democratic future. The reasons for this are indeed complex and resist reduc-tion to a common denominator such as the weight of historical tradireduc-tion, the force of German nationalism, the fear of Bolshevism, or the anti-liberal animus of Germany’s conservative elites. All of these factors–and others as well–were involved, though in differing degrees at different points in time. As this would suggest, the responses to the question posed above even within the German Right were extremely varied, just as the players who were involved in crafting those responses were diverse and represented divergent, if not contra-dictory, interests. By no means, however, was the way in which all of this was eventually resolved somehowfixed or pre-determined. In other words, it was the specific actions of specific individuals or groups of individuals at specific points in time that shaped the course of events that ultimately determined the fate of Germany’s experiment in democracy.1
1
Larry Eugene Jones, “Why Hitler Came to Power: In Defense of a New History of Politics,” inGeschichtswissenschaft vor 2000. Perspektiven der Historiographiegeschichte, Geschichtstheorie, Sozial- und Kulturgeschichte. Festschrift für Georg G. Iggers zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Konrad H. Jarausch, Jörn Rüsen and Hans Schleier (Hagen, 1991), 256–76. In a similar vein, though from a different conceputal perspective, see Geoff Eley,Nazism as
The consequences of what happened on the German Right were indeed enormous. Recent scholarship has suggested that an essential precondition for the smooth transition from authoritarian to democratic government was the existence of a strong, resilient party on the Right that was committed to pursuing its objectives within the framework of the new democratic system. A case in point, as Daniel Ziblatt argues in his recent book on Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy, is the Conservative Party in Great Britain, a party that adapted itself to the exigencies of democratic politics and that by the end of the nineteenth century had evolved into a bulwark of British democracy. The absence of such a party, Ziblatt goes on to argue, severely undermined efforts to establish a viable democratic order and greatly enhanced the likelihood of a return to authoritarian rule in one form or another, often in a form that was more authoritarian and more brutal in its opposition to the forces of democratic change than the one it had replaced. The perfect counterpoint is the case of Germany before 1933, where forces on the Right never succeeded in achieving the degree of political cohesiveness that would have enabled them to assume the mantle of their British counterpart.2 The disunity of the German Right was very much a defining feature of the German party system and the way it evolved in the Weimar Republic. The purpose of this study is to examine why a party like the Conservative Party in Great Britain never succeeded in establishing itself as a durable political force in pre-Nazi Germany. Political parties constituted a particularly important feature of Weimar’s political landscape. They were, after all, indispensable vehicles for the mediation of social, economic, and political power between the individual, his social class, and the state. At the same time, political parties objectified the basic values of the different“social-cultural milieu”that consti-tuted Germany’s political culture. In this respect, political parties not only represented the material interests of specific sectors of German society but also helped articulate the subjective images of the world – or what Max Weber calledWeltbilder–by which the different segments of the German population came to understand their role in Germany’s political system. As Weber wrote in the introduction to his comparative study on the economic ethic of world religions: “Not ideas but material and ideal interests directly govern men’s conduct. Yet very frequently the ‘world images’ that have been created by ‘ideas’ have, like switchmen, determined the tracks along which action has been pushed by the dynamic of interest.”3
Fascism: Violence, Ideology, and the Ground of Consent in Germany, 1930–1945(London and New York, 2013), 13–22.
2
Daniel Ziblatt,Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy(Cambridge, 2017), 1–21. 3
Max Weber,“The Social Psychology of the World Religions,”inFrom Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills (Oxford, 1948), 268.
In his classic formulation of this argument, the German sociologist M. Rainer Lepsius attributed the remarkable stability of the German party system from the founding of the Second Empire in 1871 to the outbreak of the Great Depression at the end of the 1920s to the fact that during this period Germany’s political parties functioned as the political“action committees”of four relatively homogeneous, yet structurally complex, political subcultures, or what Lepsius chose to call“social-moral milieus.”4 The strength of Lepsius’s approach is that it employs both social and cultural criteria to understand the relationship between Germany’s political parties and the different subcultures they represented. This is particularly useful in the case of the German Center Party (Deutsche Zentrumspartei), which had served as the political represen-tative of Germany’s sociologically diverse Catholic population since its founding in 1871. Germany’s Protestant population, on the other hand, was split into two distinct subcultures, one feudal, rural, and conservative and the other bourgeois, urban, and liberal. The German working class, with its plethora of political, economic, and cultural organizations, constituted the fourth andfinal subculture upon which the German party system rested.5
According to Lepsius, the net effect of this situation was to create a political culture in which the various German parties were concerned more with defending the material and cultural assets of the specific subcultures with which they were identified than with effecting their integration into a national political culture.6While this state of affairs may have inhibited the emergence of a homogeneous political culture similar to those that developed in France, Great Britain, or the United States, it nevertheless produced a remarkably high degree of politicization on the part of the Wilhelmine electorate. By the outbreak of World War I, Germany had developed an electoral system in which voters took their right to vote seriously and, in the case of an over-whelming majority of all German voters, exercised that right as a politically meaningful act by which they affirmed their loyalties to the respective subcul-ture to which they belonged. Even if electoral outcomes had little effect upon the personnel or policies of those in control of the existing political system, the cleavages between Germany’s different subcultures endowed the right to vote with a significance that was more than purely symbolic. This was no less true of conservatives from east of the Elbe River than it was of Catholics or 4
M. Rainer Lepsius,“Parteiensystem und Sozialstruktur: zum Problem der Demokratisie-rung der deutschen Gesellschaft,” in Wirtschaft, Geschichte und Wirtschaftsgeschichte. Festschrift zum 65. Geburtstag von Friedrich Lütge, ed. Wilhelm Abel, Knut Borchardt, Hermann Kellerbenz, and Wolfgang Zorn (Stuttgart, 1956), 382. See also Wolfram Pyta,
Dorfgemeinschaft und Parteipolitik 1918–1933. Die Verschränkung von Milieu und Par-teien in den protestantischen Landgebieten Deutschlands in der Weimarer Republik
(Düsseldorf, 1996). 5
Lepsius,“Parteiensystem und Sozialstruktur,”383–92. 6
Ibid., 383.
workers. Even though German conservatives may have had profound reserva-tions about the legitimacy of representative institureserva-tions, they nevertheless came to use the ballot not only to defend their vested class interests against the incursion of commercial and industrial capitalism but also to affirm the specific cultural and religious values that were inseparably intertwined with the Prussian way of life.7
Much of the following study focuses on the history of the German National People’s Party (Deutschnationale Volkspartei or DNVP), a party that was firmly anchored in Germany’s predominantly Protestant national-conservative milieu and that served as its primary political representative from the time of its founding in late 1918 through the end of the Weimar Republic. Though still mostly rural, this milieu was no longer as homogeneous as it had been at the beginning of the nineteenth century and had undergone considerable diversification in the preceding half-century. This study is not a conventional party history of the DNVP but seeks to examine the party’s development from 1918 to 1930 against the background of what was happening to the larger milieu of which it was a part. In this respect, this project draws not just upon the theoretical insights of Lepsius but upon the more historically rooted applications of the milieu thesis in the works of Karl Rohe, Frank Bösch, and Helga Matthiesen, the last two of which deal specifi c-ally with the national-conservative milieu that is the primary focus of this project.8 A specific goal of this undertaking is to situate the DNVP in the milieu with which it was identified even as that milieu was undergoing a series of dramatic changes in the wake of economic and political modernization. To do this, it will be necessary to place the development of the DNVP in the broader context of its relationships with the various interest groups that constituted the material base of Germany’s national-conservative milieu with specific attention devoted to the tensions this produced at various levels of the party organization. This, in turn, will entail a careful study of the aspirations of organized economic interests and how they sought to promote those interests not just within the DNVP but within the German party system as a whole. It will also focus on how the Stahlhelm, the Pan-German League (Alldeutscher
7 Stanley Suval,Electoral Politics in Wilhelmine Germany(Chapel Hill, NC, 1985), 55–63, 97–106. See also Gerhard A. Ritter,“The Social Bases of the German Political Parties, 1867–1920,”inElections, Parties, and Political Traditions: Social Foundations of German Parties and Party Systems, 1867–1987, ed. Karl Rohe (Oxford, 1990), 27–52.
8
For a reassessment of the Lepsius thesis, see Karl Rohe,“German Elections and Party Systems in Historical and Regional Perspective: An Introduction,”inElections, Parties, and Political Traditions, ed. Rohe, 1–26, as well as the more specialized applications of the milieu thesis by Frank Bösch,Das konservative Milieu. Vereinskultur und lokale Samm-lungspolitik in ost- und westdeutschen Regionen (1900–1960)(Göttingen, 2002), and Helge Matthiesen,Greifswald in Vorpommern. Konservative Milieu im Kaiserreich, in Demokra-tie und Diktatur 1900–1930(Düsseldorf, 2000), esp. 75–301.
Verband or ADV), and the various groups that comprised Germany’s patriotic Right resisted efforts to use the DNVP as the vehicle for the representation of organized economic interests and how they struggled to reassert the primacy of the national moment in German political life over the purely economic. With the increasing fragmentation of Germany’s bourgeois party system in the second half of the 1920s and early 1930s, the focus of the manuscript is broadened to include a detailed analysis of those parties that broke away from the DNVP in an attempt to establish themselves as independent forces on the German Right. The political fragmentation of Germany’s bourgeois Right posed a particular challenge to the patriotic Right and its struggle to salvage the national movement from descent into the morass of interest politics, most notably in the 1929 crusade against the Young Plan.
The underlying question is, as Thomas Mergel defined it in a widely cited article in theHistorische Zeitschrift, how and why did the DNVP not evolve into a German version of British Tory democracy, that is, as a state-supporting conservative party committed to pursuing its objectives within the framework of Germany’s republican system of government.9 Mergel’s answer to this question, however, was too narrowly focused on the years from 1928 to 1930 to provide an altogether satisfying answer to the question he had posed. In fact, what happened between 1928 and 1930 was not, as Mergel would have us believe, so much a turning point, a path not taken, as the logical conse-quence of what had already happened, of other paths not taken, in the earlier history of the party. The purpose of this study will be to place the events of 1928 to 1930 in a broader historical perspective by identifying earlier points in the history of the DNVP–for example, in the struggle over the party program in April 1920, the racist crisis of 1922, the split over the Dawes Plan in 1924, the Locarno conflict of 1925, and the DNVP’s difficulties as a member of the fourth Marx cabinet in 1927–28–when the DNVP missed the opportunity to redefine itself in a way that might have contributed to the stabilization of the Weimar system. At the same time, Mergel runs the risk of overestimating the actual potential of the DNVP to develop into a moderate state-supporting conservative party along the lines of the Conservative Party in Great Britian. As Manfred Kittel reminds us in a sharp critique of Mergel’s thesis, party leaders often found their hands tied by the strong anti-system sentiment that existed in broad sectors of the DNVP’s popular base, a sentiment that could be easily mobilized by those on the party’s right wing who adamantly opposed any sort of accommodation with the hated Weimar system.10One could argue
9
Thomas Mergel,“Das Scheitern des deutschen Tory-Konservatismus. Die Umformung der DNVP zu einer rechtsradikalen Partei 1928–1932,”Historische Zeitschrift276 (2003): 323–68.
10
Manfred Kittel,“‘Steigbügelhalter’Hitlers oder‘stille Republikaner’? Die Deutschnatio-nalen in neuer politikgeschichtlicher und kulturalistischer Perspektive,”inGeschichte der
that the prospects of a development such as that envisaged by Mergel would have become even more difficult with the economic collapse of the late 1920s. A somewhat more skeptical assessment of the DNVP’s political prospects is to be found in Maik Ohnezeit’s monograph on the party’s development from its founding in the last months of 1918 to Alfred Hugenberg’s election to the DNVP party chairmanship in October 1928.11This work is based on extensive research in the surviving party records and the private papers of Count Kuno von Westarp, who served as chairman of the DNVP Reichstag delegation from 1924 to 1928 and as the party’s national chairman from 1926 to 1928. It contains a wealth of information on the party’s organizational structure and on the decision-making process within the party as a whole. Moreover, Ohnezeit is particularly sensitive to thefissures within the party’s social base and the effect these had upon the DNVP’s ability to articulate a coherent vision and to pursue a clear and consistent course of action. Yet for all its many virtues, Ohnezeit’s study of the DNVP is deficient in several key respects. Most importantly, it does not situate the DNVP’s political fortunes during the period under investigation in the general framework of German social and economic development over the same period of time. Similarly, Ohnezeit devotes insufficient attention to special-interest organizations like the National Federation of German Industry (Reichsverband der deutschen Industrie or RDI) and the National Rural League (Reichs-Landbund or RLB) and patriotic associations like the Stahlhelm and Pan-German League (All-deutscher Verband or ADV) and the demands they placed upon the DNVP’s national leadership. It is important, therefore, to view the DNVP’s history in the Weimar Republic not just in its own terms but as part of the larger German Right to which it belonged. Third, Ohnezeit’s study is essentially a study of the DNVP from the perspective of Berlin and does not adequately address the enormous regional diversity that existed throughout the party organization. A member of the DNVP in Bavaria, for example, had interests and concerns different from those of his counterpart in Württemberg, and both viewed party affairs through a lens that was substantially different from that of their party colleagues in East Prussia or Mecklenburg. Here too it is necessary to broaden the focus that Ohnezeit brings to bear upon the DNVP and its place in the politics of the Weimar Republic.
The development of the German Right in the Weimar Republic was pro-foundly affected by the general course of German social and economic devel-opment. One of the major objectives of this study will be to explore the impact
Politik. Alte und neue Wege, ed. Hans-Christof Kraus and Thomas Nicklas, Historische Zeitschrift, Beiheft 44 (Munich, 2007), 201–35.
11
Maik Ohnezeit,Zwischen “schärfster Opposition” und dem “Willen zur Macht.” Die Deutschnationale Volkspartei (DNVP) in der Weimarer Republik 1918–1928(Düsseldorf, 2011).
of developments in the economy of the Weimar Republic on the DNVP and the interest groups that constituted its material base. The Weimar economy passed through three distinct phases, each with profound implications for the social and economic constituencies that formed the backbone of the DNVP’s electorate.12 Although the runaway inflation of the early 1920s helped keep employment levels high and thus helped hold the radicalization of the German working class in check, it wreaked havoc on the urban middle classes and those sectors of society whose wealth was primarily in the form of paper mark assets. The DNVP was able to capitalize upon the distress that broad sectors of the German middle class experienced as a result of the great inflation, a factor that no doubt helped account for its dramatic victories in the May and December 1924 Reichstag elections. But the stabilization of the German currency at the end of 1923 and the return to normalcy from 1925 to 1929 were accompanied by a sharp increase in unemployment, the collapse of agricultural prices on the world market, and a revolt on the part of small investors who felt victimized by the government’s failure to embrace a full and equitable revaluation of the losses they had suffered during the great inflation. This coincided with the DNVP’s entry into the government in 1925 and 1927 and the emergence of special-interest parties that articulated their appeals for support in the language of economic self-interest. The heavy losses the DNVP suffered in the May 1928 Reichstag elections bore dramatic testimony to the success with which special-interest parties were able to mobilize the support of specific sectors of the Nationalist electorate. This, in turn, set the stage for a bitter leadership conflict that ended with the defeat of those who had been responsible for the DNVP’s two experiments at governmental participation and the triumph of those on the party’s extreme right wing who were irrecon-cilably opposed to any form of collaboration with the hated Weimar system.
The third phase in the economic history of the Weimar Republic began with the outbreak of the world economic crisis in the fall of 1929 and was marked by the end of effective parliamentary rule and the turn to government by presidential decree. In many respects, this represented the fulfillment of what the more moderate elements on the German Right had been hoping for ever since the founding of the Weimar Republic and created opportunities for the pursuit of a conservative agenda that had not existed since the end of the Second Empire. Moderate conservatives both within and outside the DNVP would rally behind the banner of Reich President Paul von Hindenburg and the experiment in government by presidential decree in the hope that this might allow them to reposition themselves as the driving force in German political life. All of this presented the DNVP with a series of challenges that
12
For an overview, see Harold James,“The Weimar Economy,”inWeimar Germany, ed. Anthony McElligott (Oxford, 2009), 102–26.
would ultimately determine whether it would evolve into the state-supporting conservative party that would play its role in the stabilization of Weimar democracy or remain steadfast in its implacable opposition to the hated Weimar system. Would the DNVP succeed in withstanding the forces of social and political disintegration that the world economic crisis had unleashed throughout the German nation? Would the moderates regain control of the DNVP, or would they be left with no alternative but to try to establish themselves as a viable force outside the orbit of the DNVP? Or would the DNVP somehow manage to reestablish itself as the basis upon which the various elements of a badly fragmented German polity reconstituted them-selves as an effective and viable political force? These were indeed critical questions, and the fate of the Weimar Republic would hang in the balance. No less critical was the way in which the DNVP and the forces of the German Right would react to the emergence of the NSDAP as a mass political move-ment toward the end of the 1920s. Would the DNVP be able to sustain itself as a viable political force in the face of challenge from a party that was more radical both in its recipe for a solution to various ills that bedeviled the German nation and in the methods by which it sought to translate that recipe into reality? Would a badly fragmented German nation discover in national-ism, anti-Marxnational-ism, antisemitnational-ism, or any combination thereof the ideological basis upon which it could reconstitute itself as the decisive force in German political life? And if so, would the NSDAP replace the DNVP as the party political basis upon which this would take place?13
The men who would face these challenges would, for the most part, have defined themselves as conservatives. But, as Oded Heilbronner argued in 2003 in a thought-provoking review of recent literature, the relationship between conservatism and the conservative German Right is problematic and defies any easy one-to-one correlation.14In fact, many of those who rose to leadership on the German Right both before and after World War I came not from conservative but from liberal backgrounds.15 The study of what conservatism meant in its German context is further complicated by the lack of a scholarly consensus over what the term conservatism actually means.16
13 In this respect, see Larry Eugene Jones,“Germany’s Conservative Elites and the Problem of Political Mobilization in the Weimar Republic,”in Transformations of Populism in Europe and the Americas: History and Recent Tendencies, ed. John Abromheit, Bridget Maria Chesterton, Gary Marotta, and York Norman (London, 2016), 32–48.
14
Oded Heilbronner,“The German Right: Has It Changed?”German History21 (2003): 541–61, here 542–46.
15
Geoff Eley,Reshaping the German Right: Radical Nationalism and Political Change after Bismarck(New Haven and London, 1980), 101–15.
16
Much of what follows identifies themes originally addressed in Larry Eugene Jones and James Retallack,“German Conservatism Reconsidered: Old Problems and New Direc-tions,”inBetween Reform and Reaction: Studies in the History of German Conservatism
Problems of definition stem in large measure from the fact that, unlike liberalism or socialism, conservatism did not originate as an ideology with a fully articulated concept of human nature, the state, and society, but as a reaction to the sudden and dramatic changes that began to transform the face of Europe in the second half of the eighteenth century. In terms of its basic ideological contours, conservatism rejected the liberal doctrine of natural rights in favor of an organic theory of the state and society that affirmed the priority of the general welfare of the whole over the private rights of the individual. In its critique of liberal theories of the state and society, German conservatism drew much of their inspiration from the writings of Edmund Burke and his rejection of the universalist principles that in his mind had led to the outbreak of the French Revolution.17In Germany, however, this was reinforced by two further tendencies that gave German conservatism its characteristic form. The first of these was a literary movement known as romanticism and the revolt against reason that had begun in France with the writings of Jean Jacques Rousseau but found many of its most ardent supporters in Germany. The romantics stressed the primacy of feeling and sentiment over reason and replaced the liberal theory of society and its emphasis upon the pursuit of private self-interest with the concept of an organic society in which the welfare of the whole assumed priority over the interests of any of its constituent parts.18 The second was the wave of nationalist indignation that swept much of Germany following Napoleon’s humiliation of Prussia in 1806–07 and that found expression in Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s famousAddresses to the German Nationfrom the winter of 1807–08.19 The symbiosis of German conservatism with romanticism and nationalism provided those who were committed to the preservation of existing social, economic, and political hierarchies with a coherent and emo-tionally compelling defense of tradition against the corrosive forces of the modern world.20
It would take the better part of the next forty years and the revolutionary upheaval of 1848–49 for those who subscribed to these principles to coalesce into political organizations of their own. In this respect, Sigmund Neumann
from 1789 to 1945, ed. Larry Eugene Jones and James N. Retallack (Providence, RI, and Oxford, 1993), 1–30, esp. 3–8.
17
On the German misreading of Burke, see Karl Mannheim,“Conservative Thought,”in
From Karl Mannheim, ed. and with an introduction by Kurt H. Wolff (New York, 1971), 132–222, esp. 140.
18
Ibid., 142–52. On Rousseau’s impact on German political thought, see David James,
Rousseau and German Idealism: Freedom, Dependence, and Necessity(Cambridge, 2013), 91–142.
19
Matthew Levinger, Enlightened Nationalism: The Transformation of Prussian Political Culture, 1806–1848(New York and Oxford, 2009), 97–99.
20
Mannheim,“Conservative Thought,”152–60.
distinguished between two antithetical strands within nineteenth-century German conservatism that he identified as“romantic”and“liberal” conserva-tism and that came together in the period after 1848 to produce a higher synthesis he labelled“realistic conservatism.”As representativefigures of these three stages in the development of German conservatism, Neumann selected the romantic conservatives Justus Möser and Ludwig von der Marwitz, the liberal conservatives Joseph Maria von Radowitz and Moritz August von Bethmann-Hollweg, and the realistic conservative Otto von Bismarck.21In a similar vein, Klaus Epstein in his seminal study of the genesis of German conservative thought from 1770 to 1806 not only stressed the historical specificity of German conservatism as a defense of theancient régimeagainst the universalist principles of the Enlightenment and French Revolution, but also offered a comprehensive definition of conservatism that embraced three distinct ideal types: status quo conservatism, reform conservatism, and reac-tionaries.22 The definition of conservative in the German context would become even more complicated with the emergence of“conservative revolu-tionaries” in the last decades of the nineteenth century. The conservative revolutionaries–epitomized by the likes of Paul de Lagarde, Julius Langbehn, and Arthur Moeller van den Bruck–rejected the ideologies of the nineteenth century, including conservatism itself, as moribund and sterile and evinced a deep-seated animosity to the various manifestations of cultural and political modernity. They espoused a particular hostility toward the materialism of the industrial age and called for the spiritual renewal of the German nation in apocalyptic tones that drew much of their inspiration from the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche. They were also quick to identify the Jew as one of the principal beneficiaries of the modern age and embraced a particularly virulent form of antisemitism that was gaining ever wider acceptance within Ger-many’s conservative establishment.23 Antisemitism was a well-established and highly recognizable component of right-wing ideology both before and after World War I.
For the most part, the conservative revolutionaries –or“young conserva-tives”as they preferred to call themselves in the Weimar Republic–remained on the fringes of German political life and exercised little in the way of direct influence on the politics of Germany’s conservative elites before World War I. While the study of their ideas is a valuable exercise in and of itself, it is more
21
Sigmund Neumann, Die Stufen des preußischen Konservativismus. Ein Beitrag zum Staats- und Gesellschaftsbild Deutschlands im 19. Jahrhundert(Berlin, 1930). See also Hans Jürgen Puhle,“Conservatism in Modern German History,”Journal of Contempor-ary History13 (1978): 689–720.
22
Klaus Epstein,The Genesis of German Conservatism(Princeton, NJ, 1966), 7–11. 23
See the classic study by Fritz Stern,The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology(Berkeley, CA, and Los Angeles, 1961).
