Anthony McElligott, 'Rethinking the Weimar Republic'

Offprint from German Historical Institute London Bulletin Review by Alex Burkhardt of Anthony McElligott, Rethinking the Weimar Republic: Authority and Authoritarianism, 1916–1936 German Historical Institute London Bulletin Vol. XXXVIII, No. 1 (May 2016), 67–71 ISSN 0269-8552 ANTHONY MCELLIGOTT, Rethinking the Weimar Republic: Authority and Authoritarianism, 1916–1936 (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 384 pp. ISBN 978 1 84966 472 1. £70.00 In the half century after 1945, the Weimar Republic was frequently depicted as an unloved, if culturally progressive, experiment in democracy, and one that was unlikely to survive in the long run. Since the turn of the millennium, however, historians have tried to escape this ‘glitter and doom’ paradigm to present Weimar as something other than a mere prelude to the horrors of the Third Reich. They have placed a heavier emphasis on the role of contingency in the Republic’s demise,1 pointed to its achievements in building an authentically democratic civic culture,2 and questioned the notion that 1920s Germany was pervaded by a sense of impending disaster.3 Locating Anthony McElligott’s book in this ‘new orthodoxy’ is no easy task. On the one hand, there is much here about the Republic’s success in establishing and legitimizing itself among the broad mass of the German population. But on the other hand, McElligott continuously brings attention to those authoritarian continuities that linked Weimar with the Third Reich, and he maintains throughout that the Republic was bedevilled by a fundamental and dangerous crisis of legitimacy. Indeed, this crisis is the focal point of the entire book— each chapter is organized around the central question of ‘authority’ and where it truly lay in Weimar Germany, a question which ‘remained unresolved throughout the 1920s’ and was the basic problem at the heart of the Republican project (p. 7). The focus on contested authority is reflected in the timespan that the book covers. Rather than beginning with the war’s end in 1918 1 Rüdiger Graf, Die Zukunft der Weimarer Republik: Krisen und Zukunftsaneignungen in Deutschland 1918–1933 (Munich, 2008) <http://sub-hh.ciando.com/book/?bok_id=17869>, accessed 3 Oct. 2013. 2 Manuela Achilles, ‘With a Passion for Reason: Celebrating the Constitution in Weimar Germany’, Central European History, 43 (2010), 666–89 <http:// dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0008938910000750>, accessed 29 Oct. 2015. 3 Moritz Föllmer, Rüdiger Graf, and Per Leo, ‘Einleitung: Die Kultur der Krise in der Weimarer Republik’, in Föllmer and Graf (eds.), Die ‘Krise’ der Weimarer Republik: Zur Kritik eines Deutungsmusters (Frankfurt am Main, 2005). 67 BOOK REVIEWS and finishing with Hitler’s accession to the chancellorship in 1933, as do most conventional accounts, McElligott maintains that we must begin in 1916 and end in 1936, because it was during this twenty-year period that the question of who really held power in Germany remained unanswered and, at times, was violently contested. McElligott convincingly argues that this dynamic of uncertain and splintered authority was unleashed in 1916 by two developments which first compromised the Kaiser’s pre-eminence: Hindenburg and Ludendorff’s assumption of dictatorial powers; and growing social unrest and calls for constitutional reform within the Reichstag. However, the reason for choosing 1936 as the year in which this dynamic of contested authority was finally resolved is less clear and is, in fact, rather briefly addressed. McElligott suggests that only with the 1936 plebiscite in the wake of the remilitarization of the Rhineland was Hitler’s ‘unbounded authority’ unambiguously recognized by the population of the entire Reich, but this (highly debatable) argument is not developed much beyond a few fleeting paragraphs. The book treats the central theme of ‘contested authority’ in seven chapters, the first and last of which are chronological and deal with the Republic’s beginning and end respectively, with the remaining five organized thematically. They focus in turn on foreign policy, the economy, the judiciary, culture, and the civil service. In each chapter, McElligott uses a consistent formula, first presenting the reader with the ‘standard narrative’ on whatever issue is about to be dealt with— that the judiciary, for example, was implacably opposed to the Republic—before challenging it, or at least drawing out some of its underlying complexities. For the most part, this approach works well, especially where some of the striking continuities that linked the Republic with the Third Reich are identified. In chapter 3, which examines Weimar foreign policy, McElligott convincingly argues that German domination of central and eastern Europe was on the agenda long before the Nazis came to power. But whereas Stresemann had pursued this goal cautiously and peacefully, his successors (including, but not only, Hitler) ‘threw caution to the wind’ (p. 66), becoming increasingly aggressive and impatient in their striving for hegemony in the east. Chapter 6, which deals with Weimar’s ‘cultural authority’, calls into question the classic portrayal of the Republic as a progressive staging ground for avant-garde artistic experimentation that was brought to 68 RETHINKING THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC an abrupt end in 1933.4 Instead, McElligott emphasizes how stringent some of the censorship laws passed by Republican governments were, as well as the illiberal character of much of the Weimar state’s pedagogical self-presentation. Focusing on competing visions of politics during the Weimar period, the author shows in chapter 8 that the seeds of Hitler’s untrammelled authority after 1933 had already been built into the Weimar Constitution, which tried to marry elements of parliamentary democracy with more authoritarian ideas of plebiscitary, presidential rule. But perhaps the most successful example of ‘rethinking’ in this book is chapter 7, which deals with the provincial councils and bureaucracies that effectively ran much of Germany. These institutions have frequently been depicted as, at best, lukewarm in their support for the Republic and, at worst, as conservative and reactionary outfits that did all they could to sabotage democracy from within. But McElligott shows that the pro-Republican political parties were remarkably successful at packing the German bureaucracy with their own supporters, despite some colourful examples of obstructionism from redoubtable monarchist civil servants such as Herbert von Bismarck (whose office continued to send out letters bearing the Imperial stamp throughout the 1920s). There are other chapters where the attempt to ‘rethink’ historiographical orthodoxy is a little far-fetched, however. In chapter 5, which focuses on the ‘authority of law’, McElligott initially resolves to challenge the traditional thesis that the legal profession remained a bastion of authoritarian, conservative nationalism and bitterly opposed to the Republic throughout its lifespan. But much of what follows tends to confirm precisely this conventional narrative, though McElligott does succeed in laying bare some of the fluctuations in the severity of sentencing throughout the 1920s. In fact, the most interesting aspect of this chapter is yet again McElligott’s unearthing of a striking historical continuity: ‘special courts’, set up during the First World War to try dissenters for undermining German morale, continued to be used extensively in the first years of the 4 This portrayal of Weimar culture is most commonly associated with two classic studies: Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (New York, 2001); and Walter Laqueur, Weimar: A Cultural History, 1918–1933 (1st American edn. New York, 1974). 69 BOOK REVIEWS Republic, when revolutionary unrest was widespread, and were introduced again in order to quell political radicalism in Weimar’s twilight phase after 1929. Remarkable, too, is that some of these ‘special courts’ remained operational and were used, to devastating effect, in the early years of Hitler’s dictatorship. This singular organ of juridical authoritarianism thus connected the legal culture of the Kaiserreich with that of the Third Reich. There are other instances where the opportunity to ‘rethink’ the Weimar Republic is surprisingly passed up. Chapter 4, which deals with ‘the authority of money’, includes a short section on the crucial question of who voted for Hitler, which largely amounts to a restatement of the traditional and long discredited thesis that the Nazi party was a movement of the disgruntled middle classes. But the last few decades of scholarship have shown how successful Hitler was at winning support from a remarkable cross section of German society, including among workers and even defectors from the Social Democrats. There is little mention of this, despite the works of Jürgen Falter and Conan Fischer appearing in the bibliography. Nor does McElligott adequately engage with the thesis, advanced by Peter Fritzsche and others,5 that Nazi successes after 1929 were less a shortterm result of the Depression than the manifestation of a long-term process of mobilization within a largely Protestant, rural, and small town nationalist subculture that was visible by the mid 1920s at the latest. None of this is to detract from the exceptionally thought-provoking nature of McElligott’s contribution. All of the chapters are packed with provocative insights, for example, that the sudden explosion of the Nazi vote after 1929 was at least partly caused by a wave of nationalist euphoria triggered by the final withdrawal of French troops from the Rhineland. The central idea at the heart of the book— that the Weimar Republic’s instability was ultimately the result of its imperfect and contested claim to ‘authority’ over the German body politic—is also useful and illuminating. Finally, McElligott’s incisive unpacking of many of the authoritarian continuities that linked the Weimar period with Nazi Germany, especially those inherent in the 5 Peter Fritzsche, Rehearsals for Fascism: Populism and Political Mobilization in Weimar Germany (New York, 1990); Rudy Koshar, Social Life, Local Politics, and Nazism: Marburg, 1880–1935 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1986). 70 RETHINKING THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC constitution and legal system, is a significant service to scholars of the period. Undergraduates and specialists alike will profit from reading this book. ALEX BURKHARDT is working on a Ph.D. thesis entitled ‘Democrats into Nazis? The Radicalisation of the Bürgertum in Hof-an-der-Saale, 1918–1924’ at the University of St Andrews. 71