Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- PART ONE ELECTORAL POLITICS IN AN AUTHORITARIAN REGIME
- PART TWO GENDER, IDENTITY, AND POLITICAL PARTICIPATION
- PART THREE LOCAL DIMENSIONS OF POLITICAL CULTURE
- 9 Democracy or Reaction? The Political Implications of Localist Ideas in Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany
- 10 Communist Music in the Streets
- 11 Weimar Populism and National Socialism in Local Perspective
- 12 Political Mobilization and Associational Life
- PART FOUR THE NATIONAL PERSPECTIVE CONTINUITIES AND DISCONTINUITIES
- Index
11 - Weimar Populism and National Socialism in Local Perspective
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 January 2013
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- PART ONE ELECTORAL POLITICS IN AN AUTHORITARIAN REGIME
- PART TWO GENDER, IDENTITY, AND POLITICAL PARTICIPATION
- PART THREE LOCAL DIMENSIONS OF POLITICAL CULTURE
- 9 Democracy or Reaction? The Political Implications of Localist Ideas in Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany
- 10 Communist Music in the Streets
- 11 Weimar Populism and National Socialism in Local Perspective
- 12 Political Mobilization and Associational Life
- PART FOUR THE NATIONAL PERSPECTIVE CONTINUITIES AND DISCONTINUITIES
- Index
Summary
Historians agree that National Socialism should not be regarded as an unfortunate accident, or Betriebsunfall, marring German history but troubling the sweep of German tradition only very little. It is misguided to understand the Nazis in terms of accidents or emergencies. Yet metaphors and images that draw attention to the chaos and breakability of Weimar continue to circulate widely. These seem to be indispensable components of an explanation of 1933. The mind's eye of the historian imagines economic crisis and political extremism pushing burghers farther and farther to the political periphery until they hit Nazism. Hans Fallada's Little Man, What Now? (1931), the chronicle of one young German who becomes a social castaway in Depression-era Berlin, is only the most literary example of this dominant historiographical trope.
Demolition is the most useful and orthodox strategy used to narrate twentieth-century German history. To get to Nazism, historians usually wreck all sorts of things in the 1920s: They undermine cherished assumptions about national identity, upend long-standing political loyalties to liberal and conservative parties, and destroy worlds of economic security and social intimacy.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Elections, Mass Politics and Social Change in Modern GermanyNew Perspectives, pp. 287 - 306Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1992