Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-rdxmf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T11:47:27.193Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Nazism: Highway or Byway?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2008

Leonard Krieger
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

For those of us who were raised politically on the vicarious experience of National Socialism, its graduation into an apparently successful and overpowering regime was a cataclysm of unparalleled proportions. The movement seemed an enormous, overbearing force whose source was beyond time and the changes associated with time. It appeared not so much to grow and develop as to manifest in apparently different, but internally affinitive, ways the relentlessly consistent potentialities which had ever been in it. Nazi opportunism was well known to us, of course, but it did not so much define the movement as express it, generalizing National Socialism and equipping it to act characteristically on all kinds of objects in all kinds of situations. Nazism, in short, was a massive central reality, sui generis. We were uneasy about Italian fascism, saddened by the Spanish version, regretful at the east European varieties, and divided both within and among ourselves vis-à-vis the instrumental similarities of the Soviet dictatorship. But Nazism was in a class by itself, at once invincibly individual and supremely representative, an inimitable compound of Germanism, fascism, and regressive autocracy that was reducible to none of these ingredients and yet intensified each of them to its ultimate power. Thus Nazism was connected to the past and contemporary worlds sufficiently to make its impact universal, but in these connections it was ever Nazism that was the senior partner: it was not German history or fascism or absolutist tradition that made Nazism relevant to us but the other way around. Nazism abolished the limitations of time and space for us: the clutches of atavism and the tentacles of technology alike could now reach to any individual anytime anywhere. It was at once fact and symbol. It marked both the climax of German history and the point at which, as the ultimate authoritarianism, this German finality met the destiny of humanity.

Type
Articles
Information
Central European History , Volume 11 , Issue 1 , March 1978 , pp. 3 - 22
Copyright
Copyright © Conference Group for Central European History of the American Historical Association 1978

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1. Taylor, A. J. P., The Origins of the Second World War (London, 1961);Google ScholarBarraclough, Geoffrey, New York Review of Books 19 (1972): 10. 19, pp. 37–43; Nov. 2, pp. 32–38; Nov. 16, pp. 25–36.Google Scholar

2. Allen, William S., The Nazi Seizure of Power: The Experience of a Single German Town, 1930–1935 (Chicago, 1965);Google ScholarPeterson, Edward N., The Limits of Hitler's Power (Princeton, 1969);Google ScholarDiehl-Thiele, Peter, Partei und Staat im Dritten Reich (Munich, 1969).Google Scholar

3. Peterson, op. cit.

4. For a moving revelation of this linkage in the passage of the Nazi experience from autobiography to history, see Stern, Fritz, The Failure of Illiberalism: Essays on the Political Culture of Modem Germany (New York, 1972), pp. xi–xv, xxxvi–xliv.Google Scholar

5. See Horn, Wolfgang, Führerideologie und Parteiorganisation in der NSDAP 1919–1933 (Düsseldorf, 1972),Google Scholar and Nyomarkay, Joseph, Charisma and Factionalism in the Nazi Party (Minneapolis, 1967).Google Scholar

6. Bracher, Karl Dietrich, The German Dictatorship: The Origins, Structure, and Effects of National Socialism (New York, 1970), p. 213; Diehl-Thiele, Partei und Staat, p. 14.Google Scholar

7. Ibid., passim; Orlow, Dietrich, History of the Nazi Party: 1933–1945 (Pittsburgh, 1973), passim.Google Scholar

8. For this absence of “progression” or “development” in Nazi culture, see Mosse, George L., Nazi Culture: Intellectual, Cultural, and Social Life in the Third Reich (New York, 1966), p. xxii.Google Scholar

9. E.g., Bracher, , The German Dictatorship, p. 288;Google Scholar Orlow, History of the Nazi Party: 1933–1945, pp. 490–91; Dawidowitsch, Lucy S., The War against the Jews, 1933–1945 (New York, 1975) pp. 14, 18, 56, 111,151.Google Scholar

10. On this running theme through Nazi history, see especially Bracher, The German Dictatorship, pp. 149, 334, 362, 403, 489.

11. Erbe, Reneé, Die nationalsozialistische Wirtschaftspolitik 1933–1939 im Lichte der modernen Theorie (Zurich, 1959), pp. 3–4, 161–65, 173–74.Google Scholar

12. Thus Bracher, The German Dictatorship, pp. 249–52, and Dawidowitsch, The War Against the Jews, pp. 3–5, 88–91, 151,163–69.

13. Sauer, Wolfgang, “National Socialism: Totalitarianism or Fascism?” American Historical Review 73 (1968): 419.Google Scholar

14. Ibid., pp. 412–13.

15. Ibid., pp. 417–18.

16. Dahrendorf, Ralf, Gesellschqft und Demokratie in Deutschland (Munich, 1966), pp. 432–40.Google Scholar

17. Schoenbaum, David, Hitler's Social Revolution: Class and Status in Nazi Germany 1933–1939 (New York, 1966), pp. xxii–xxiii, 287–293; Bracher, The German Dictatorship, P. 330.Google Scholar

18. For the Nazis' failure to carry through a church revolution because of their vacillation between racial paganism as a revolutionary new religion and “positive Christianity” as a politically controlled ecclesiastical establishment, see Conway, J. S., The Nazi Persecution of the Churches 1933–45 (New York, 1968), pp. 2–4,328–31.Google Scholar For the Nazi incapacity to develop a characteristic approach to the arts consistent with its revolutionary self-image, see Brenner, Hildegard, Die Kunstpolitik des Nationahozialismus (Hamburg, 1963), passim.Google Scholar

19. Orlow, History of the Nazi Party: 1933–1945, pp. 450, 479–80.

20. Marcuse, Herbert, One Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston, 1964), pp. 123–43.Google Scholar

21. Loewenberg, Peter, “Psychohistorical Perspectives on Modern German History,” Journal of Modern History 47 (1975): 229–53.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

22. But Mosse has retained the older concept by insisting on the coherence of Nazi ideology (see his Nazi Culture, pp. xxii–xxiii).

23. Peterson, op cit., p. xxiii; Buchheim, Hans, Broszat, Martin, Jacobsen, Hans-Adolf, Krausnick, Helmut, Die Anatomie des SS-Staates (Freiburg, 1965), 1: 5.Google Scholar