This chapter analyzes why the SPD failed to stop the collapse of the Weimar Republic and whether it could have averted this outcome, discusses the lessons that German Social Democrats drew from this failure, and assesses to what extent the history of Weimar democracy and its collapse is relevant for analyzing the threat or reality of democratic breakdown in the contemporary world. The SPD leadership decided not to initiate any direct protest action to oppose the Nazi takeover. The chapter argues that any such action, if it had been undertaken, would very likely have been crushed and proven ineffective. There is no imminent threat of democratic breakdown in contemporary Germany or Western Europe. However, the Nazi takeover was the culmination of a process of executive aggrandizement that characterizes many contemporary cases of democratic decline and breakdown. Champions of democracy must combat this process from the outset – before it is too late.

Many scholars agree that one of Darwin’s main accomplishments was the introduction of blind mechanism into biology, thus banishing moral values from the understanding of nature. The history of Darwin’s accomplishment and the trajectory of evolutionary theory during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has led many to the conclusion that the principle of survival of the fittest has rendered human behavior, including moral behavior, ultimately selfish. As a result, many accept the idea that Darwinian theory, especially as construed by Darwin’s German disciple, Ernst Haeckel, inspired Hitler and led to Nazi atrocities. However, this claim is false. A close historical examination reveals that Darwin, in more traditional fashion, constructed nature with a moral spine and provided it with a goal: man as a moral creature. Moreover, Hitler’s own conception of biological processes was antithetical to Darwin’s theory; and the leading Nazi theorists rejected Darwinian evolution because of its materialistic character. The chapter shows that Darwin is wrongfully blamed for Hitler’s atrocities.

Berlin is often described as the site of sexual innovation in both popular and scholarly accounts of the history of sexuality in the twentieth century. Particularly in the inter-war period, the metropolis became an iconic symbol of gender-bending nightlife, an organizational centre for myriad movements of sexual emancipation, and a nexus of scholarly efforts to catalogue and understand human sexual comportment and identity. This chapter argues, however, that while there was certainly an explosion of public, literary, and medical interest in sex, sexuality, and sexual identity in early twentieth-century Berlin, the terms ‘invention’ and ‘discovery’ can oversimplify what was actually a very complex and contentious historical process. Focusing on a few examples of the divisions within queer communities – particularly the conflicts between feminist, lesbian, and transgender activists and the arguments emanating from the masculinist branch of the gay rights movement – it tracks how discourses about the morality of prostitution, the social impact of same-sex love, and racialized biological knowledge shaped definitions of citizenship in ways that still resonate and are still debated. It is this debate, rather than some kind of definitive invention of sexual identity, that makes this period relevant for our present.

This chapter focuses on the reception of Old Norse-Icelandic literature. It begins with a discussion of the definition of the term ‘reception’ and moves on to describe the beginnings of medievalism in Europe and its roots in social and political change. The relationship between nationalism and a ‘Nordic’ or ‘Germanic’ racial identity is explored, and the role of Old Norse myth in politics, ideology and propaganda is analysed. Following a survey of early modern and eighteenth-century European responses to Old Norse literature, including the work of Paul-Henri Mallet, and nineteenth-century translations of Old Norse literature and the work of Jacob Grimm, the discussion moves on to German nationalism and Old Norse, culminating in the National Socialist appropriation of Old Norse mythology and motifs. The use of medieval Icelandic literature to reconstruct a supposed pre-Christian Germanic religion is outlined, and the anti-Christian and anti-Jewish attitudes of so-called völkisch thought explained. The subsequent rise of Neopaganism throughout the world is the subject of the rest of the chapter, with special attention to the racist ideology evident in various Neopagan groups.

Sering’s son died in the last week of the war. Following this, Sering asked to write the Reich Settlement Law (Reichssiedlungsgesetz), which covered plans to settle veterans and Freikorps. Sering fought the Diktat of Versailles. There were calls for plebiscite in Posen to divide Poles from Germans. Sering then spent the early, poor years of Weimar attacking Versailles treaty, setting up the Sering-Insitut, and training PhDs, before formally retiring in 1925. The chapter goes on to cover the rise of racial thinking among Sering’s inner colonial peers. Sering then returned to the USA in 1930 with his student Constantin von Dietze. During the rise of the Nazis, Hitler turned to the agrarian sector for votes. Chancellor Brüning was a big fan of Sering. Initially, in 1932, Sering seemed open to some of the more radical language.

The unforeseen extent and duration of World War I interrupted much of Europe’s access to the abundant lands of the New World, on which its food supply had come to depend. In Germany, the British blockade starved some 800,000 people; mortality increased most (over 60 percent) from malnutrition-related tuberculosis. Central to the appeal of Hitler’s National Socialist movement was its call for the conquest of Lebensraum in eastern Europe and western Russia – and the expulsion or extermination of those regions’ native inhabitants – as a means to self-sufficiency in food. Both in Mein Kampf and in his “second book,” Hitler argued explicitly that neither factor substitution, factor mobility, nor new technologies could guarantee Germans’ food supply; only the admittedly costly and risky route of conquest would suffice. When Stresemann’s “export powerhouse” strategy of factor mobility collapsed after 1929, Hitler’s alternative won strong popular support. In the “breakthrough” election of 1930, the Nazi vote increased most in the cities that had suffered the highest wartime mortality from tuberculosis. Hitler’s genocidal plan appealed especially to the populations that had endured the worst wartime hunger and death.

Chapter 2 focuses on Hans Pfitzner’s Symphony in C♯ minor, a reworking of his 1925 String Quartet Op. 25, at its Berlin premiere in March 1933. This case study illuminates how National Socialist values, particularly to do with monumentality, gained traction within symphonic aesthetics. Liberal sociological theorisations of the symphony such as Paul Bekker’s (1918) seemed increasingly absurd as politics shifted and Enlightenment narratives about sovereignty reached breaking point. For instance, due to Nazi threats of violence, just days before the Berlin performance of Pfitzner’s new symphony the Philharmonie had seen the cancellation of Walter’s regular concert, precipitating his political exile. I read the Pfitzner concert’s critical reception in parallel with both Bekker’s symphonic utopianism and emerging Nazi symphonic aesthetics, exploring Pfitzner’s symphony as caught between these two symphonic poles. I pay attention to how discourses of public and private space associated with the symphony and chamber music allow a clear view of fascist reformulations of subjectivity and space in this context marked by Walter’s persecution.

Premiered in Berlin, but composed in Paris, Arthur Honegger’s Mouvement symphonique n° 3 was a commission for the Berlin Philharmonic, and Chapter 5 deals with its reception, bringing the book back to its two major European centres. For reviewers, Swiss-German Honegger’s work, the third in a trio of symphonic movements that began with Pacific 231 and Rugby, was unambiguously neither French nor German, and it reveals mechanisms by which commentators sought either to assimilate the work with, or expel it from, Germanic idealist aesthetic traditions. Despite the work’s ‘sober and unprepossessing’ title, this chapter suggests that Mouvement symphonique n° 3 had a critical political programme – even if programmatic aspects were barely acknowledged in the critical reception. Manipulating the symphonic form, and referencing Beethovenian subjective narratives in particular, the work considers the changing relationship between the individual and the collective within a tumultuous era of political and industrial/technological upheaval, ultimately lamenting over the ruins of both the symphony and the utopian political project it represented.

Part introduction to the frame around 1933, part initial case study, the first chapter introduces Kurt Weill’s Symphony No. 2, the symphony-in-progress he carried in his suitcase as he escaped Nazi Berlin for exile in Paris in March 1933. The chapter explores its 1934 premiere in Amsterdam, where critics took issue with both the popular-sounding music and with Weill himself – neither seeming suitable for the symphonic genre – to introduce the book’s central concerns: how, at this uncertain and turbulent political moment, the specific cultural anxieties that emerge around symphonies can generate insights into how people thought about both subjectivity and about political and aesthetic notions of space. If previous scholarship on the genre has largely been wedded to nation-states and grand political narratives, this chapter instead argues for a transnational approach and lays out the symphonic genre’s long history of entanglement with Germanic philosophies of subjectivity and space, from E. T. A. Hoffmann to Paul Bekker.

Whereas links between Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche and revolutionary extremism are debatable, Heidegger’s commitment to National Socialism is unquestionable. He saw Nazism as a revolution of the German people to throw off the alien values of liberalism and embrace their collective destiny in an encounter with global technology, the culmination of modernity. To a more radical degree than Marx and Nietzsche, Heidegger rejected everything that happened in history between the ancient Greeks and Germany’s destiny as valueless and totally alienating. He urged Germany to revive the pre-Socratic account of existence as violent strife and thereby resist the relentless working out of Platonic metaphysics in the form of technology, a dynamic for bringing all of existence under the control of rational efficiency. When Nazism failed, in Heidegger’s view by itself succumbing to the technological imperative, he abandoned hope in any political movement or people, forecasting instead a looming global encounter with technology in which all mankind would either become fodder for efficiency or emerge into a new epoch of closeness to all that is, the Shepherd of Being, an either/or choice or eschatological reversal resembling Marx’s dyad of bourgeoisie versus proletariat and Nietzsche’s dyad of Overman versus herd morality.

Islamic Jihadism has deep ties to National Socialism, both in its history and in its vision of a world that is “purified of the Jews.” Chapter 8 demonstrates the influences of Nazi exterminationist Jew hatred on modern Islamic Jihadism. It should be noted that I use the term Islamic Jihadism to distinguish Jihadists from other Muslims who are not part of this movement. Tracing the path from Hitler to Hamas, the chapter brings out the connections between the antisemitism of the Muslim Brotherhood and National Socialist Jew hatred, with particular attention to the Nazi war criminal Haj Amin al-Husseini. I incorporate primary texts of Jihadist ideologues such as Hasan al-Banna, Sayyid Qutb, Abdullah Azzam, Ruhullah Khomeini, and others. Like the Nazis, but with theological differences, the Jihadists maintain not that all Jews are evil but that all evil is Jewish, to which and that to resolve it there can be only a Final Solution.

Leslie Howard’s Pimpernel Smith seeks to clarify cultural differences between the British and the Nazis by way of Shakespeare—a task complicated by German claims of the playwright’s putatively Nordic nature. This struggle over Shakespeare’s national identity is mirrored, first, in the film’s persistent emphasis on doubles; and, second, in its apparent advocacy for the notion that Edward de Vere, the 17th earl of Oxford, wrote Shakespeare’s plays. Just as Oxford appears in the film as Shakespeare’s doppelganger, Hamlet shadows both Horatio Smith (played by Howard) and Howard’s screen personae as a cerebral hero. Howard’s willingness to countenance arguments about Shakespeare’s Germanness, as well as entertain Oxfordianism, proves to be central to the film’s propaganda objectives. By contrasting Nazi intolerance for dissent with Smith’s apparent acceptance of heterodox ideas, Pimpernel Smith expresses Britain’s cultural superiority not only by way of Shakespeare, but also through Oxfordian challenges to the playwright’s identity.

Chapter 9 focuses on various theorists who make up the Anti-Free Speech Movement, starting with philosopher Herbert Marcuse. They suggest that the First Amendment has been interpreted too broadly to allow protection for speech they believe is intolerable, and that this should be reversed. The chapter examines those who have espoused critical race theory to develop arguments for suppressing hate speech, and feminists who advocate suppressing sexually oriented speech. The connection between these various theorists is that they argue that the First Amendment has gone too far, yet they vigorously deny that they support censorship. In doing so, they adopt the rhetoric and tactics designed by Anthony Comstock, Fredric Wertham, and Newton Minow before them.The chapter concludes that the purpose of the First Amendment is to block government from having the type of power these theorists advocate, and suggests that one way to preserve free speech is to use this list of characteristics as a means of identifying censors.

In western Germany, a major controversy developed over the British and French policy of requiring German courts to prosecute Nazi crimes against humanity. German critics argued that this violated the violation on ex post facto law making. This, they said, made such trials unjust and similar to the courts of the Third Reich, which had also used ex post facto laws. The British and their German supporters argued that Nazi crimes could only adequately be punished as crimes against humanity, since many Nazi misdeeds had not been criminal under the laws of the Third Reich (e.g. the denunciation of individuals to the Gestapo). The American decision not to grant German courts jurisdiction over crimes against humanity came in large part out of a desire to avoid a similar controversy in their own occupation zone. Many of those critical of prosecuting Nazi atrocities as crimes against humanity wanted to help Nazi criminals and make it harder to prosecute Nazi crimes. Yet, because they made their arguments in the language of liberal legalism and the principles of legality, these critics helped to deradicalize the German legal profession, which had previously been deeply anti-liberal and anti-democratic.

From 1900 the potato began to regain its lustre as a political instrument. Developments within nutritional science led dieticians to reverse their earlier condemnations. This reversal coincided with an increase in the capacity of modern states to influence everyday eating habits. The First and Second World Wars were particularly important in developing the technologies and institutions that made this possible. Concerned to provide for the wartime needs of their populations, European governments actively encouraged potato consumption. Nonetheless, the economic development models that emerged in the post-war years paid little attention to potatoes. Only recently has smallholder agriculture been incorporated into international models of food security. Just as the peasant know-how that spread potato cultivation across early modern Europe remained largely invisible, so the smallholder expertise that allowed the potato to preserve its genetic diversity has only begun to be appreciated by international development organisations. Potatoes have also become a source of gastronomic pride; many countries have registered specific varieties as part of their national patrimony. The contemporary history of the potato recapitulates both the eighteenth-century conviction that potatoes could play a role in national security, and also the reality that small farmers, as well as agronomists, possess expertise relevant to building a viable food system.

Chapter 3 discusses the key characteristics and numbers of internees. It argues that here, too, the similarities across the zones were greater than is often assumed, but that important differences emerged. It shows that internee numbers were higher in the western zones than is often believed and that most internees in every zone were middle-aged men. The chapter examines competing claims about internees’ Nazi incrimination and distinguishes between different organizations and tiers of the Nazi Party hierarchy. It shows that there were more lowly than highly ranked personnel in every zone, but that seniority levels were higher in the western (and especially the American and British) zones and that only there were significant numbers of SS members interned. Yet one should not overlook the personnel of the broader Nazi repressive apparatus nor downplay the responsibility of even the lowest-ranked Party officials who were interned in the Soviet zone in large numbers. The chapter also argues that the Soviets interned fewer adolescents, Social Democrats, and members of other postwar political parties than is often believed and that some were targeted for Nazi-era offences. Nevertheless, their number had no equivalent in the west and even more were prosecuted by Soviet Military Tribunals.