The culture of ressentiment in Germany from the Second to the Third Reich

The belated nation

Ressentiment, the memory of an evil keenly experienced, of an injury, of an injustice, most often accompanied by the desire to take revenge, concerns peoples as well as individuals. But why did it take so singular and so violent a turn on German soil? “Germany,” Alexis de Tocqueville already noted in 1854, “is a country endowed with a modern sense of science and economics within a Gothic body.” In other words, with an archaic political foundation, ill-suited to the evolutions of modern democracy. Germany’s western neighbors became nations at the dawn of modern times, coinciding with the formation of sovereign States. Hence a form of identification between State and Nation, reinforced by a secular continuity. Described as “belated,”¹ the German nation emerges only in the last third of the nineteenth century, with the creation, in 1871, of the Second Reich. Born of three victorious wars against Austria and France, its proclamation amounts to a “white revolution,” imposed by Bismarck’s Prussia upon the princes, from Versailles — that is, on foreign soil, in the absence of the people’s representatives. “Germany,” according to Robert d’Harcourt, “is the land of failed revolutions and of successful counter-revolutions.” Without going back to the crushing of the Peasants’ War in the sixteenth century, 1789, 1830, 1848 — one may even add 1918 later — each time met with failure, for want of a liberal bourgeoisie relying on popular aspirations to forge the nation’s unity. Now the concept and the idea of nation remained diffuse in a territory long fragmented into 350 principalities of differing size and confession (cujus regio, ejus religio) until the Napoleonic occupation and administration prepared the way for unification, simplifying the country’s map to 39 States in 1806 and shaking the socio-economic foundations of the Ancien Régime. It is under the Napoleonic administration that there occur the abolition of serfdom and feudal rights and the emancipation of the Jews in the territories subject to the Civil Code modeled on the French. But it is in reaction against the thought of the French philosophers and the ideas of 1789, founded on the freely consented contract, that German Romanticism conceives the nation as a living, organic reality of the Volk — a community exceeding the limits of the existing State, but excluding foreign minorities. A community sinking its roots into the most distant, original past of the Germanic community. If, until 1848, liberal unitary aspirations manifest themselves in a fringe of the enlightened bourgeoisie, the failure of the Frankfurt parliament — where seven “centrist” Jewish delegates sat, including the vice-president, the jurist Gabriel Riesser (the non-parliamentary revolutionary wing counted roughly 15 percent Jews) — sounds the death knell of the hopes of civic equality. An equality which, according to Rabbi Leopold Stein (Frankfurt), “is one with the cause of the fatherland and will triumph or fall with it.”² In fact, the emancipation of the Jews, begun under the Napoleonic administration in 1808 and continued until the imperial unification of 1871, is a long march marked by legislation more or less restrictive according to the region. And yet, despite the political unification of the empire, this process — weakened by the inequality of the intermediate stages of emancipation — runs up, as soon as the great economic crises appear from 1873 onward, against the ressentiment of the anxious or directly affected social strata, against the Jews supposed to be the monopolizers of the Reich’s initial prosperity. Already, in an article published in French in 1867 by the International League for Peace, the liberal deputy from Hamburg, Wilhelm Marr, denounced “the peril of the Asiatism of the Jews for the Indo-European peoples,” declaring, “True nationality is race.” But the same man — author in 1879 of Der Sieg des Judenthums über das Germanenthum (The Victory of Judaism over Germandom) — goes further, coining the term “antisemite” and founding the first Antisemites’ Party. An expression of those disappointed by the failure of 1848, as indeed was Richard Wagner, who passed from the revolutionary liberalism of 1848 to the cult of Deutschtum (Germandom). Was it the consciousness of his difficult beginnings, materially dependent on the bounty of his elder Meyerbeer? Be that as it may, his ressentiment drove him to publish in 1850 “Judaism in Music,” where, under an assumed name, he already develops the image of the Jews as parasites on a decomposing body. But it is in the Bayreuth Circle and the gazette of the same name that Wagner and his son-in-law Houston Stewart Chamberlain — assisted by Ludwig Schemann, translator and, in the 1880s, introducer of the Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines (Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races) (1853–55) by the Comte de Gobineau, disappointed by the failure of his book in France, to which his friends Renan and Tocqueville had predicted a better reception in a Germany still attached to its primordial roots — that Germanic racism was to find its founding nucleus. Taking up the Gobinian idea of races as the motor of history, and the thesis of a hierarchy of races, of which that of the white “Aryans” constituted the superior form of humanity, alone creative of culture but, like the others, degenerating through miscegenation, the Bayreuth Circle intends to surpass the cultural pessimism of the French model through a synthesis of the philosophy of Life and of Volkstum (folkdom). With Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century) (1899), H. S. Chamberlain — still rejected by the specialists as a “terrible simplifier” — nevertheless wins over the majority of the bourgeoisie, including the Pan-German current, and even the emperor, whom he meets and who orders the compulsory teaching of the work in the Prussian seminaries for the training of teachers. For, contrary to the repressed centrifugal forces (cultural, national, ethnic minorities), the metahistorical and metapolitical conception of Germanic superiority set forth in H. S. Chamberlain’s work compensates for the people’s frustrations consequent upon political powerlessness, and also helps prepare it, after the dismissal of Bismarck in 1890, for the Weltpolitik (world policy) of Wilhelm II. Characteristic of the proliferation of organizations and publications illustrating this Zeitgeist (literally, spirit of the time), the work of Josef Ludwig Reimer, Ein pangermanisches Deutschland. Versuch über die Konsequenzen der gegenwärtigen Rassenbetrachtung für unsere politischen und religiösen Probleme (A Pan-Germanic Germany: Essay on the Consequences of the Present Racial Perspective for Our Political and Religious Problems) (Berlin–Leipzig, 1905), defines a Pan-German Germany making racialization the solution to political and religious problems by conferring upon it a scientific aura. The project of a Germany mistress of continental Europe that Reimer sets forth implies, in effect, a sorting between “Germans” and “Germanizable” on the one hand, and “non-Germanizable” on the other. A sorting entrusted, when the time came, to a commission of anthropologists, doctors, and specialist breeders. The first being encouraged to procreate, the second, on the contrary, forbidden to procreate. If this type of project, linked to the Pan-German League founded in 1890 by industrial and financial circles backed by the army, still corresponds to the continental aims of Bismarck — reticent toward the ambitions of the colonial lobby — it was to find a prolongation in the imperial Weltpolitik, resolved to win for Germany its “place in the sun,”³ unjustly monopolized by France and Great Britain. “Nietzsche,” remarks the historian Fritz Stern, “was the first to recognize the psychological power of ressentiment and the first to warn against its decomposing force.”⁴ Characterized by the rejection of Western liberalism in favor of economic liberalism alone, bolstered by historism instrumentalized in the service of political legitimation, a German religion, and biologism, this culture of ressentiment traverses all the strata of society (military and landed aristocracy, business bourgeoisie, university circles, middle classes). A synthesis of associations of all kinds, the Pan-German League (Alldeutscher Verband — ADV) represents the programmatic foundation of this Weltpolitik. Notably with colonial associations, which occupy a place of choice as a vector of ideological mobilization in the service of the “national-völkisch” expansionist policy of the Second Reich. A policy involving, however, both the project of domination of Mitteleuropa and colonial conquest with the means forged by heavy industry. Including the construction of a military fleet capable of rivaling that of England. Projects that do not exclude the struggle against the centrifugal forces within the Reich — notably the Jews, embodying the absolute antibody of Germanic Volkstum. To save the German people from this peril, the president of the ADV advocates the merciless closing of the borders to all new Jewish immigration, the expulsion of Jews not holding German citizenship, and the placing under alien status of all resident Jews. Is to be considered Jewish any person who, on the date of January 18, 1871, belonged to the Jewish religious community, as well as all the descendants of persons Jewish during their lifetime, even if only one of the parents was a Jew. There follow a series of prohibitions for those placed under alien status. University figures of renown — such as the geographer Friedrich Ratzel, the historian Heinrich von Treitschke (to whom we owe the slogan “The Jews are our misfortune,” which flourished under the Third Reich), the biologist Alfred Ploetz, founder in 1904 of the first eugenic movement called, from the outset, unlike its sister associations, “Society for Racial Hygiene” — take it upon themselves to justify “scientifically” the German right and aptitude to dominate the “inferior” peoples and cultures of the world. In an article, “Our Prospects,” published in 1870 in the Preussische Jahrbücher, Treitschke — the only National Liberal deputy to have voted for the law against the socialists — puts his prestige in the service of the antisemitic movement. While declaring himself, like the liberal party, in favor of an emancipation of the Jews, on condition of a total assimilation freed from Jewishness, he holds that the risk of failure would yield a bastard German-Jewish culture, which would destroy the purity of the thousand-year-old Germanic heritage. A member of the same party, his colleague Theodor Mommsen and the surgeon Rudolf Virchow create, after the appeal of 76 personalities against the campaign and the anti-Jewish abuses, “the Association for Defense against Antisemitism.” Strong at its beginnings with 12,000 members, its scant efficacy and the progressive disaffection of liberal personalities determine the creation, in 1893, of “the Central Association of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith” (CV). For, despite their undeniable economic and social ascent, the Jews, officially registered as such, form a weakened community. First demographically, since passing from 1.95% in 1871 to 0.95% on the eve of the war. To the point that Felix Theilhaber wondered about Der Untergang der deutschen Juden (The Decline of the German Jews) (Berlin, 1911). A perverse effect of an incomplete emancipation, demanding assimilation, even conversion to Christianity as the “ticket of admission into German society.”⁵ Not to mention the divisions internal to the community, the Jewish minority undergoes a triple ressentiment: the Christian anti-Judaism of the Court preacher Adolf Stöcker, with numerous ramifications in the Christian associations, and also that of his Austrian Catholic counterpart, Karl Lueger, one of the first sources of inspiration for the young Hitler in Vienna. A political and economic ressentiment illustrated, after Zur Judenfrage (On the Jewish Question) by Karl Marx (1844), by Die Judenfrage (The Jewish Question) of Eugen Dühring (1881) already marked by racialization, that of Karl Kautsky, one of the socialist leaders, author of Rasse und Judentum (Race and Judaism), or again of Werner Sombart, author of Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben (The Jews and Economic Life) (1911), taking up the theme of Jewish nomadism as the origin of a specific capitalism, whereas Weber sees in it the source of Protestant capitalism. A racial ressentiment of which Theodor Fritsch — creator of the Hammerbund, a veritable nursery of völkisch theorists, and of a publishing house, Der Hammer, devoted to publications of this type — achieves a synthesis with the Antisemiten-Katechismus (Catechism of the Antisemites) (1887), later become the Handbuch der Judenfrage (Handbook of the Jewish Question), which would reach 40 editions up to 1936.⁶ Avid for panache and prestige, the young emperor listens neither to his four successive chancellors after the dismissal of Bismarck, nor to his parliamentary majority, in order to engage in the world policy dictated by the combined pressure of a demography that passed from 49 to 67 million between 1890 and 1914 and that of the economic circles claiming the conquest of new vital spaces, providers of supplies and outlets. A policy that destroys the system of continental alliances built by Bismarck and leads — with Austria, impatient to settle scores with Russia, its rival in the Balkans, as its sole ally — to the First World War. Strong in the support of the ruling class, but also of the German socialists who, convinced that highly civilized Germany must liberate Russia from Tsarist oppression, oppose within the International, like the “free trade unions” close to the SPD, any strike movement against the war, vote the military credits, and commit themselves to supporting the government in the name of the “Sacred Union.”

The enthusiasm of the Sacred Union and the ressentiment of defeat

At the dawn of this war, the emperor’s proclamation, “I no longer know parties, I know only Germans,” also fills with enthusiasm the German Jews, persuaded that the hour of their full integration has at last arrived. More than 100,000 of them fight, nearly 12,000 die under the imperial flag. Jewish personalities join the manifesto of the 93 academics supporting the German war. Ernst Lissauer composes the most popular song against England. Walther Rathenau and the shipowner Albert Ballin, close to the emperor, organize the war economy. Franz Oppenheimer creates the Committee for the Liberation of the East. In Deutschtum und Judentum (Germandom and Judaism) (1916), Hermann Cohen holds that the successful symbiosis between Judaism and Germandom will assure, once peace has returned, a preponderant place for Germany in the world. And this even as the Prussian Ministry of War has just launched, at the demand of the movements against the “shirking Jews, war profiteers and starvers of the people,” a specific census of those present under the flag. Undertaken in November 1916, the results of this census will never be published and will feed popular ressentiment all the more. For the majority of Germans, the shock of defeat is all the more brutal in that the speeches of victory and the promises of a powerful and prosperous Germany poured out by the media under strict military control had instilled in them the strength to endure four years of sacrifices and privations. In the military hospital in Pomerania where he is recovering from an eye wound caused by asphyxiating gas, the Austrian corporal Hitler — a volunteer enlistee from 1914 — recounts having thrown himself on his bed, weeping for the first time since his mother’s death, on learning that the house of Hohenzollern no longer had the right to bear the German imperial crown… “It had all been for nothing. For nothing all the victims and all the sacrifices, for nothing the hunger and the thirst, sometimes for months without end, vain the hours when, prisoners of a mortal anguish, we nonetheless did our duty. Vain the death of two million of our own. Emperor Wilhelm II had been the first to extend the hand of reconciliation to the Marxist leaders, without suspecting that these scoundrels have no honor. While they still held the imperial hand in theirs, the other was already groping for the dagger. With the Jews, there can be no compromise. There is only the hard law of either/or. As for me, I resolved to become a politician.”⁷ The multiform revolution of November 1918 — opened by the establishment, on October 28, of a parliamentary monarchy under the direction of Prince Max of Baden, at the request of General Ludendorff, eager to shed the responsibilities of the High Command — begins with a mutiny of the fleet’s crews at Kiel and Bremerhaven, prelude to the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils throughout the Reich. On November 8, proclamation of the free republic of Bavaria by Kurt Eisner. The next day, November 9: flight and abdication of the emperor to the Netherlands, prompting Philipp Scheidemann to proclaim the Republic and the formation of a socialist government in Berlin under the direction of Friedrich Ebert. Two hours later, Karl Liebknecht has the red flag hoisted over the royal palace and “the free socialist Republic” acclaimed. The proclamation, in two days, of 3 different republics claiming socialism, in a context of revolutionary uprisings, sows confusion in a disoriented population that aspires above all to the return of order and peace. Branded from the outset by its adversaries as “un-German” (undeutsch), because imposed by the victors and their agents whom Hitler would soon call the “November criminals,” the regime fails to secure its foundations. The appeal by the socialist leaders to the military chiefs to subdue the revolutionary forces — resulting notably in the assassination of Rosa Luxemburg, of Karl Liebknecht, of Gustav Landauer, of Kurt Eisner, of Leo Jogiches, of Erich Mühsam, and of some 1,200 militants — seals a rupture, fraught with consequences for the future of the Republic, between the two lefts. Henceforth a minority, constrained to form the “Weimar coalition”⁸ in the small town that was the cradle of German classicism, far from the confrontations of the capital, with the Catholic Zentrum and a democratic party issued from the liberalism of the empire, “rallied by reason” to the Republic, the socialists took part in the various coalitions only until 1923, before tolerating those formed with a part of the old right, become the German People’s Party (DVP). Undermined by what Rosa Luxemburg already called “the political immaturity of the leaders,” with a people that had never known democracy, the Weimar Republic, the historian Hans Mommsen holds, is the illustration of a “squandered freedom” (Verspielte Freiheit). The defeat of 1918 could have produced a process of clarification similar to that undertaken by the vanquished France of 1871. Now, faced with the economic and political difficulties used by the anti-republican forces to spread the thesis of the “stab in the back of an army that returned undefeated,” instead of explaining the origins of the war and drawing the consequences from it to reinforce the foundations of republican democracy, the “Weimar coalition” multiplies the concessions to the partisans of the old regime, largely present in the administration and the army. Beginning with the wording of Article 1 of the Constitution: the Reich is a Republic. A formulation, source of ambiguity, that those for whom the Republic is but a parenthesis would exploit. Another formidable ambiguity: the unanimous storm provoked by the Treaty of Versailles, giving rise to an appeal by the socialist leaders to the people and the Länder against this “inapplicable diktat,” whereas the military pronounce themselves for acceptance, on condition of making the “shameful paragraphs” on German responsibility for the war and the handing over of war criminals disappear. The new government, formed with the centrists and socialists alone after the resounding resignation of Scheidemann and the defection of the democrats who vote with the nationalists, is finally constrained — after an Allied ultimatum — to take it upon itself to sign the treaty. An additional humiliation, in the very place where Bismarck had proclaimed the Second Reich, without obtaining the suppression of the “shameful articles.” Already divided by this episode, destined to become one of the key themes of ressentiment against a “Republic of the Jews” accused of having handed over Alsace-Lorraine and the Saar mines, northern Schleswig-Holstein, Posnania, East Prussia, a part of Upper Silesia, and the whole of the colonies, the Republic must confront, between 1920 and 1923, the Kapp-Lüttwitz putsch in Berlin (1920) and that of Hitler in Munich (1923), in a climate of confrontations punctuated by political assassinations. Notably those of Matthias Erzberger, centrist negotiator of the Treaty of Versailles (1921), and that of Walther Rathenau, minister of foreign affairs (1922). In these various confrontations, the army of 100,000 men, reinforced by the Free Corps banned following their participation in the events of 1921–22, plays the role of defender of the unity of the Reich, not of the Republic. Back in Germany after a seven-year sojourn in Switzerland, Einstein writes in 1921: “I believe German Jewry owes its survival to antisemitism. I have observed it for myself.”⁹ Drawing for his part a bitter assessment of an ardently desired integration, Jakob Wassermann¹⁰ — a much-prized author nonetheless — observes: “Unfortunately, the situation is such that the Jew is today an outlaw. Not in the legal sense, but in the people’s feeling. It is vain to live for it or to die for it.” To a population devoid of political education, replaced by clichés, it was easy to present the image of a country victim of external and internal enemies. The external enemy, France, which — not content to support the Polish nationalists during the plebiscites, and the Rhineland autonomists, to recover Alsace-Lorraine and the Saar mines — occupies, in response to the non-payment of Reparations, the left bank of the Rhine, inflicting upon it “the black shame” (die schwarze Schmach) of its colonial troops. Interpreted in Mein Kampf (dictated in 1924 during his detention) as a revealer of French degeneration through miscegenation, this theme accompanies, in the German press and literature, the resistance to the Franco-Belgian occupation of the Ruhr — general strike, financed by the government, sabotage provoking the expulsion of suspected populations toward the Reich, murderous attacks leading to death sentences by the French military tribunals, including Lieutenant Schlageter, celebrated as a hero by the young Nazi party. These events would mark even the generation of officers — such as Werner Best — charged with the military administration of occupied France. Within the Republic, the SPD (Social Democratic Party) remains, with the support of the “free trade unions,” the leading democratic force until 1931. But it has already lost nearly 3 million voters, that is 18%, by 1923. Which obliges it to content itself with tolerating center-right governmental coalitions without a parliamentary majority. The great inflation of 1923, which ruins the middle classes and the pensioners, favors the progress of the anti-republican forces, which obtain 23.6% of the vote in the legislative elections of December 1924, to which is added the opposition of the left with 13.4%, which already represents 37%. If the defensive and offensive league (DSTB), created in 1919 at the initiative of the Pan-German League, counts nearly 200,000 members at its dissolution in 1922 — following a campaign of desecrations of cemeteries, places of worship, and political assassinations — its most activist wing finds itself in the Deutschvölkische Freiheitspartei (German-Völkisch Freedom Party), which figures on the joint list with the Nazis in the 1924 legislative elections. The privileged theme of the DSTB, “Jewish pollution,” meets with notable success in Artur Dinter’s trilogy. A former Protestant theologian, co-founder of the DSTB, then elected deputy, then minister of culture in the first Nazi government in Thuringia in 1930, he is afterward relegated by Hitler to an obscure publishing house for having encroached on his ideological monopoly by advocating a unified German national Church founded on a Germanized Christianity. His trilogy Die Sünde wider das Blut (The Sin against the Blood), Die Sünde wider den Geist (The Sin against the Spirit), Die Sünde wider die Liebe (The Sin against Love), published between 1918 and 1921, reaches nearly 500,000 copies up to 1931. Enough to remind those who admire, not without reason in our day, the “Weimar culture,” that it was the product of a cosmopolitan avant-garde, prized by a fringe of the cultivated bourgeoisie, essentially Jewish. That even Thomas Mann, Nobel Prize for literature in 1929, knew success only with Buddenbrooks (1901), the story of his Hanseatic family from Lübeck, printed in a million copies. His brother Heinrich, more socially engaged, was indeed elected president of the literary section of the Prussian Academy for his trilogy Das Kaiserreich (1900–1917), of which the Professor Unrat, popularized by the film The Blue Angel with Marlene Dietrich, earned the book a print run that nonetheless did not exceed the 265,000 of Volk ohne Raum (People without Space) (1926), the account of the German colonial experience by Hans Grimm. A veritable seismograph of the Zeitgeist and of mass culture under Weimar: the novels of Gustav Frenssen (1863–1945). A former Protestant pastor, like many nationalist ideologues, named Dr. honoris causa of the theology faculty of Heidelberg in 1905, at the same time as his mentor Friedrich Naumann,¹¹ he passes from social Christianity to national socialism, then, with Weber and Naumann, to plebiscitary democracy in 1918. His disappointment with the new power leads him to hope for a “new order,” embodied, in his province of Schleswig-Holstein, by the Steel Helmets and the Deutschvölkisch groups represented by one of his former fellow students, Count Reventlow, pioneer of antisemitic nationalism in the region. Imbued with his vocation as educator of the people, the failure of his candidacy for the Nobel in 1919 (Anatole France) and 1929 (Th. Mann) — reserved, according to him, for “Judeo-Roman art” — orients him toward German Faith, a link between Christianity and Germandom. According to him, the young front generation, disappointed by the political collapse of defeat, thirsts for authority, for a simple life, for a “spiritual mystique” founded on Volkstum and race. His adhesion to the Nazi party, whose progress he attentively followed from 1928, comes about only after Hitler’s accession to power. A year that is also that of the publication of Meino der Prahler (Meino the Braggart) (1933), the first novel evoking the putting to death of “inferior beings” or of incurables. A subject that the former pastor previously mentioned only in his personal notes or by allusion regarding German colonization (Peter Moors Fahrt nach Südwest). Covered with honors by the masters of the Third Reich, he would serve them by pen and word “despite a few errors” — unspecified — until his last breath. The turning point of the new order that Frenssen called for is already sketched from 1925 onward, with the election, on the death of President Ebert, of the imperial field marshal and Prussian squire, Paul von Hindenburg. At first sight — with a representative of the old ruling caste at its head, the end of the Ruhr resistance judged costly and ineffective, the return to monetary stability and to a relative prosperity thanks to Anglo-Saxon investments — the situation appears appeased. A peace more apparent than real, the work of the government of national union formed in 1923 by Gustav Stresemann, head of the German People’s Party (DVP), who intends, as minister of foreign affairs until his death in October 1929, to devote himself entirely to the revision of the Treaty of Versailles. A power policy (Machtpolitik) that, for want of sufficient military forces, he counts on realizing through the division of his adversaries. No problem on the Soviet side, with which he signs, in the prolongation of the Treaty of Rapallo (1922), that of Berlin in 1926, assuring Germany not only important orders, but military cooperation for the training of his army’s cadres. Perceived as a counter-insurance against Versailles, these treaties, including the unlimited one of 1931, are widely approved, whereas those concluded with the Western powers at the Locarno Conference — considered by international opinion as the beginning of an era of peace — are for Stresemann only an opening to new demands. An attitude that Aristide Briand would qualify as “insatiable,” with a record comprising the guarantee of the western borders without commitment for the eastern borders, entry into the League of Nations, the evacuation of the Ruhr, the Dawes Plan opening the German market to foreign capital, and, in counterpart, a negotiated reparations plan and the renunciation of Alsace-Lorraine. This policy, known as national realism, is even disapproved by his own party. It is true that, with a President of the Republic who dreams of restoring the Hohenzollern dynasty, the openly anti-republican right of the DNVP entered the government in 1925, while the Nazi party — banned after the 1923 putsch — reconstitutes itself under the direction of Hitler, freed after nine months of detention without serving the five years (the minimum sentence for the crime of high treason). The indulgence of a justice for the rights, qualified as “patriots,” and merciless repression for left-wing militants: the fire smolders beneath the ash. From 1928, before the world economic crisis of 1929 that was to shake to its very foundations the economy and the politics already weakened by the war and the crises of 1920–23, the trial of strength takes shape between those who want to restore the old regime and those who want to build a “People’s State” through a “völkisch” revolution. On one side, President Hindenburg, supported by the Reichswehr, a Protestant majority that does not forgive the Republic the exile of the emperor, spiritual head of a Church henceforth deprived of its privileged status as State confession, reduced to a status of “corporation under public law,” with the same rights as the Catholic and Jewish cults. Another support until 1931, the Steel Helmets, founded in 1918 with 100,000 veterans, to reach nearly 500,000 in 1930, resolved to combat “the swinish revolution.” Its members were required to prove that they had no Jewish ancestry. Hence the creation, also in 1918, of the Reich Union of Jewish Front Soldiers (“Reichsbund jüdischer Frontsoldaten,” RJF) — the term “front” imposing itself. Strong with 50,000 members, it assigns itself the task of combating, even physically if necessary, antisemitic abuses, and of ensuring, from 1922 onward, the security of Jewish institutions. Facing the nostalgics of the empire, the partisans of a völkisch revolution proclaim the absolute priority of biological racism according to the theses of Hans F. K. Günther, author of a Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes (Racial Science of the German People) (1922) and of a Rassenkunde des jüdischen Volkes (Racial Science of the Jewish People) (1930), which earns him appointment as professor at the University of Jena, one of the first university bastions of the Nazi SS elites. Between the two, the neo-conservatives, partisans of a “Conservative Revolution” replacing the Republic with an authoritarian, Christian conservative State according to the theses of Moeller van den Bruck in his Das Dritte Reich (The Third Reich) (1922). The rapprochement between conservatives and “völkisch” is favored by the election, in 1928, of Alfred Hugenberg to the presidency of the DNVP. Which would earn the Jews — already vilified in 1922 as invasive elements in society and the State — no longer being admitted by this party. A former provincial administrator in Prussia (hence his support for Pan-German revisionism regarding the Eastern Marches), a member of the Krupp board, owner since 1914 of a veritable media empire, his violent campaign against the new Reparations plan (Young Plan) again ends in failure at the requested referendum. But the replacement, on his death, of Stresemann by an agrarian, a former Steel Helmet, at the head of the DVP, seals the union with Hugenberg’s DNVP and the entry of the Nazis into several regional governments. A union that annihilates, in March 1930, the renewal of a grand coalition formed with the socialists between 1928 and 1930 to confront the first effects of the crisis. In Germania, the official organ of the Zentrum, an article of March 28, 1928, draws up the assessment of a crisis marking the end of the parliamentary regime, while the number of unemployed passes from 600,000 to 2,700,000.

The putting to death of a Republic

In the legislative elections of 1930, Hitler’s party achieves its first political breakthrough, becoming, with 6,407,000 votes, that is 18.3% of the suffrage, the second party of Germany behind the SPD. With six million unemployed, to which are added eight million part-time unemployed — that is, nearly 50% of the population affected — the crisis intensifies, while the Reich’s budget already shows a deficit of 700 million marks. For want of a parliamentary majority, presidential cabinets succeed one another in contempt of constitutional rules, with the endorsement of President Hindenburg. On October 11, 1931, the union of the anti-republican forces is officially sealed at Bad Harzburg between Hugenberg’s DNVP, Hitler’s party, the leaders of the DVP, the Steel Helmets, in the presence of cadres of the former imperial army, of two sons of the emperor — including the Crown Prince — and of Dr. Schacht, who has become the Nazi party’s financial expert. In a resolution, the “Front” refuses confidence to the Brüning cabinet, demands the dissolution of the Reichstag and the abolition of the decrees and laws promulgated since 1931. In an annexed manifesto, Hitler declares that the parties of the Front are ready to assume power. It would take a further 14 months of negotiations with the industrial circles and the reelection of President Hindenburg — with the votes of the republican forces against his own camp of the rights — for Hindenburg, betraying his electors, to call Adolf Hitler to the chancellery, Hitler having gathered 33% in the legislative elections of November 1932. On January 30, 1933, he takes the oath to the Weimar constitution in the presence of the field-marshal-president of a Republic that he had largely contributed to emptying of its democratic foundations. If the new government still comprises, apart from Hitler, only two Nazi ministers — but in key posts: Frick at the Interior, Göring at Aviation, but above all at the Interior Ministry of the Land of Prussia — the nine other ministers represent the old ruling caste, which makes bold to “tame” (zähmen) “the Bohemian corporal.” Now, in the space of 19 months — after obtaining only 44% of the suffrage in the legislative elections of March 1933, from which he hoped for an absolute majority, the vote of full powers for four renewable years by 2/3 of the deputies (by means of pressure and verbal promises to the Zentrum to respect the freedom of worship; the communists are already excluded since the Reichstag Fire in February 1933), with only 91 socialist deputies still present out of 120 voting against — makes it possible to carry out the “coordination” (Gleichschaltung) of the whole of the republican institutions. In July 1934, he will have crossed the ultimate stage with the banning or forced self-dissolution of the democratic parties, trade unions, and associations in favor of the Nazi party alone and its numerous annexed organizations. After the crushing in July of the rebellion of the SA chiefs during the Night of the Long Knives — which allows the SS to assassinate at the same time a few political adversaries, including General and last chancellor von Schleicher and his wife — and the death in August of President Hindenburg, Hitler becomes the Führer of the Third Reich and head of an army henceforth sworn to his person. In a public speech of August 20, 1933, Hitler declared: “The struggle for State power is finished today. But the struggle for our dear people continues.” The leaders of the Reich Representation of the Jews, created in September 1933 — the some 495,000 Jews still present in Germany after the departure of a first wave of about 30,000 persons consequent upon the first measures of exclusion — still dared to hope for a modus vivendi with the new regime, once the first upheavals of its establishment had passed. They still did not know, or did not want to see, that the announced struggle, founded on the culture of ressentiment already set forth in Mein Kampf, opened an “iron future.” A future of which the party’s ideologue-in-chief, Alfred Rosenberg, already predicted¹² in 1930 that it would demand nerves of steel and the most abrupt formative forces, when the insult to the people and the race, racial defilement, would be punished by imprisonment or death “until what seems monstrous has one day become self-evident.” Who, in the democracies, had taken this warning seriously?

Notes