Translated from Rolf Gutte/Freerk Huisken, Alles bewältigt, nichts begriffen! Nationalsozialismus im Unterricht. Eine Kritik der antifaschistischen Erziehung, VSA-Verlag, Hamburg, 2007, p. 60-78.
The seizure of power – the failure of Weimar
As is well known, Hitler was appointed Reich Chancellor after an election in which the NSDAP received the most votes. In textbooks, this event is regularly talked about as a “seizure of power.”[1] Here, it is claimed, someone seized power by himself and exercised it undividedly. It was not, as it should have been, placed in his hands by the people and continually controlled by them. In this way, a process that is normal in democratic systems is declared to have been a sneak attack, if not a coup, as if the military had stormed a government palace overnight, forcibly ousted the old government and installed themselves in power. All sorts of familiar questions immediately arise that would not have occurred to anyone when Schmidt was replaced by Kohl: Who was to blame for Hitler’s rise to the Chancellor’s office? Who bears responsibility for his seizure of power? Who failed? What were the circumstances that made it possible for Hitler to seize power? For the democratically educated post-war citizen, these questions are quite natural, although they are far from addressing the facts rationally.
Politics is not explained by these kinds of questions, but culprits or circumstances responsible for a scandalous event are searched for. Whether power was seized illegally or a politician simply won an election, whether a recognized democrat is ruling the country or whether it is being ruined by an incompetent, power hungry politician, in short: whether the ruling figures are good or evil is the question of interest. What happened in Weimar is not up for debate. The only thing that needs to be explained is who or what is to blame for the fact that history deviated from the expectations of German politicians held by the guardians of the nation’s honor. The questions raised are the result of a perspective of disappointed national success. And this is why political events that are not at all unusual are retrospectively declared to be crimes for which special circumstances are said to be responsible. A post festum revaluation commences: politicians who make use of all the permitted means of the competition for power are retrospectively declared criminals, their national achievements are retrospectively declared undeserved “early successes,” the spirit of optimism they staged and celebrated becomes megalomania, the public party conferences become stagings of mass hysteria, their job creation programs become a way to deceive the people, and so on. In the eyes of the caretakers of the state defeat, none of the political achievements of the leadership are what they once were. In light of the state’s failure, all the ordinary measures of bourgeois politics become sheer treason or worse.
Since the main culprit has already been established to be the criminal Hitler, the most important question of guilt has been quickly and satisfactorily answered. However, it leads to the next one. Hitler’s criminal offense was neither snatching a purse nor insurance fraud, but rather leading a government and ruling a people, the majority of whom groveled before him at the beginning of his term in office. So the question is: how could such a criminal have come to power when the Weimar Republic was the first German democracy in which the people could cast their votes in free elections? What is certain is that, given what is known about the outcome of this policy, something went awry!
Even before taking a closer look at a school textbook, it is clear that it won’t provide any accurate information on the subject of the “seizure of power” and the “expansion of power” after the year 1930 if it takes the politics of the NSDAP as a crime and Hitler as Germany’s gravedigger.
Likewise, the authors of the textbooks and their academic mentors are convinced from the outset that the representatives of the Weimar democracy must have failed. After all, it was their job to prevent a Hitler from coming to power! This means that the politicians of the Weimar parties – SPD, DNVP, BVP or Zentrum – are assumed to have had the same condemnation of the NSDAP that post-war Germany came to. This ignores the fact that the assessment of National Socialist politics by bourgeois democratic parties before the end of the Second World War, and even more so before 1933, was different than it was after 1945. And if, according to this view, the leading Weimar parties – with the exception of the KPD, which did indeed oppose Hitler, but for reasons that are not acceptable today – pursued the goal of blocking Hitler’s access to power, then his appointment to chancellor makes it clear that the Weimar politicians failed because the NSDAP leader was able to “seize power.” The reasons for this alleged failure are then also obvious: since the democratic parties could not have lacked an anti-fascist political will, they must have lacked the means or the determination, and in any case the strength. In fact, the announced verdict is that Weimar democracy was too weak to prevail against a Hitler.
Too weak
If one examines this finding, and does not just focus on its relatively crude message, then one allegation must first be rejected: there could be no talk of an anti-Hitler front of democratic parties that was outmaneuvered by Hitler in the Weimar Republic. Rather, the parties, including the Social Democrats, agreed with Hitler that the KPD should not assume government responsibility under any circumstances if Germany wanted to regain its former greatness. From 1930 onwards, there was even an increase in domestic and foreign voices that saw “Hitler as a bulwark against Bolshevism.”[2]
Moreover, the NSDAP was not a bunch of outlaws, but a licensed party that, as is usual with political parties, wanted to win power. It regularly ran in elections and campaigned extensively. With its electoral successes between 1930 and 1932,[3] Hitler’s party became a sought-after coalition partner. The fact that it initially rejected coalition offers was due to a well-known calculation. If the upward trend continued, it believed it would no longer have to share power inside the government.
Such calculations are neither unusual nor the first signs of undemocratic machinations. They are just as much a part of parliamentary competition for power, since it is common in democracies to make do with shared power, or even just a small part of it, when popularity with voters is falling. When power is shared between parties, haggling over positions is just as common as publicly airing dirty laundry. Occasionally, a coalition that has just been formed collapses over this and the ability of the circle of ministers to govern can then only be secured with a moratorium of the remaining parties. The rule of a parliamentary minority – whether in the form of a transitional or presidential government – is not uncommonly the result.
Anyone who rediscovers the “rules of the game” of parliamentary democracy in this account, who thinks of post-war Italian conditions or German government coalitions but not of Weimar, is both correct and quite wrong. He is correct because the power shift that occurs when “the voters” fail once again and do not give any party an absolute majority can be observed in every democracy and says a lot about what the parties expect from the voters. This is precisely why he is wrong when he writes off the events in the Weimar Republic as “weakness and failure ”[4] and does not want to rediscover anything in the politics of the years 1930 to 1933 that he knows from the current democracy and has learned to appreciate as one of its strengths. Hitler initially adhered to precisely these democratic “rules of the game”: On January 30, 1933, as leader of the strongest party, he entered into a coalition with von Papen in which the NSDAP ministers were initially in the minority. This was confirmed by Hindenburg. As the coalition of NSDAP, Zentrum and DNVP proved to be incapable of “working,” new elections were called, which Hitler hoped would give him an absolute majority. He intended to make full use of the chancellor bonus and, as is well known, helped his cause with initial demonstrations of his strength, winning the elections on March 5, 1933 with 43% of all votes, giving him the legitimacy to install his one-party government.
The finding that the Weimar democracy was weak does not hold up in another respect. If one follows the ideology that democracy should be translated as popular sovereignty,[5] then one should actually consider it a strength of the Weimar Republic that the voice of the citizen counted more than it does today. Politically, the citizen had not yet been completely reduced to the voter. At that time, status and class organizations were still committed to substantive interests that they did not simply trust to be implemented by parliament alone. Questions about the economic system and the political order had not yet been definitively decided and secured by the state’s monopoly on violence, but were still “under debate” to a certain extent. Nor were the voters, as the true “sovereign,” deprived of party alternatives by bans or 5% clauses, either by reference to national political priorities or the need for effective governance. Rather, every political interest was allowed to constitute itself into a party, participate in elections, and was then represented in the Reichstag according to its number of votes, so that the Reichstag represented a “meticulous ‘empirical’ representation of the smallest groups of voters through proportional representation.”[6] There was therefore still a real pluralism in parliament. Accordingly, parties were not popular parties in today’s sense of merely expressing variants of the same national interest.
However, it is noticeable that all this was already a thorn in the side of the Weimar politicians. Even back then, they complained that a system that allowed citizens’ interests too much parliamentary and extra-parliamentary freedom prevented the unhindered exercise of government power. Forming a government, they complained, had to constantly deal with “unpredictable majorities” in the Reichstag and the government was regarded by many, who already then counted on the sovereignty of the cabinet, as a mere “parliamentary committee.”[7]
So Hitler was not the first to see this “weakness” and exploit it for his benefit. On the contrary, the Weimar constitutional fathers had already set about remedying this “evil.” They created institutions that heralded the emergence of “modern” post-war democracy: to ensure that the government’s dependence on the Reichstag did not hinder the passing of laws if no “constructive majority” could be found, the Reich President could appoint so-called presidential cabinets which exercised a kind of “dictatorial power” by means of emergency decrees (Art. 48). As is well known, these instruments were used extensively from 1930 onwards. And it was Hitler who very resolutely then used these instruments after 1933 to ensure effective government power, regardless of the “unclear” majority in parliament.
The failure of the parties
Strangely enough, it is precisely these two constitutional institutions, which the Weimar democracy used to ensure the unconditional ability of minority cabinets to govern, that are regarded in the textbooks as evidence of its weakness:
“After the break up of the Grand Coalition in 1930, the government, supported by the confidence of the majority of the parties in the Reichstag, was replaced by presidential cabinets that only wanted to govern with the help of emergency decrees under Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution and increasingly tried to disempower parliament. Later, Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution remained the last option for being able to govern at all in the political crisis of parliament. While the Reichstag had passed 98 laws in the proper[!] way in 1930, this figure fell to just 34 in 1931 and just 5 in 1932. The number of emergency decrees under Article 48 rose from 5 in 1930 to 44 in 1931 and finally to 60 in 1932.”[8]
The finding is: chaos, crisis, disorder. But what did the chaos and disorder consist of? The effectiveness of the presidential cabinets really can’t be denied. Nor did they lack diligence. But this is not how students should see the Weimar Republic. They should not point out that the parties’ distrust of the government could not have been very strong if they themselves approved the constitution that provided for presidential cabinets and emergency decrees; nor should it occur to them that the laws passed under Article 48 of the constitution at the time could hardly be considered “administrative offenses.” Nor should they dare ask why a divided parliament should actually be synonymous with the “crisis of parliamentarism.”[9]
They must take note of the fact that, according to the textbook authors, the Weimar constitutional guardians ignored the question of government legitimacy when “strengthening” the Weimar system. What the school textbooks subsequently notice is that the zealous governmental activity was exercised in a quasi-dictatorial manner. They neither criticize the content of the resolutions nor complain about the governments’ lack of effectiveness or their loss of authority in enforcing emergency decrees. Rather, they note that the shortcoming is that all decrees lacked majority approval. This is something that textbook democrats, who are supposed to prove that Hitler’s seizure of power was undemocratic, attach great importance to. And so they apply a standard of judgment that was never declared to be the highest guideline, even in those comfortable post-war conditions in which the “lessons of Weimar” were already valid. Regardless of what is decided in detail and regardless of the power with which a government decision is given, it is supposed to be democratically consecrated and unchallengeable solely by being legitimized by a majority of parliament or even the people behind the government. The legitimacy of government decisions is therefore not based on the parliamentary-democratic procedure itself, but is supposed to depend solely on having been approved by majorities. The textbook authors know only too well that there is no conflict between the ability to govern and legitimacy in any democracy. Whenever majorities are questionable, party discipline kicks in, members of parliament are bought, the obligation to obtain approval by parliament is questionable, the protest outside parliament comes from the “rabble,” it is the mark of a responsible ruler that he sometimes makes “lonely decisions,” etc. Only when majority legitimation by parliament and the people is obvious is it referred to separately and regarded as a great asset.
By contrast, these types of standards are applied strictly to the Weimar Republic: Only decisions legitimized by majorities are nicely democratic. Measured by this, Weimar is considered weak and unstable, and by this measure, Hitler was able to take advantage of a failure of Weimar.
So the lesson that future voters must learn is: Make democracy strong! Use your vote to ensure that strong majorities are achieved. Forgive the parties if they don’t care about your decision with their coalitions, because with an unhindered government based on majorities they make sure that a Hitler won’t have a chance. The fact that this very Hitler not only ruled effectively and unhindered by means of emergency decrees, but also created his parliamentary majorities and, on top of that, allowed himself to be legitimized by the people at mass events outside of parliament, does not detract from the lesson. Because all of this was an abuse of democracy – as can be seen from the outcome of Hitlerism. So the statement that Hitler came to power because of a failure of Weimar democracy is ultimately only proved by its reversal: Where a Hitler came to power, democracy must have been weak and failed.
In this analysis, the domestic and foreign policy goals that the governments had actually set themselves after the First World War, and the national problems they were faced with, are completely ignored. The textbooks assume that the sole, or at least primary, concern was the preservation of democracy against fascists and communists. As is well known, this was about the economic and political consequences of the war, reparations, the Treaty of Versailles, and the economic crisis. The central issue of the Weimar Republic was dealing with these national tasks, which the fascists wanted to participate in in their own way and which the communists, unfortunately, did not always refuse to take on. To this end, the country was governed by approved emergency decrees. If textbook authors and scholars see a failure of Weimar in this, then they are measuring this republic by completely wrong standards. They declare the form of rule to be an end, having previously idealized it. As if Müller, Brüning, von Papen and others were only motivated by the idea of establishing a democracy that the democratic-idealistic textbook authors of the second half of the 20th century could be proud of.
An own goal
In the course of this indoctrination, the authors of the textbooks score a number of own goals: “Getting used to governing without parliament ultimately gave the declared opponent of the parliamentary system of government, Adolf Hitler, the opportunity to gain power by formal legal means.”[10] On the one hand, the bourgeois parties are said to have suffered terribly from the fact that they – supposedly the guardians of democracy – could only govern with emergency decrees; on the other hand, they are said to have become so accustomed to this disgrace that they did not even notice that their democracy had been abolished! Nothing adds up. As avowed anti-fascists, shouldn’t they have done everything possible by emergency decree to block Hitler’s path to power instead of asking him to form a coalition after the 1932 elections, offering him even the chancellorship on January 30, 1933, while also agreeing to his wish for new elections and an Enabling Act beforehand? Since when do politicians offer co-regency to their declared enemies?! It’s downright silly to try to interpret von Papen’s invitation to the fascists to participate in government power as a way to disempower them. This would not have been so easy given the electoral success of the NSDAP and the lifting of the ban on the SA and SS by von Papen, nor did the Papen government even have such a thing in mind. The Zentrum and the German Nationals were in agreement with Hitler on key points of domestic and foreign policy, economic and regulatory policy, and already had worked together on policies. In cooperation with the fascists or with their tolerance, they had passed a number of emergency decrees and pushed them through against the SPD and KPD. They did not see the NSDAP as a political enemy, but as an increasingly strong and demanding competitor in the same cause: to free Germany from the shame of defeat and make it a world power again!
Since the facts are clear and something like this can’t be concealed, the textbooks are ready to score another own goal. Why were the “National Socialists’ promises of a ‘great’ Germany taken uncritically seriously and romantically idealized”?[11] Why was Hitler able to reach people “with slogans about the ‘restoration of German honor’ and the ‘national community’”? Why did his promise to prevent the “Bolshevik seizure of power” and to eliminate “high unemployment” go down so well?[12] If the Germans had concluded after 1918 that nationalism, imperialism, and capitalism would only bring them wars and hardship, that the “termination of reparations obligations” would certainly not secure their livelihoods, that commitment to “German honor” would only demand sacrifices from them, and that the “eradication of the disgrace of Versailles” would be tantamount to a new declaration of war, then the NSDAP wouldn’t have had a chance. Conversely, since the bourgeois parties, including the SPD, relied on the nationalism of the citizens of the Reich because they themselves considered the financial, territorial, economic, armaments and foreign policy revisions of the war results to be more important than the long-term security and improvement of the livelihoods of the people, it should come as no surprise that the National Socialist version of all these goals also resonated with the population. Even the supposedly more radical formulation of these concerns by Hitler – “Shake off the slave yoke of Versailles,” “Give way to the capable,” “Break the bondage of interest,” “Annihilate rapacious capital,” “Common good before self-interest,” “Fight against the corrupt parliamentary economy”[13] – and the already clear attribution of blame to “world Jewry,” whose “extermination” Hitler demanded early on,[14] were less offensive to parties and voters to the extent that the first goal of Weimar politics, the restoration of Germany’s former greatness, had not been achieved in other parliamentary constellations. The Weimar Republic would therefore only have been truly strong and successful if it had achieved the goals that the bourgeois democratic parties shared with the fascists without the fascists, perhaps even in conjunction with their complete elimination, on the basis of a secure parliamentary majority, i.e. including the SPD!
A failure of the voters
Following the same pattern used to criticize the parties, the voters are also blamed: “Of course, the millions of voters who made the NSDAP the relatively strongest party through their vote and brought Hitler into the discussion for government office in the first place must also be mentioned. They failed as democratic voters because they were prepared to relinquish their right to control parliament and government which they exercised through periodic voting.”[15]
This means that the parties that have just been accused of failure are off the hook again. According to this interpretation, they had no choice but to democratically follow the undemocratic vote and offer Hitler the government office. The voter, that unpredictable creature who annoyingly has to be taken into account in a democracy, supposedly chose his own immaturity when, having already been educated in revanchism by the bourgeois parties, he saw Hitler as the savior of Germany and voted for him. That the citizen as voter is only driven by the interest in exercising the right of control over parliament and government through “periodic voting,” that when voting he thinks neither of work nor income, neither of inflation nor nationalistically of “Versailles,” but just wants to preserve democracy like the government, is an invention of textbook authors who do not explain the Weimar Republic, but look for someone to blame within it.
Along the way, they proclaim their ideal of a voter who wants nothing in particular and therefore does not mess with the business of the established parties, who is satisfied if he is allowed to vote occasionally at all, sees this right as an honor bestowed upon him, and resigns himself to the conceit that his vote matters.
A “culture of obedience”
There isn’t a textbook that doesn’t relativize this attribution of blame in one way or another. It is popular to refer to the political socialization of the Reich citizens who must somehow not have been ready for democracy: “Growing up in a ‘high culture of obedience’ (W. Hennis), as was typical of political life before 1919, without experience of a democratic way of life, they considered the value of freedom and self-determination relatively low compared to the law and order promised by the ‘strong man’. With no experience in examining political programs for their actual content, they were confused by events and took refuge in the desire for an all-directing dirigistic authority.”[16]
Were the attempts at revolution instigated by communists and socialists in the German Reich after the First World War and then crushed by force of arms the sign of an authoritarian disposition and low regard for self-determination? Were the soviet republics that were set up, the demands for disarming the police and officer corps, for arming of the proletariat, for the expropriation of large landowners and capitalists, all testimony to the “high culture of obedience”?
The logic is simple: if the “right” party is elected, then the act of submitting to a process that gives up one’s own interest in the voting booth and empowers parties to form strong governments is considered an act of freedom and self-determination. If an uprising against the state and the military is organized or if the “wrong” party is elected, then it is certainly an act of submission to a dirigiste authority.
The reference to a “high culture of obedience” means nothing but that people were brought up that way and couldn’t change their ways. But what drove the voters who did not vote for Hitler – even in 1933, it was still 56% – is not up for debate. Had they already matured into democrats or were they just counting on a “dirigistic authority” led by social democrats?[17] Did they already have “experience with the democratic way of life”? If so, where did this experience come from? Did they vote for the other parties because they “saw through” Hitler? Did the SPD, DNVP or BVP gain the favor of voters because of or despite their “lack of experience”? Did these voters just fall for the right people? Or does everything that is said about NSDAP voters not apply to them – despite the same historical conditions of their political socialization?
It gets even more complicated. For the textbooks, it is not only clear that the people were not “democratically educated.” Moreover, they could not have been properly educated at all. For “a democratic, intellectual and social process of change would have required a much longer period than the years between 1919 and 1932.”[18]
Such a process takes time, they say. Strange, because after 1945 the larger half of the German people had already been so successfully re-educated in a short four years that they immediately and overwhelmingly voted for the right people. In contrast, however, the time after the First World War is said to have not been enough. The fact that it was far too short can be seen from the results! Period! This is the desired interpretation, which in no way wants to accept the finding that Hitler was elected by over 40% of the German people in 1933 because they trusted him to implement the political goals that were in the program of most of the Weimar parties and that were shared by the voters. It is not the political will of the citizens that is said to have dictated their voting decision, but rather that their vote for the NSDAP was simply the result of a lack of democratic experience, a lack of maturity or an authoritarian state deformation. The truth is simpler. It was not a lack of education, but rather an unfortunately quite successful national education that prompted parts of the German people, including many who had supported communism after the First World War, to vote for the conservatives and the fascists. This can be seen from the election results.
Bolshevism – the greater evil
From today’s perspective, the fact that some Germans had become convinced fascists is simply unacceptable: “Some, however, whether young or old, who voted for the NSDAP, did so only half-heartedly, out of fear of the growth of communism. As great as the reservations about Hitler may have been, he still appeared to be the lesser evil compared to the threat of Bolshevism.”[19]
Actually, most Germans were somehow against Hitler, according to this learning material, which thus continues the dialectic of correct and incorrect political wills. But since they were against the communists even more, they had no choice but to choose the lesser evil. This immediately makes sense to the anti-communist, educated post-war German, although this finding also lacks any coherence. The textbook authors’ judgment that there was really only a choice between the KPD and the NSDAP generously ignores their own criticism of the “fragmented party landscape” and no longer wants to know anything about their observation that any interest could constitute itself as a party in the Weimar Republic. Why didn’t the majority of these Germans actually vote for the SPD or the “moderate forces” of the Zentrumpartei? Why did these alleged opponents of Hitler not create a body for themselves that would have pursued their “well-being” and put an end to the choice between “evils”?
So there couldn’t have been much half-hearted support for the NSDAP born out of fear of communism. Anyone who feared a “communist seizure of power” and saw the Hitler Party as the sole force to prevent this had opted for the central point of Hitler’s program and subscribed to his radicalized diagnosis that communism meant the downfall of Germany: “14 years of Marxism have ruined Germany... The November criminals have ruined the German peasant state (and) created an army of unemployed ...”[20]
Interestingly, there is no indication in the textbooks as to whether students today should believe this portrayal or not. Do they want to claim that the voters were taken in by Hitler’s completely unjustified demonization of the communists, or do they want to teach students that Hitler was able to exploit an actual “ruining of Germany by Marxism” for his own purposes? The indecision on this question is no coincidence, because they are always caught in a dilemma whenever their anti-fascist arguments are faced with the anti-communist findings of the German fascists. On the one hand, they are only too willing to agree with the criticism that the KPD ruined Weimar. But since it is the fascists who are pilloried as the bad guys here and not the communists, the verdict is on the other hand a “distorted and horrifying picture” that sheds light on Hitler’s propaganda techniques.[21] The fact that they do not make up their minds on this issue is their whole decision.
Mass poverty leads to fascism
No textbook should be without the statement that the mass misery, for which communism or the global economic crisis are alternately blamed, made people susceptible to fascism at the time: “The domestic political climate created by the economic crisis with its mass poverty, increasing numbers of unemployed, rise in bankruptcies and extensive government austerity policies was a good breeding ground for the rise of National Socialism... In their desperation, many people were prepared to believe the promises and irrational slogans of Hitler and his party.”[22]
This type of argument has persisted to this day – without, by the way, the obvious conclusion being drawn from it. If this were the case, as historians and sociologists claim, then the simple panacea against fascism would be: Abolish the social causes of mass poverty! Prosperity for the masses! But since those who are warning against fascism today are identical to those who are once again imposing poverty on the masses – back then with emergency decrees, today more conveniently with cross-party approved social policies and a national Alliance for Work – nothing will ever come of this anti-fascism.
The argument implies something else. It claims that poverty makes people susceptible to fascism, which is why it is not poverty that needs to be eradicated, but rather that something needs to be done to counteract this susceptibility. Moral stabilization is required. This is also the aim of the textbooks, which teach the young that unemployment and wages on the verge of the subsistence level are not deplorable so much because more and more people don’t know how they are going to feed themselves, clothe themselves, and pay the rent, but because this poses a danger to the state. The state can fall into the wrong hands – this is the warning that young citizens should heed. As if in a state in the right, i.e. democratic, hands, the persistent economic hardships would be only half as bad!
The theoretical core of the susceptibility theory is also untenable. The hardship that occurs with unpleasant regularity among the income-dependent masses in capitalism does not in itself lead to any particular party-political choice.[23] A fascist attitude doesn’t automatically arise in the wake of unemployment, nor does the judgment that the rule of profit must be broken, nor does deep faith or unconditional loyalty to the state. The fact that unemployed people draw these and other conclusions already refutes the deterministic assertion. The objective situation in which people find themselves does not determine their thinking. Rather, it is the object of their thinking. It must first be thought through, a judgment must be made about it before one conclusion or another can be drawn. Far too often, those affected are less impressed by the actual causes of their economic situation than by common ideologies about it. Even today they are still more likely to blame immigrants or foreign countries, mismanagement or the interest-based rule of “rapacious capital” for layoffs than to accept the simple idea that capitalist companies are not institutions for creating jobs, but are only interested in profitable work. Since wrong nationalist conclusions clouded the judgment of those affected both at the end of the Weimar Republic and at the beginning of the “new era” after “reunification,” the sociological mind can apparently no longer imagine anything other than that fascism follows from hardships.
However, anyone who has successfully convinced the people that they are in the best hands under the ruling nation state should not be surprised if parts of their own team cling to this judgment, accuse the democratic leadership of weakness, and sympathize with the “far-right” alternative that sees a remedy in the establishment of a strong state.
The textbook wisdom, which stops here, is simple: the Germans were driven into Hitler’s arms by mass poverty. Here, too, it is said that Weimar failed and Hitler had an easy time of it. If the governments had decided on the armaments program before the “seizure of power,” which is still credited to Hitler today as a job creation measure, then Hitler would not have been able to prevail. Ultimately, the entire democratic finding about the “failure of Weimar” is based on just one message: if the democratic parties had shown strength, if they had maintained order in parliament and turned a “talking shop” into an organ of acclamation for the government, if they had banned the KPD, done away with the split parties, and committed every special interest to a political alternative approved by parliament, if they had given hope to the unemployed masses with job creation measures and thus given them back their faith in Germany, in short: If, as democrats, they had immediately adopted the standards of fascist criticism, then Hitler would not have come to power because the Weimar Republic would have then made him superfluous beforehand.
An enabled and forced conformity
Although the textbooks are not entirely unanimous on the question of whether German voters and politicians should or could have known what Hitler wanted to do with state power – some emphasize the seducer who deceived the masses, others cannot avoid mentioning his blatant hostility to parliamentary democracy, the “mockery born of dirt and fire”[24] – they all agree that Hitler only revealed his true anti-democratic character when he was in possession of state power: “Hitler had come to power legally, that is, lawfully and in accordance with the provisions of the constitution. From the very beginning, however, he had the intention of eliminating democracy.”[25]
In order to emphasize that the German democracy of the post-war era is the only guarantee of the final eradication of fascism, Hitler’s fascism is once again presented as the antithesis of democracy. Yet the textbooks themselves have to concede that, for all his fundamental criticism of the Weimar Republic, Hitler initially submitted to the constitution. He took part in elections, respected majorities, and even had the “Enabling Act” passed by the Reichstag in 1933 with a majority that amended the constitution.
So a politician named Hitler, who came to power legally, actually used all the means of the constitution to maintain and consolidate his power. This, the student learns, is an abuse of democracy. Such things are alien to democratic politicians: it is well known that, after establishing a government, they put their power up for debate, invite the opposition to discuss all national affairs without prejudice, discuss every bill with all those affected by mutual agreement, renounce the use of the majority to enforce their will, and immediately resign from all offices if they do not succeed in reaching a consensus on all issues of domestic and foreign policy. Any kind of cabal is alien to them, they do not know blackmail or party discipline, they consider poaching MPs to be a machination, and bribery by lobbies is punished with the loss of all offices!
The scandal is supposed to be that the National Socialists – like all politicians – had a decidedly instrumental relationship with democracy: they submitted to it where necessary, used it for their own benefit when possible, and overruled it – occasionally even democratically – when they had the opportunity. They saw it as a limited instrument for exercising political power, which had “degenerated into Marxism” in Weimar and therefore had to be overcome – especially in view of the “great national tasks” that required action and not parliamentary “chatter.” The fascists thus continued the Weimar tradition in several respects and radicalized it: With two emergency decrees approved by Hindenburg, they restricted freedom of the press, assembly and speech, abolished state sovereignty, and created the legal basis for the persecution of the KPD. What had begun with Severing’s “Public Protection Act” of 1930, continued with Brüning’s emergency decree “To combat political excesses” in 1931, and was intensified once again with the emergency decree on press coordination in the same year,[26] was radicalized by the fascists in both substance and parliamentary form. The restriction of civil liberties for dissidents was followed by the further disempowerment of party competition, which had been provided for in Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution and had already been practiced since the first presidential cabinet under Brüning.
The dismantling of basic rights
Textbooks rarely mention the fact that Hitler was entirely in the tradition of the Weimar Republic in this respect. They also leave readers in the dark as to what is actually to be criticized about the ban on political parties, the coordination of the press, the ban on strikes and demonstrations, etc. The presentation of the learning material relies on the fact that it should have long been clear to everyone that these were crimes against freedom.
“The things you weren’t allowed to do back then, terrible!” is the tenor with which a comparison to the present day is imagined and morally exploited. As if nowadays the destruction of democratic culture is immediately lamented if a day goes by without a strike or demonstration! At the same time, young people are taught that a democracy which, in contrast to fascism, grants citizens such freedoms does not deserve to be constantly protested and demonstrated against. Students in this country learn early on that, as Germans, they owe it to “their” past to uphold the civil liberties of post-war democracy as an anti-fascist achievement. The bottom line is that fascism forbids people from doing things that citizens in a democracy, from their own insight, should forbid themselves because they are not forbidden.
It is easy to see from the textbook presentation of the “Coordination policy” that the task is to uncritically celebrate the basic rights because fascism abolished them. This replaces any concern with the question of what these basic rights are all about and for whose benefit the state-granted permission to express something that deviates from the state’s course without being punished or sent to a concentration camp exists in the first place. The principle of these civil liberties can be derived from both the fascist ban and the democratic permission. In either case, it is a calculation of state power and not about the freedom of citizens to criticize as much as they like, to register protests and to demand redress when they discover a reason for complaint in their everyday lives that is addressed to a state or state-protected institution. But who would expect textbooks, in criticizing the abolition of basic rights under fascism, to include criticism of what was being abolished?
The end of the rule of law
Moreover, the judgment that the “emergency decrees meant the end of the rule of law”[27] is also incorrect. For just as democratic politics constructs its own rule of law, Hitler did the same with the fascist rule of law: he transformed it into an instrument of his politics. Even after 1933, things were still governed by the rule of law, i.e. according to the letter of the respective constitution. On March 24, 1933, the politicians in the Reichstag authorized Hitler to remove themselves from power and thereby approved an emergency decree for issuing emergency decrees in perpetuity. Hitler abolished the parties, the majority of which had thereby declared themselves superfluous, with the exception of the NSDAP, and also dissolved the dependency on presidential governments. He disempowered the Reich President by combining his office with that of Chancellor in his person, which was “legitimized” by Hindenburg’s policy of approval. Hindenberg was subsequently found to be “senile” because he signed Hitler’s emergency decrees. His signatures under the same exemptions made by Brüning or von Papen were still accepted as the result of far-sighted political decisions in difficult times.
Hitler accomplished all of this in a very short time, not to create a monument to himself as an anti-democrat, but to gain freedom for his fascist policies. In order to gather all national forces and concentrate them on the one goal of giving Germany the role in the world that was its “destiny” or “providence,” he did not need domestic political enemies, not domestic political competition, but only a dedicated people’s community of Germans. The fact that the abolition of democracy is the only thing recorded in the textbooks about this completion of the logic of the Weimar constitution by the National Socialists can be explained by the fact that the textbook writers do not want to criticize anything in Hitler’s first year as Reich Chancellor except as a deviation from democracy. This is therefore already considered something worth striving for and preserving. A proper presentation would not reject the finding that Hitler established a dictatorship, i.e. an autocracy, but only the judgment that this was a crime against democracy. The fact that fascism abolishes democracy does not ennoble the latter, just as fascism is not criticized by democrats denying any similarity to it. But the lesson about the “seizure of power” does not achieve much more than that. We don’t learn anything sensible about either fascism or democracy when democrats emphasize that their political system is beyond criticism simply because it is not fascist.
The unwanted lesson: Totalitarian lessons from Weimar – or: Democracy makes fascism superfluous
This is what students are supposed to learn:
The “seizure of power,” they are taught, brought about the end of democracy and ushered in the beginning of dictatorship. The “weakness” of the Weimar Republic was responsible for this development. The Weimar politicians, they go on to learn, acted out of a “false understanding of the liberal concept of freedom.” They failed to ensure a majority capable of governing and of eliminating the “enemies of freedom” in good time. So the students should take to heart the message that democracy must be made strong and any attack on it must be resisted. Since mass unemployment also makes people susceptible to fascism, it is particularly important in times of economic hardship not to follow false prophets, but to remain loyal to the democratic state.
The following insights are, by contrast, undesirable: 1. This praise of democracy is untenable. This is shown by the lessons that the fathers of the constitution are said to have learned from Weimar after 1945. But they did not learn any lessons – which is not important anyway – but rather cobbled together a constitution for their national political interests for the future and successfully sold it as a blessing for the German people by citing an alleged fascist abuse of Weimar democracy.
A closer look at the “Lessons from Weimar” reveals everything we need to know about democracy. The guiding principle of the drafters of the Basic Law, who were concerned about the unhindered exercise of power, was: If a constitution allows illiberal forces to democratically gain access to power through electoral majorities, then it is too liberal. Citizens must not be given the chance to elect “illiberal forces.” The creators of the Weimar Constitution had overlooked, says Carlo Schmid, “that in the modern mass world there are a thousand ways of secretly incapacitating the formally[!] responsible citizen, and so their principle of unrestricted freedom itself led to the murder of freedom.”[28] A conscious departure from the “value-neutral relativistic principle of the state”[29] was therefore called for. Only if the constitution consciously restricts freedom and is intolerant can it be truly democratic and thus committed to freedom.[30] This contradiction says a lot about democracy. It shows that post-war democracy itself cleared up the misunderstanding that all “political and intellectual forces must be given completely free rein.”[31]
In the interests of stable government, “false tolerance” must be prevented, is one lesson from Weimar. The undisturbed exercise of rule therefore in the ruling democracy goes through the parliamentary constitution of the people’s interests to the government. If all “political and intellectual forces” are permitted, the message is that there will only be disputes in parliament and proper governance will hindered. It must therefore be ensured, firstly, that not every interest present in the people can be constituted in parliament and, secondly, that the interests admitted in parliament that want to influence government do not hinder the government.
The “Lessons from Weimar” present the ideal of a totalitarian democracy:
■ It has been implemented with the constitutional obligation of all Germans to defend democracy (Article 21.2 of the Basic Law). The constitution has thus declared the political process, which supposedly represents the best of all possibilities for allowing the people to make sovereign decisions, to be the highest political purpose which every particular interest of the people must subordinate itself to and even crushes any questioning of this process.
■ This is why it is possible to ban parties that do not subordinate themselves to this purpose or are considered “enemies of democracy.” “Illiberal forces” that do not know how to use democracy properly encounter constitutional institutions that can invoke the law and the Basic Law to eliminate unruly competition because this interest has been elevated to constitutional status.
■ All authorized, i.e. democratically approved, parties are condemned to parliamentary success by the 5% clause. Parliament does not protect political minorities and ensure their appropriate articulation but, on the contrary, is protected from them.
■ Furthermore, the formation of a government must not be disrupted by “splinter” and “single issue” parties that may only be interested in their own particular interests, such as phasing out nuclear power, reducing local transport fares, securing pensions or kindergarten places for every child, but have no concept for the national economy, defending national borders, the European Union or the future of NATO. This is why all parties running for election are required to present a program that does not clearly formulate their own concerns, but presents a politically balanced concept on all issues of national and world politics, even if this is not in their interest. This prevents parliament from being abused by selfish or even materialistic desires. These are not compatible with national political interests.
■ This is why political parties have also been given the legal task of participating in the political education of the people. Citizens should first be educated to reformulate their “selfish” private concerns in such a way that they fit in with the programs of the popular parties that are capable of governing and concerned with protecting democracy and the nation. That can then easily be found in the programs.
The way citizens formulate their concerns from a daily life dominated by worries about work and income, housing and rent, health and vacations is therefore completely useless for a German democracy that has learned from Weimar. They may demand consideration from parliament and complain if this is not granted. Anyone who does not want to understand that they have to serve democracy is already close to being an enemy of the state.
■ So if all parties that are permitted and committed to democratic Germany are ultimately able to form coalitions with each other, there is no need for a presidential power alongside parliament to confirm governments that parliament is unable to legitimize. Emergency rules that can be used to suspend democracy in a completely democratic way are then only there for “real emergencies” and no longer for those that some parties arbitrarily declare, perhaps even invoking a parliamentary majority – as is said to have happened in Weimar and 1933.[32]
2. People who are dissatisfied with the political and economic conditions of democracy do not have a political instrument in the parliamentary system with which they can express their dissatisfaction and present programs to remedy the situation. Rather, they are seen as a danger to democracy. They are quickly suspected of being among its enemies. As we are supposed to learn from Weimar, these include firstly the political left-wing forces in the form of communists and radical socialists, secondly the right-wing forces in the form of the National Socialists, and thirdly the school textbooks also include among these enemies the mass poverty of the population which is said to be somehow connected to the global economic crisis and to have led to fascism.
And since they can politically eliminate two of these three enemies of democracy, the fathers of the constitution also wrote this into the Basic Law and passed it off as a lesson of Weimar.
The fascists – who, after all, also propagated bourgeois rule, respected capital ownership, and put the nation’s success above anything else, and who must therefore be counted as competitors rather than as enemies of the democrats – were declared enemies because they represented the predecessor state and were ostracized as war losers who had plunged Germany into the misfortune of division, loss of sovereignty, and global political downgrading. It is no secret why democrats knew that a Communist Party, one which took part in elections after 1945 and played an opposition role in parliament, professed anti-fascism and praised democratic ideals, was to be counted among the “enemies of the constitution.” The only thing judged is the party’s position on the state and the mode of production. Communists want to change both of these things, which is why they are seen as opponents of freedom and advocates of a coercive economy, even if, like the German communists, they initially campaigned for a fairer distribution of wealth.
Democracy is therefore a specific form of political rule that is intended to advance the capitalist mode of production. This is the only reason why the parties are concerned about whether the voters are voting correctly. Their will is only important if they agree with the preliminary decisions of every democratic election and have already made their three most important crosses before entering the polling booth: One cross behind “market economy,” one behind “democracy” and a very big one behind “Germany.”
3. This is why the third “enemy” of democracy, which textbooks see in mass unemployment, is also dealt with differently. Not only can it not simply be banned by the Basic Law. Strictly speaking, it is not an “enemy,” not even a danger, but a thoroughly undesirable effect of the mode of production that democracy seeks to safeguard.
Unemployment is the result of the fact that the capitalist mode of production does not derive its wealth from the use of labor, but solely from the use of profitable labor. This includes the periodic and chronic non-employment of those workers whose work is not profitable. And not infrequently the pressure on workers’ wages that this creates contributes to making them even more profitable. Mass unemployment is therefore not a political threat to democracy, but at best a fact that those threatened by it could draw undesirable conclusions from and join the enemies of democracy rather than the democrats. That is why democrats do everything they can to prevent such wrong conclusions. They are not thinking about eliminating mass unemployment.
4. With powerful foreign policy allies, the local democratic parties of the post-war period “resisted all the beginnings” and politically decided the class struggle in favor of the advocates of increasing capitalist wealth as the overarching national goal. They also did not deal squeamishly with any attempts to organize extra-parliamentary criticism of capitalist wealth production. This could be seen early on in their commitment to being a “well-fortified democracy.”
So German democracy in its “highest stage” consists of a bloc of bourgeois democrats who take turns looking after national concerns and who are regularly confirmed in their rule by an overwhelming majority of voters. Left-wing and right-wing forces play no parliamentary role in this country and lead an insignificant existence outside parliament. Those still tolerated are regularly faced with the alternative of being politically integrated into the parliamentary system or being eliminated.
As times become tougher for the nation, the mainstream parties are dropping all pretense of political differences and the “real” national concerns are becoming increasingly clear to the fringe parties. In the face of millions of unemployed people, massive budget problems and threats to the strength of the nation’s currency, they are suddenly discovering that democracy is no longer a high value that needs to be preserved, but rather a method of securing power that is cumbersome and time-consuming, distracts from political necessities, and requires the staging of a parliamentary clash that is not justified by the political programs of the parties.
This criticism of democracy in the name of effective government in difficult times by the parliamentarians themselves has recently led to the suggestion that elections should not be allowed to interfere with political business.[33] This was rejected because, on the one hand, the parties still rate their competition for government power quite highly and, on the other, because they have come a long way in the art of staging politics as an election campaign.
Democrats are also familiar with state situations in which the usual democratic instruments of rule are completely useless and recourse to the popular vote is inopportune. Democrats have made provisions for such cases, known as states of emergency, in which all opposition – whether parliamentary or extra-parliamentary – loses its rights, in which decisions must be made quickly and decisively by a powerful leadership without the “time-consuming” process of having the people authorize parties to govern. Quite democratically, they adopt an emergency constitution that suspends democracy if parliament decides that the state is in an internal or external emergency situation.
In this way, modern democracy has made fascism superfluous.[34]
[1] It is often mentioned that it was the NSDAP itself that declared January 30, 1933 the “day of the seizure of power.” It wanted to underline its triumph. Today’s textbook writers use the same term – with or without quotation marks – to characterize the downfall of democracy. The critical discussion of this term, as can be read in the brochure of the Federal Agency for Civic Education, for example, underlines this. It says that Hitler did not initially have “unrestricted powers to rule,” but was only given the task of forming a government. Hitler then pursued this task with the “tactic” of getting rid of the “rein-holders” – Hindenburg and von Papen – as soon as possible. And that’s when things became terribly undemocratic. (see: Der Nationalsozialismus, Informationen zur politischen Bildung [National Socialism, Information on Political Education], volumes 123/126/127; 1982 reprint, Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung edition [Federal Agency for Political Education], Bonn 1991, p. 23 [cited subsequently as: Der Nationalsozialismus]).
[2] W. Ruge, Deutschland 1917-1933, Berlin (East) 1978, p. 377.
[3] In July 1932 it was 37.4%, in November 1932 33.1% and in March 1933 already 43.9%; from: Der Nationalsozialismus, p. 25.
[4] H. Möller, Parlamentarismus-Diskussion in der Weimarer Republik, in: Funke/Jacobsen/Knütter/Schwarz (ed.), Demokratie und Diktatur, Schriftenreihe der Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, Band 250, Bonn 1987, p. 145.
[5] Spiegel der Zeiten, Bd. 4, Frankfurt 1971, p. 195.
[6] H. Möller, ibid., p. 153.
[7] Ibid., p. 154.
[8] Th. Berger, Der Nationalsozialismus, Arbeits- und Quellenhefte, Frankfurt 1990, p. 11.
[9] H. Möller, ibid., p. 141.
[10] Th. Berger, ibid, p. 11.
[11] Der Nationalsozialismus, p. 22.
[12] Th. Berger, ibid., p. 11.
[13] W. Ruge, ibid., p. 348.
[14] See Hitler’s speech of August 1920: “Why are we anti-Semites?” (in R.H. Phelps, Hitlers ‘grundlegende’ Rede über den Antisemitismus, Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte Vol. 16(4), 1968, p. 417.
[15] Der Nationalsozialismus, p. 21.
[16] Ibid.
[17] In the Reichstag elections of 1932/33, the SPD was the second strongest party, the Centre and the Bavarian People’s Party were the third strongest party, followed by the KPD.
[18] Der Nationalsozialismus, p. 23.
[19] Volksstaat und Völkergemeinschaft, Book 4, Stuttgart 1960 (Klett-Verlag), p. 27.
[20] Der Nationalsozialismus, p. 25.
[21] Ibid., p. 25.
[22] Th. Berger, ibid., p. 11.
[23] Incidentally, Hitler saw misery as the reason for susceptibility to Bolshevism and therefore tried to eliminate the worst excesses of mass misery by functionalizing wage labor for his war preparation program. According to textbook theory, the masses would then have had to flee from him in droves. Instead, as we know, they praise him to this day for creating “work and bread.”
[24] A. Hitler, Mein Kampf, München 1942, p. 85.
[25] Erlebnis Geschichte ibid., p. 9.
[26] See W. Ruge, ibid., pp. 355, 389.
[27] Fragen an die Geschichte, Bd. 4, Bielefeld 1971, p. 117.
[28] Carlo Schmid, Politik und Geist, Stuttgart 1961, p. 49.
[29] E. Denniger (ed.), Freiheitliche demokratische Grundordnung I, Frankfurt 1977, p. 403.
[30] E. Denniger, ibid., p. 173.
[31] Abiturwissen Geschichte, ed. F. Schultes, Augsburg 1994, p. 126.
[32] The minutes of the “Parliamentary Council” from 1948-1949 are clear on this point. It is emphasized that the Third Reich did not come into being through emergency decrees, but through the “criminal act of the Enabling Act,” that the right to issue emergency decrees is “objectively absolutely indispensable,” that – to give one example – a strike can prevent parliament from meeting (“How can parliament meet and reach a quorum during a total transportation strike?”), that perhaps “the orders for emergency measures can be limited in time” (C. Schmid), etc. (from: Der Parlamentarische Rat 1948-1949, Akten und Protokolle, Vol. 2, Boppard am Rhein, p. 421).
[33] This is what SPD politician Verheugen said in a 1994 interview with Spiegel.
[34] Interesting facts about democracy in: Gegenstandpunkt.