The First World War and National Socialism

2018 ◽  
pp. 47-61
Author(s):  
Benjamin Ziemann
2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-45
Author(s):  
Mariya K. Medvedeva

The article analyses the French journal “La Revue des Vivants” (1927–1935) as a source of studying the history of the Inter-war period. This journal, created by the veterans of the First World War, who at the same time represented the French intellectual elites, presents a unique combination of their war experience and current political agenda. The author examines three main subjects that characterized the political and social orientation of this journal. Firstly, its publishers and authors were deeply influenced by the First World War and its consequences. Its experience forced them to seek a better international system, where the repeat of such conflict would be impossible. This leads to the second subject, the European integration and the frame it was supposed to set. The idea of the united Europe was connected with the third subject, the relations with Germany, which could be successful only as a part of an international organization. The analysis of all these subjects brings a contradictory conclusion: despite all progressive and forward-thinking ideas of this journal, its publishers and authors failed to understand some important tendencies of their time (for example, the nature and the origins of the national socialism). However, this conclusion only confirms the nature of the Inter-war period as a time of many different ideologies and ideas and opens new perspectives of its studying.


Fascism ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-41
Author(s):  
Kristian Mennen

This article reconsiders traditional assumptions about the connection between the First World War and the rise of National Socialism in Germany, according to which politically radicalised war veterans joined the Freikorps after the war and formed the backbone of the Nazi membership and electorate. In questioning this view, the article first traces the political paths of actual veterans’ organisations. Whereas the largest veterans’ organisations were not politically active, the most distinctive ones – Reichsbanner and Stahlhelm – were not primarily responsible for a ‘brutalisation’ or radicalisation of Weimar political culture. Their definitions of ‘veteran’ and ‘front experience’ implicitly excluded the so-called ‘war youth generation’ from their narrative. Secondly, it is shown how representatives of this younger generation, lacking actual combat experience but moulded by war propaganda, determined the collective imagination of the First World War. The direct connection between the First World War and National Socialism can therefore primarily be found in the continuity of public and cultural imagination of war and of ‘war veterans’, and much less so in actual membership overlaps between veterans’ and Nazi movements.


2009 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 113-130
Author(s):  
Felicity Rash

This paper applies the methods of linguistic hermeneutics devised by Wengeler (2005) to the pre- and early First World War propaganda essays of Paul Rohrbach. The analysis illustrates the discourse strategies and rhetoric of this staunchly nationalist German writer who was also Settlement Commissioner to German South-West Africa between 1903 and 1906. The texts are good examples of German nationalist propaganda of the Second Empire and were widely read at the time of their publication and afterwards. Their influence is likely to have extended to the period after the First World War, when National Socialism was inchoate.


2021 ◽  
Vol 133 (4) ◽  
pp. 597-615
Author(s):  
Daniël Hendrikse

Abstract Dreaming of a state for the people. The German idea of a people’s state in the long nineteenth century (1789-1914)The idea of a people’s state was central to nineteenth-century German political thought from the aftermath of the French Revolution to the beginning of the First World War. However, it has not as yet been studied either systematically or thoroughly. This article explores the concept of the people’s state in German political texts, arguing that the people’s state has a double meaning: it could either be a state for the people, such as a republic, or a state with one supposedly homogenous population. The two notions are intertwined, and this could explain how the people’s state became a central idea in ideologies as diverse as socialism, liberalism, and nationalism, as well as anti-Semitism and national-socialism. The development of the idea of a people’s state in the nineteenth century is crucial for a better understanding of political thinking in twentieth-century Germany.


Author(s):  
Jane Caplan

‘National Socialism’ argues that the roots of Nazi ideology and politics can be traced to Germany and Austria between 1890 and 1914, the era when Hitler and other leading Nazis came of age. It highlights the emergence of radical visions of identity and community in imperial Germany, and their disruption by the unexpected outcome of the First World War. Defeat, revolution, and republic changed the rules of German politics, splitting the country and amplifying the political ambitions, ideological belligerence, and antisemitism of the radical right.


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