scholarly journals Weimar Culture and the Rise of National Socialism: The Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur

1991 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 402-423 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan E. Steinweis
Keyword(s):  
National Socialism ◽  
German Economy ◽  
German Society ◽  
Organizational Strategies ◽  
National Socialist ◽  
Socialist Movement ◽  
German People ◽  
Weimar Culture ◽  
Political Turmoil ◽  
To Receive

Between 1928 and 1932, the National Socialist movement transformed itself from an insurgent fringe party into Germany's most potent political force. The most important factor in this dramatic turnabout in political fortunes was the rapid deterioration of the German economy beginning in 1929. It does not, however, logically follow that the German people simply fell into the lap of the party and its charismatic leader. To the contrary, the party aggressively employed sophisticated propagandistic and organizational strategies for attracting and mobilizing diverse segments of German society. With the onset of the economic crisis, and the consequent social and political turmoil, the party stood ready to receive, organize, and mobilize Germans from all social strata.

Fritz: Nazi Propagandist

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristen Renwick Monroe
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
National Socialism ◽  
Nazi Party ◽  
Nazi Regime ◽  
National Socialist ◽  
Socialist Movement

This chapter showcases a Dutch collaborator named Fritz. Fritz shared many of Tony's prewar conservative opinions in favor of the monarchy and traditional Dutch values, although he was of working-class origins, unlike Tony and Beatrix, who were Dutch bourgeoisie. But unlike Beatrix or Tony, Fritz joined the Nazi Party, wrote propaganda for the Nazi cause, and married the daughter of a German Nazi. When he was interviewed in 1992, Fritz indicated he was appalled at what he later learned about Nazi treatment of Jews but that he still believed in many of the goals of the National Socialist movement and felt that Hitler had betrayed the movement. Fritz is thus classified as a disillusioned Nazi supporter who retains his faith in much of National Socialism, and this chapter is presented as illustrative of the psychology of those who once supported the Nazi regime but who were disillusioned after the war.

Fichte and National Socialism

1942 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 460-470 ◽  
Author(s):  
F. W. Kaufmann
Keyword(s):  
National Socialism ◽  
Human Relations ◽  
National Socialist ◽  
German Nation ◽  
German Philosopher ◽  
Humanitarian Values ◽  
German People ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Right ◽  
External Form

Next to Hegel and Nietzsche, Fichte is the German philosopher most frequently blamed as one of the principal inspirers of the National Socialist ideologies of state despotism and the superiority of the German people. Indeed, it is not difficult to find in Fichte's work any number of passages which might be interpreted in such a way as to corroborate these views. In the writings of his middle period, around 1800, Fichte arrives at a despotism of reason which in its practical application might be even more consistently restraining than the rule of our modern dictators. In his programmatic speeches for the restoration of the German nation, he ascribes to his people a divine mission which has shocked many of his interpreters. Therefore we cannot be surprised that historians who, in accordance with the demands of their profession, lay more stress on the effects of thoughts and actions than on the intentions which motivate them, attribute to Fichte a good share of responsibility for the ideology of the National Socialist party and its hold on the German people. Yet these historians are right only with regard to the external form, while the intended aims of the two systems of thought are diametrically opposed to one another.On the whole, Fichte is a moral idealist whose principal concerns are the political and inner freedom of the individual, the right and duty of the individual to contribute his best to the welfare and the cultural progress of his nation, the independence of all nationalities, social security, and an acceptable standard of living for every human being. These demands are based on a genuine respect for the dignity of man and the desire to contribute to the rule of humanitarian values in all human relations. The National Socialist, on the contrary, is fundamentally an egotistic materialist, a ruthless Herrenmensch, with a deep-rooted contempt for freedom, equality, and all humanitarian values.

NO INNER REMIGRATION: MARTIN HEIDEGGER, ERNST JÜNGER, AND THE EARLY FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF GERMANY

2012 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 661-679 ◽  
Author(s):  
DANIEL MORAT
Keyword(s):  
Federal Republic ◽  
Martin Heidegger ◽  
National Socialism ◽  
Early Years ◽  
The Political ◽  
Federal Republic Of Germany ◽  
Allied Occupation ◽  
National Socialist ◽  
Political Sphere ◽  
Socialist Movement

Martin Heidegger and Ernst Jünger rightly count among the signal examples of intellectual complicity with National Socialism. But after supporting the National Socialist movement in its early years, they both withdrew from political activism during the 1930s and considered themselves to be in “inner emigration” thereafter. How did they react to the end of National Socialism, to the Allied occupation and finally to the foundation of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1949? Did they abandon their stance of seclusion and engage once more with political issues? Or did they persist in their withdrawal from the political sphere? In analyzing the intellectual relationship of Heidegger and Jünger after 1945, the article reevaluates the assumption of a “deradicalization” (Jerry Muller) of German conservatism after the Second World War by showing that Heidegger's and Jünger's postwar positions were no less radical than their earlier thought, although their attitude towards the political sphere changed fundamentally.

scholarly journals Heidegger’s metapolitics

2016 ◽  
pp. 229-244
Author(s):  
Rastko Jovanov
Keyword(s):  
National Socialism ◽  
Political Engagement ◽  
Educational Institutions ◽  
Modern Democracy ◽  
National Socialist ◽  
Modern Politics ◽  
German People

This paper examines Heidegger?s political engagement on the basis of the concept of meta-politics, which Heidegger for the first and only time introduced in his so-called ?Black Notebooks?, written during his 1933/34 Rectorship at the Freiburg University. Through the concept of ?metapolitics?, Heidegger attempts to deconstruct the modern politics by demanding that the theoretical reflections after Hitler's takeover of power in national socialist Germany give priority to the (spiritual) action. Philosophical concepts thereby operate as a ?weapon? in the struggle against modern democracy and are put into service of the German people, understood as ?true community?, which is the only one capable to ask the question of the Being from the horizon of the ?metaphysics as metapolitics?. Heidegger labelled his political engagement as a ?spiritual National Socialism? and tried to implement it through the reshaping of the German educational institutions. Thus, one part of the paper will also examine his understanding of the education as a means of his political engagement. In conclusion, this paper strives to show the ambivalence, agonism and the messianism of Heidegger's philosophical conception of the politics, but also the unavoidable Antisemitism of his theoretical and political engagement.

Die Deutschen Briefe: Gurian and the German Crisis

1955 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-72 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. A. Fitzsimons
Keyword(s):  
Personal Experience ◽  
National Socialist ◽  
National Socialists ◽  
Moral Crisis ◽  
Socialist Movement ◽  
To Receive ◽  
Stateless Person

In 1934 Waldemar Gurian had the wriest of pleasures, when he was forced to recognize that his very pessimistic analysis of the National-Socialist movement was correct. He fled from Germany to Switzerland where he was soon joined by his wife and daughter. In the extremely straitened circumstances of an emigré, soon to receive official notification that he was a stateless person, he had to face simultaneously the tasks of earning a living and of carrying on his work as a Catholic writer who combined scholarship and publicism. He was a profound student of Bolshevism. But his study, personal experience and the progress of events emphasized that Europe then faced a more dangerous threat than Russian Bolshevism. The threat stemmed from the control of Germany by the National-Socialists, who skilfully exploited a moral crisis in Germany and all of Europe, to gain and, then systematically and totally, to consolidate power in Germany. The menace to Europe was all the more dire, because the Nazis had disguised their totalitarian movement in the mask of anti-Bolshevism and so the danger went unrecognized.

“The Dying Middle”: Weimar Germany and the Fragmentation of Bourgeois Politics

1972 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Larry Eugene Jones
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Economic Crisis ◽  
German Economy ◽  
German Society ◽  
World War ◽  
National Socialist ◽  
Dramatic Character ◽  
The World ◽  
World Economic ◽  
World Economic Crisis

On September 14, 1930, the National Socialist German Workers' Party led by Adolf Hitler scored its first national triumph by polling over six million votes and winning more than a hundred seats in the German Reichstag. Its gains came mainly at the expense of the established bourgeois parties. The success of the National Socialists stemmed primarily from the ability of Hitler and his colleagues to articulate the anxieties and frustrated ambitions of the German middle class. These anxieties grew out of a multitude of factors, of which the world economic crisis was the most spectacular. But the dramatic character of the world economic crisis has generally obscured the extent to which these anxieties were the product of certain long-range factors present in the structure of German society ever since the end of the previous century. In the period before World War I the German economy underwent a series of changes which resulted in a partial rationalization of its productive and distributive processes. This process was accelerated during the course of World War I and reached a climax in the middle of the 1920's before the world economic crisis deprived German management of the capital it needed for the purposes of rationalization.

scholarly journals Forbidden Words, Banished Voices: Jewish Refugees at the Service of BBC Propaganda to Wartime Germany

2018 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-119
Author(s):  
Sheer Ganor
Keyword(s):  
National Socialism ◽  
Performing Arts ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
German Society ◽  
Radio Waves ◽  
Jewish Refugees ◽  
German Speaking ◽  
Intimate Knowledge ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
German People

During the Second World War, the BBC operated a German Service, which was tasked with broadcasting propaganda programs into Nazi Germany and occupied Europe. Psychological warfare was transmitted through radio waves to spread defeatism on the fighting front and amongst civilians, and to convince the German people that there was no future for the Third Reich. Dozens of German-speaking Jews who fled Central Europe and arrived in England as refugees found employment in the German Service. Many of these individuals worked as journalists, actors, comedians or authors in their previous homelands, some had even earned a degree of fame and recognition before the persecutory policies of National Socialism restricted their lives and forced them into exile. From the perspective of BBC officials, these refugees’ experience in the press and in the performing arts, as well as their intimate knowledge of German society and culture, set them in a unique position to create effective and powerful propaganda. This paper explores how, branded as unwelcome outsiders by their native societies, it was precisely their familiarity as ‘insiders’ that paradoxically primed them to perform the task.

scholarly journals Depopulation: On the Logic of Heidegger’s Volk

2017 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 297-330 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicolai Krejberg Knudsen
Keyword(s):  
Detailed Analysis ◽  
Socialist Revolution ◽  
National Socialist ◽  
The People ◽  
Socialist Movement ◽  
German People

Abstract This article provides a detailed analysis of the function of the notion of Volk in Martin Heidegger’s philosophy. At first glance, this term is an appeal to the revolutionary masses of the National Socialist revolution in a way that demarcates a distinction between the rootedness of the German People (capital “P”) and the rootlessness of the modern rabble (or people). But this distinction is not a sufficient explanation of Heidegger’s position, because Heidegger simultaneously seems to hold that even the Germans are characterized by a lack of identity. What is required is a further appropriation of the proper. My suggestion is that this logic of the Volk is not only useful for understanding Heidegger’s thought during the war, but also an indication of what happened after he lost faith in the National Socialist movement and thus had to make the lack of the People the basis of his thought.

scholarly journals Organising National Socialism: Nazi Organisation in Sweden and the Netherlands, 1931–1939

2021 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 351-365
Author(s):  
Nathaniël Kunkeler
Keyword(s):  
The Netherlands ◽  
National Socialism ◽  
Final Analysis ◽  
National Context ◽  
National Socialist ◽  
Organisational Model ◽  
Party Cohesion ◽  
Socialist Movement ◽  
Demographic Distribution ◽  
National Infrastructure

This article compares the party apparatuses of the National Socialist Movement of the Netherlands and the National Socialist Workers’ Party of Sweden. These two parties, founded in the 1930s, both to some extent mimicked the organisational model of Hitler's party in Germany. While this has been frequently noted, the deployment of this model in practice has not been analysed in any detail. The article explores the specific characters of the Swedish and Dutch fascist party organisations diachronically vis-à-vis propaganda, member activism and internal cohesion, highlighting their changes, successes and failures. The comparison reveals that the party apparatus was highly dependent on the specifics of national infrastructure, demographic distribution and urbanisation and the physical landscape, with notable consequences for internal party cohesion and morale. In the final analysis the relative appeal and popularity of the parties is shown party be the result of how the Nazi organisational model was deployed in practice within each national context.

scholarly journals Latvia’s Pērkonkrusts: Anti-German National Socialism in a Fascistogenic Milieu

Fascism ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 169-193
Author(s):  
Matthew Kott
Keyword(s):  
National Socialism ◽  
Essential Element ◽  
National Socialist ◽  
Apparent Paradox ◽  
German Occupation ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Socialist Movement

Aside from equating it with Hitlerism, there have been few scholarly attempts to define national socialism and specify its relation to the broader category of fascism. This article posits that national socialisms are a sub-genus of fascism, where the distinguishing feature is an ultaranationalism based on a palingenetic völkisch racism, of which anti-Semitism is an essential element. Thus, national socialism is not just mimetic Hitlerism, as Hitler is not even necessary. National socialist movements may even conceivably be opposed to the goals and actions of Hitlerism. To test this definition, the case of Latvia’s Pērkonkrusts [Thunder Cross] movement is analysed. Based on an analysis of its ideology, Pērkonkrusts is a national socialist movement with a völkisch racialist worldview, while also being essentially anti-German. The case study even addresses the apparent paradox that Pērkonkrusts both collaborated in the Holocaust, and engaged in resistance against the German occupation regime.

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