Campaigning Against Bolshevism: Catholic Action in Late Weimar Germany

2018 ◽  
Vol 53 (3) ◽  
pp. 550-573
Author(s):  
Klaus Große Kracht
Keyword(s):  
Interwar Period ◽  
Weimar Republic ◽  
Nazi Party ◽  
Catholic Action ◽  
Weimar Germany ◽  
Fertile Soil ◽  
The Right

Under the banner of ‘Catholic Action’, Pius XI called the laity during the interwar period to struggle for a worldwide ‘re-Christianization of society’. Whatever this meant in detail, a religious frontline against communism was an essential part of the papal programme. Catholic anti-communism was not just a reaction to anticlerical communist ideas, however; rather, it accompanied the development of communist and socialist parties in Europe from the very beginning. As I will show in this article through the example of the diocese of Berlin, this papal anti-communism fell on fertile soil in the Catholic milieu of the Weimar Republic, and especially so within Catholic Action. At the head of Catholic Action in Berlin was Erich Klausener, who would later become a prominent victim of the so-called Night of the Long Knives (30 June 1934), when Hitler had a number of his political opponents on both the right and left executed. As we shall see, though, the activists of Catholic Action saw their political enemy less in the ascendant Nazi Party and more in communist propaganda, which they tried to defeat with all the means at their disposal.

Journalists and Freedom of Expression in the Twentieth Century

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
Volker R. Berghahn
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Weimar Republic ◽  
Freedom Of Expression ◽  
German History ◽  
Nazi Party ◽  
World War ◽  
Underground Resistance ◽  
The Right

This introductory chapter briefly reviews the lives of the three journalists under discussion—Marion Countess Dönhoff, Paul Sethe, and Hans Zehrer—and places them within the context of German history under the shadow of World War II. It shows that the three journalists were all anti-Nazis in the Weimar Republic who had been enjoying liberal press freedoms under Article 118 of the Constitution. According to this article, “every German” had “the right, within the limits of general laws, to express his opinions freely.” Their freedom became threatened when from 1930 onward they witnessed the rise of Nazism and then Adolf Hitler's seizure of power in January 1933. Sethe, Zehrer, and Dönhoff (though she was not yet a journalist) continued to keep their distance from the regime thereafter. Unlike millions of other Germans, they never became members of the Nazi Party, nor did they emigrate or join the early underground resistance. Instead, this chapter argues that these three journalists went into “inner emigration.”

Antisemitism in the Weimar Republic

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susanne Wein ◽  
Martin Ulmer
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Weimar Republic ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Nazi Party ◽  
German Jews ◽  
Party Press ◽  
The Right

Antisemitism was an integral part of the Weimar Republic’s political culture and was widespread in society. During the 1920s, hostility towards Jews was often radical and militant, complemented by their increasing exclusion in everyday life. Right-wing anti-democrats weaponized antisemitic conspiracy myths against the Weimar Republic, defamed as the ‘Jew Republic’. In Reich and state parliaments and in the party press, antisemites attempted to charge public discourses with antisemitism and, in doing so, change the unwritten rules of what could and could not be said. Dwindling republican forces largely underestimated the looming danger. The defence organizations of the German Jews, from the early 1930s, had hardly any chance against the superior numbers of the right-wing extremist movement under the leadership of the Nazi party.

The Electoral Geography of Weimar Germany: Exploratory Spatial Data Analyses (ESDA) of Protestant Support for the Nazi Party

2002 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 217-243 ◽  
Author(s):  
John O'Loughlin
Keyword(s):  
Spatial Data ◽  
Information Science ◽  
Census Data ◽  
Spatial Data Analysis ◽  
Nazi Party ◽  
Ecological Inference ◽  
Inference Procedure ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Weimar Germany ◽  
Strong Attachment

For more than half a century, social scientists have probed the aggregate correlates of the vote for the Nazi party (NSDAP) in Weimar Germany. Since individual-level data are not available for this time period, aggregate census data for small geographic units have been heavily used to infer the support of the Nazi party by various compositional groups. Many of these studies hint at a complex geographic patterning. Recent developments in geographic methodologies, based on Geographic Information Science (GIS) and spatial statistics, allow a deeper probing of these regional and local contextual elements. In this paper, a suite of geographic methods—global and local measures of spatial autocorrelation, variography, distance-based correlation, directional spatial correlograms, vector mapping, and barrier definition (wombling)—are used in an exploratory spatial data analysis of the NSDAP vote. The support for the NSDAP by Protestant voters (estimated using King's ecological inference procedure) is the key correlate examined. The results from the various methods are consistent in showing a voting surface of great complexity, with many local clusters that differ from the regional trend. The Weimar German electoral map does not show much evidence of a nationalized electorate, but is better characterized as a mosaic of support for “milieu parties,” mixed across class and other social lines, and defined by a strong attachment to local traditions, beliefs, and practices.

Social Policy in the Weimar Republic

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karl Christian Führer
Keyword(s):  
Social Policy ◽  
Collective Bargaining ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Weimar Republic ◽  
War Veterans ◽  
Minimal Support ◽  
Weimar Germany ◽  
Public Expectations ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Economic Constraints

Social policy was immensely important in Weimar Germany. In this area the republic, defining itself as a welfare state, frequently clashed with the expectations of its citizens. In fact, Weimar’s social policy was progressive and ambitious, for instance implementing unemployment welfare and collective bargaining agreements as two of its key pillars. But the tight economic constraints in which the Weimar state was operating also meant that the minimal support for pensioners, disabled war veterans, and war widows during the hyperinflation created true and lasting hardship. Furthermore, many citizens experienced the assessment of their claims as unfair and humiliating. Social policy in Weimar Germany was severely burdened by the limited financial possibilities the state had available. Ultimately, the republic failed in adequately communicating why it could not match public expectations.

Beyond Weimar: The Long Crisis of Liberalism, the Political Economy of the Interwar Conjuncture and the Foundations of Neo-liberalism

2021 ◽  
pp. 44-72
Author(s):  
Michael A. Wilkinson
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
Carl Schmitt ◽  
The Political ◽  
Karl Polanyi ◽  
Weimar Germany ◽  
The Social ◽  
Hans Kelsen ◽  
Crisis Of Liberalism

<Online Only>This chapter examines authoritarian liberalism as a more general phenomenon ‘beyond Weimar’. It looks outside Weimar Germany and takes a longer historical perspective, revealing deeper tensions in liberalism itself, specifically its inability to respond to the issue of socio-economic inequality in a mass democracy. The major Weimar constitutional theorists—Hans Kelsen, Carl Schmitt, and Hermann Heller—had no answer to the social question as a matter of constitutional self-defence. The chapter then discusses the political economy of the various crises across Europe—in Italy, France, and Austria—revealing a similar quandary. As Karl Polanyi argued, in these contexts, the turn to authoritarian liberalism fatally weakened political democracy and left it disarmed when faced with the fascist countermovement. Later in the interwar period, proposals for neo-liberalism would be introduced, symbolized by the organization of the Walter Lippman Colloquium in 1938.</Online Only>

GERMANY'S FIRST REPUBLIC

2001 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 579-585
Author(s):  
MARTYN HOUSDEN
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Weimar Republic ◽  
Upper Silesia ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
Weimar Germany ◽  
Weimarer Republik ◽  
First Republic ◽  
Eastern Border

Republik ohne Chance? Akzeptanz und Legitimation der Weimarer Republik in der deutschen Tagespresse zwischen 1918 und 1923. By Burkhard Asmuss. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1994. Pp. 619. ISBN 3-110-14197-3. DM280.00.Heinrich Brüning and the dissolution of the Weimar Republic. By William L. Patch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Pp. 358. ISBN 0-521-62422-3. £42.50.National identity and Weimar Germany: Upper Silesia and the eastern border, 1918–1922. By T. Hunt Tooley. Lincoln, Nebraska, and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1997. Pp. 320. ISBN 0-803-24429-0. £53.00.Reichswehr und Rote Armee, 1920–1933: Wege und Stationen einer ungewönlichen Zusammenarbeit. By Manfred Zeidler. Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1993. Pp. 375. ISBN 3-486-55966-4. DM78.00.

Domesticating a Mystic: Catholic Saint-Making in Weimar Germany

2018 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 228-248
Author(s):  
Cassandra Painter
Keyword(s):  
Religious Belief ◽  
Weimar Republic ◽  
Popular Press ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Modern City ◽  
Weimar Germany ◽  
Push And Pull

AbstractVeneration of Westphalian stigmatic and visionary Anna Katharina Emmerick (1774–1824) reached new heights during the Weimar Republic. German Catholics engaged in promoting her beatification cause organized a multipronged, multimedia campaign. Priests and laypersons, as well as the popular press and theological journals, all encouraged the veneration of Emmerick as “a crucified saint for a crucifiedVolk.” Memories of Napoleonic French aggression, secularization, and waning religious belief provided revanchist Weimar German Catholics with a readymade narrative of victimization. Moreover, as a poster child of the WestphalianHeimat, her pilgrimage sites offered a spiritual antidote to the “godless” modern city. Meanwhile, everyday Catholics continued a century-old, locally-based tradition of veneration that did not strictly conform to the new “official” line. Emmerick's Weimar cult, and the modern saint-making process more generally, thus provide a window onto the push and pull between clergy and laity, men and women, institutional and popular forces, in shaping lived German Catholicism in the 1920s.

BETWEEN REFORM AND REPRESSION: IMPRISONMENT IN WEIMAR GERMANY

2002 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 411-432 ◽  
Author(s):  
NIKOLAUS WACHSMANN
Keyword(s):  
Social Policy ◽  
Criminal Law ◽  
Weimar Republic ◽  
Early Years ◽  
New Approach ◽  
Penal Policy ◽  
Weimar Germany ◽  
Modern School ◽  
Prisoner Rehabilitation

This is the first account of the prison in the Weimar Republic (1918–33), set in the context of the evolution of German social policy. In the early years, the Weimar prison was characterized by hunger, overcrowding, and conflict. At this time, leading officials agreed on a new approach to imprisonment, influenced by the demand for the ‘incapacitation of incorrigibles, reformation of reformables’. This principle was championed by the modern school of criminal law, designed to replace traditional policy based on deterrence and uniform retribution. The policy of reform and repression shaped the Weimar prison. Most prison officials supported the indefinite confinement of ‘incorrigibles’. While this did not become law, many prisoners classified as ‘incorrigible’ (increasingly after ‘objective’ examinations) received worse treatment than others, both in prison and after their release. Regarding the ‘reformables’, some institutions introduced measures aimed at prisoner rehabilitation. But such policies were not fully implemented in other prisons, not least because of resistance by local prison officials. During the collapse of the Weimar Republic in the early 1930s, measures aimed at rehabilitation, only just introduced, were cut back again. By contrast, the repression of ‘incorrigibles’ was pursued with even more vigour than before, an important legacy for Nazi penal policy.

The Crisis of the Psyche and the Future of Germany: The Encounter with Freud in the Weimar Republic

2013 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 325-345 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony D. Kauders
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Weimar Republic ◽  
German Culture ◽  
Weimar Germany ◽  
The Future ◽  
Favorable Change ◽  
Younger Generation

Some two decades ago, Peter Fritzsche wrote the first of two influential essays that questioned the then common conviction that Weimar Germany was all about doom and gloom. “What is distinctive about twentieth-century German culture,” he argued, “is not simply ‘crisis’—economic, political, cultural—but the widespread consciousness of crisis and the allied conviction that these emergency conditions could be managed to Germany's advantage.” Recently, Fritzsche's view has been taken up and expanded by a younger generation of German scholars, who have detailed how “crisis” meant different things to different people, often denoting the possibility of favorable change. This insistence on “crisis” as the beginning of something (positively) new is in many ways the most far-reaching application of the anti-teleological turn in Weimar historiography.

Performing the Nation: Sports, Spectacles, and Aesthetics in Germany, 1926–1936

2010 ◽  
Vol 43 (4) ◽  
pp. 616-638 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nadine Rossol
Keyword(s):  
Weimar Republic ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Nazi Party ◽  
National Socialist ◽  
The Third ◽  
Political Aesthetics ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
Set Up

National Socialist propaganda has created an aesthetic legacy that is difficult to shake off. Filmic images of well-trained athletes preparing for the Berlin Olympics or mass scenes from Nazi Party rallies have become familiar features in history documentaries. While many of us lack personal memories of the Third Reich, we think we know what Nazism looked like. In addition, Walter Benjamin's concept stressing the use of aesthetics in politics has become commonplace in interpretations of Nazi representation. “Gesamtkunstwerkof political aesthetics” or “formative aesthetics” are terms used to analyze festivities and spectacles in the Third Reich, suggesting that the Nazis developed a specific style with a focus on aesthetics, symbols, and festive set-up. This allegedly distinctive Nazi style is emphasized even more by contrasting it favorably with celebrations of the Weimar Republic. Once again, the German republican experience is placed in “the antechamber of the Third Reich.”

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