A History of Germany 1918 - 2020. Mary Fulbrook

on the Third Reich in the peacetime and wartime years. A relatively large amount of space is allotted to the issue of the ‘Final Solution’. It may, with some justice, be asserted that an undue proportion of this text deals with the Holocaust; however, given not only the shattering significance of the Holocaust for the lives (and deaths) of millions of people but also the pivotal role it plays in all popular prejudices about German history, and the major difficulties it has caused for the self-understanding, self-representation and national identities, of postwar Germans – in different ways in East and West – it seems important to give the actual course of events and the difficulties of their explanation a lengthier, more explicit hearing than merely the customary paragraph or two embedded in a wider narrative of the war that is often found in general histories.

      Part II then explores the extraordinary historical experiment of the divided nation. Three chronological chapters (6, 7, 8) are followed by four thematic chapters (9, 10, 11, 12) exploring certain aspects of the two Germanies in more depth. While the economic development of the two Germanies and the question of inner-German and foreign relations are dealt with in the three narrative chapters, which establish a basic chronological framework, the focus in the thematic chapters is primarily social, political and cultural (in a broad sense, including issues of political culture). There is inevitably a (hopefully minimal) degree of repetition across chapters, but by treating certain themes analytically an interpretation of the dynamics of development of the two Germanies may be developed, exploring the degrees and nature of their divergence and elucidating the background to the East German revolution of autumn 1989. This revolution, and the radical historical transformation it inaugurated, forms the subject of Chapter 13.

In Part III, Chapter 14 surveys the new social and political landscape of the Berlin Republic, formed out of the incorporation of the ‘five new Länder’ (or the defunct GDR) in an enlarged Federal Republic, and sketches some of the complex ways in which the doubly dictatorial past of Germany was reconceived after unification. It explores the ways in which Germany under its first female Chancellor, Angela Merkel, won new respect both nationally and internationally in a dramatically changed global situation. Finally, a concluding chapter engages directly with the issue of historical divides, the pivotal dates of the preceding century. It reflects more broadly on the major patterns of development in Germany since 1918 and proposes a general framework for interpretation of the course of the last century of German history.

      The book seeks, ultimately, to present in a readable and intelligible compass an account of some of the major currents of German history since the end of the First World War in the light of wider debates and controversies.

Part I A Divided Society

      2

      The Weimar Republic

The Weimar Republic was Germany’s first attempt at parliamentary democracy. Born in 1918 of military defeat and domestic revolution, it was riddled with compromises and burdened with difficulties. After turbulent beginnings, from 1924 to 1928 there was a period of at least apparent stabilization, yet between 1929 and 1933, concerted attacks on democracy in the context of mounting economic difficulties culminated in the collapse of the regime and the appointment of Adolf Hitler, leader of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP or Nazi Party), as Germany’s Chancellor.

The ultimate demise of the Weimar Republic has inevitably overshadowed interpretations of its course. Some commentators have drawn such a stark and gloomy picture of its early difficulties that the Republic seems foredoomed to failure from the outset; other scholars have placed greater weight on problems arising from the Depression after 1929; and some historians have emphasized the importance of particular decisions and actions made by key political figures in the closing months of the Republic’s existence, in 1932–3. It is important to bear in mind, when exploring the complex paths of Weimar history, the constant interplay of structure and action, context and personality; it is important also to bear in mind that under certain circumstances the scope for human intervention in the course of events may be more limited or constrained than at other times. The conditions in which Weimar democracy was born were certainly not such as to help it flourish, and as it unfolded it was clearly saddled with a burden of problems, in a range of areas that would render Weimar democracy peculiarly susceptible to antidemocratic forces in the end.

      Germany in the Early Twentieth Century

      What was Germany like in the decades prior to 1918? A ‘small’ Germany, excluding Austria, had been unified only as a result of Prussian chancellor Otto van Bismarck’s policies of ‘blood and iron’ in 1871. Although processes of industrialization had started earlier in the nineteenth century, the pace of change was dramatically quickened by unification. In the period from 1871 to the outbreak of war in 1914, Germany’s output of manufactured goods quintupled, while her population grew from 41 million to 67.7 million. Rapid changes in economy and society were associated with a host of strains in the autocratic political system that was Bismarck’s legacy for Imperial Germany.

      Some areas were experiencing rapid modernization, with expansion in urban areas, such as the great metropolitan capital, Berlin, and in the heavy industry and coal-mining centre of the Ruhr. Workers migrating from the countryside to the towns were lucky if they were accommodated in the housing estates of paternalistic employers such as Siemens; many more found themselves living in cramped, dark tenement buildings with poor sanitation and limited backyards which were the only areas where their children could play. Meanwhile, the urban upper-middle classes led often rather stuffy lives in the somewhat pompous buildings that were characteristic of Imperial Germany. The ‘middle classes’ were a far from homogeneous entity. At the upper levels were the officials, professionals and state servants (the Beamten, in Germany a wider category than the British ‘civil servant’). Then, at a more modest social level, there were the increasing numbers of white-collar employees (Angestellten) as well as the older groups of the self-employed, traders and shopkeepers, and small artisans. These latter groups were increasingly challenged by the rise of ‘modern’, large-scale mechanized industry, run by major entrepreneurs and by the growth of big department stores as outlets for mass-produced wares. Urban life was clearly changing and expanding at a quickening rate.

Peasants in far-flung rural areas, such as southern Bavaria, might still appear to be living as they had done for centuries, although the notion of a static, unchanging ‘traditional’ rural society is something of a myth. While the urban bourgeoisie might be enjoying the fruits of modern technology – such as electricity – these peasants would be living in the old, wooden farmhouses, with their religious wall-paintings and flower-bedecked balconies, where they still relied on candlelight, water from the well and very rudimentary sanitary facilities. Small peasant economies in the south and west had been interpenetrated by artisanal activities for centuries, and had also begun to cater to the newer pursuits of tourism. In the northeast and, particularly, eastern areas of Germany, rural life was characterized by a rather different social pattern: estates owned by the aristocratic landowning class, the Junkers, were worked by landless agricultural labourers (often Polish) and were increasingly under strain in the competitive atmosphere of a rapidly industrializing nation. While retaining a socially and politically dominant position, the militaristic landowning caste was suffering a period of economic difficulty, necessitating a series of compromises with, particularly, increasingly important industrial interests.

There were many regional variations: the German Empire had by no means homogenized the differences between its constituent states, and in many ways regional and other loyalties overrode any ‘national’ identification. There were traditional antagonisms between, for example, Bavaria and Prussia, based on centuries of political, cultural and social differences. The Reich was ethnically diverse, with minority populations including Danes and Poles. Citizenship in the Reich under the 1913 law, while emphasizing the principle of descent, was based on citizenship within one of its constituent states, not on principles of ethnicity as such. German Jews