Book Review: Seeding Hilterism - Germany During the Interbellum

 

The Weimar Years

Rise and Fall 1918–1933

By Frank McDonough

German bellicosity, which ignited the Second World War, wasn’t preordained. Its causes are traceable to a spiteful peace treaty imposed on Germany after the Great War of 1914-1918, the Weimar Republic’s electoral system of pure proportional representation, unrelenting economic turbulence, and the advent of Adolph Hitler. The challenge is how to unpack and weigh the relative importance of each of these.

I know a fair amount about the European theater during WWII and Hitler’s concurrent war against the Jews. About WWI, I know less but enough to get by, thanks to research I did about the Balfour Declaration in preparation for its centenary in November 2017. However, the intra-war period in Germany was a lacuna for me. Frank McDonough has filled the gap with his masterful The Weimar Years – Rise and Fall 1918-1933. 

The Weimar Years is lucidly written and neatly organized chronologically. It is beautifully produced with skillfully positioned pictures by Head of Zeus, a division of Bloomsbury, and published this year in London. Primarily a political history – a prequel to the author’s two earlier books about Germany under Hitler – McDonough also colorfully sketches the Weimar’s social and cultural ambiance. An obscure Jewish writer advanced incipient feminism and women obtained the right to vote. An imaginative film industry produced the first talkie. The libertine Marlene Dietrich burst onto the cinematic scene. Memorable novels were published, including All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque. The cabaret scene flourished thanks to a remarkably uninhibited sexual revolution. Architectural and artistic boundaries were reimagined. “Berlin was seen as the most open, tolerant, and decadent city in the world,” writes McDonough.

McDonough throws in a veritable Who’s Who of Weimar Republic characters, among them Rosa Luxemburg described as “no crude Marxist, but a cool-headed and nuanced thinker, who rightly deserves to be placed at the same level as Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky in the pantheon of socialist intellectuals.” 

Naturally, what drew me to the book was the prospect of understanding how Hitler, who technically became a German citizen at the last minute, morphed into Chancellor, Führer, and Destroyer of Worlds. And while the book is not a biography of Hitler, his malevolent persona hangs over every page. And McDonough is superb at sketching the early Hitler. The blue-eyed demon was born in Austria on April 20, 1889, baptized Catholic. His mother, Klara Poelzl, was 28, and his father, Alois, 51. His parents were cousins. Hitler grew up in an economically comfortable home, though Alois, a heavy drinker, was stern, humorless, and often violent toward his son. Hitler never loved his father but was close to his mother, who died in January 1907. Klara had been looked after by a Jewish family doctor named Bloch, whom the Gestopo would allow to emigrate to the United States in 1940.

How different history might have been had Hitler been accepted into a prestigious Vienna art school. He lacked sufficient talent. Impervious, he pursued an artist’s life using money from an inheritance and his generous aunt. He was adamant about working only as an artist, so he sometimes lived the vagrant’s life. The future dictator was the beneficiary of a hostel funded by a philanthropic Viennese Jewish family, attended musical soirees at a Jewish venue, and sold his paintings through a Jewish art dealer.

His antisemitism emerged in the context of Germany’s defeat in World War I, according to McDonough. “Without the war, and the fact that Germany lost it, it is almost certain Hitler would never have entered politics.” He initially sought to avoid Austria’s draft, then spent the war on the Western Front as a dispatch runner. It was hazardous but gave purpose to his life; he won medals and achieved the rank of senior private. A mustard gas attack briefly blinded Hitler. He stayed in the army for as long as possible after the war.

That is when he came under the influence of an anti-Jewish, anti-capitalist agitator, Gottfried Feder. Feder, Anton Drexler, and some others founded a workers’ party that would morph into the Nazis. It turned out Hitler had a knack for public speaking. By July 1921, he had become the paramount figure in the party. In 1923, Hitler, along with WWI hero General Erich Ludendorff, stumbled into launching the failed “Munich Beer Hall Putsch” and became suicidally depressed. His well-covered 1924 trial and imprisonment helped him draw political and psychological victory from the jaws of defeat. He used the courtroom to declare himself a political antisemite, an opponent of democratic values, and an enemy of Marxism. In prison, he wrote his manifesto cum memoir Mein Kampf published in two volumes in July 1925.

In Hitler’s narrative, Germany lost WWI because it had been “stabbed in the back” by Jews. Race was at the core of human life – he wanted Germans to understand. For Hitler, Jews were a race, not a religion, and they were engaged in a world conspiracy. He spoke of removing, eliminating, and exterminating the Jews. Of democracy, Hitler wrote, “Parliament is a terrible thing, but we must join it to kill it.” Yet, as late as 1930, the greatest minds, including Albert Einstein, poo-pooed the danger of antisemitism.

Hitler’s personal life gets due coverage. McDonough dismisses speculations that one of Hitler’s grandparents was of Jewish origin. Hitler had several intense friendships with other men after the war, but the author discounts rumors that he had same-sex relationships. Not that Hitler was bothered by gay sex. Ernst Rohm, a leader of the SA paramilitary, was an open homosexual. Rohm was purged in 1934, but not over his sexual orientation. After Heinrich Himmler became SS chief, gays were persecuted. Up to 15,000 men were sent to concentration camps as homosexual offenders, according to the Holocaust Encyclopedia. McDonough describes Hitler’s bizarre bond with his young niece, Angela “Geli” Raubal, who eventually took her own life in his apartment to escape his smothering attentions.

A principal subject of The Weimar Years is how Nazi Germany came to happen. Losing WWI was a shock to the Germans. The war began in August 1914 and was fought beyond Germany’s borders. As late as October 1918, generals Paul Von Hindenburg and Ludendorf told Germans that victory was approaching. McDonough speculates that had the Allies invaded German territory, Germans might have been more psychologically prepared for defeat. The shock of losing when not an inch of Germany fell to the Allies helps explain the “stab in the back” conspiracy. America’s April 1917 entry into the war tipped the scales. Germany sued for peace on November 11, 1918.

Germany’s postwar political system under the Weimar Republic – the name derives from a city in central Germany where the new parliament held its first meeting– was distinguished by political instability. The system promoted numerous ideological parties. There were 20 coalition governments between 1918 and 1933; none served their full four-year term. Centrism went largely unrewarded. Political strife, even assassination, became routine. Political discourse was coarse, and demagoguery rife. Excesses on the left met excesses on the right. The ultra-right had captured the judiciary before WWI and never let go. Judges indifferent to democratic values exploited the bench to weaken the Republic.

The vengeful Versailles peace treaty, named for the palace in Paris where the victors gathered on January 18, 1918, to dictate peace terms to Germany, was another factor in making Germans susceptible to pathogenic political messaging. Under the 1919 treaty, Germany was to be militarily toothless. It ceded Alsace–Lorraine to France. American, Belgian, British, and French forces occupied the Rhineland. Germany was under recurrent threat of occupation should it fail to meet its heavy reparations payments. Germany’s coal mines were confiscated. It was not allowed to export to allied markets or join the League of Nations (at least initially). Danzig was placed under League of Nations auspices. Parts of Prussia were handed to a new Poland.

Moreover, unfairly, the Germans were exclusively blamed for the war, a political and psychological burden too much to bear. McDonough depicts France as vengefully pushing Germany more harshly than necessary. The reparations were so onerous that they undermined post-war economic recovery and polarized society because any politicians who cooperated with the Allies – not that they had much choice – even to ease demands placed on Germany were painted collaborators. Versailles spurred hatred of the moderates struggling to bring Germany back into the family of nations.

The number of politicians who were both reasonable and talented was not unlimited. Some, like Friedrich Ebert, were irreplaceable. He served as President of Germany between 1919 and 1925, fostering a democratic ethos. Ebert’s replacement was the reactionary Hindenburg, whom McDonough calls the “gravedigger” and “undertaker” of Weimar democracy. Another star was Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann, who ended the Allied occupation of the Ruhr, eased reparation demands, and brought Germany into the League of Nations in 1926.

By 1927-1928, Hitler was allowed public speaking again. Diabolically talented misfits, including Joseph Goebbels, who would become his chief propagandist, were drawn to Hitler’s orbit. Yet Hitler’s rise was by no means inevitable. He suffered electoral setbacks. The economy occasionally rallied. It helped that he had a talent for taking slogans from both left and right and could glue them together with antisemitism. He was an evil genius who could make the most of a perfect storm: Economic instability, irresponsible political elites (former chancellor Franz von Papen leads the pack), cultural decadence, demagogic scapegoating, overly empowered masses, and the wherewithal to promote his propaganda.

It was not primarily the economy that brought Hitler to power but rather the people’s desire for order in the political system. Establishment conservatives underestimated him and presumed they could manipulate him. Hitler made his peace with big business, downplaying the socialism of the Nazi platform. By 1932, on the threshold of power, Hitler was barnstorming in his airplane and had emerged as the most popular politician in the country. He would not cut deals with other politicians to share power. Herman Goring became Reichstag Speaker in 1932, facilitating Hitler’s “legal” rise to power. Guardrails against his militias were lifted; his opponents were intimidated by hate speech and street thuggery.

On November 6, 1932, the last free election was held in Germany. Hitler won 33.1% of the vote (down from 37.3% the previous election). He would not enter into any coalition in which he did not call the shots. Papen lobbied Hindenberg to appoint Hitler as Chancellor. While Hindenberg might have preferred a more conventional conservative, he was also worried about a potential Reichstag corruption investigation involving his son. On January 30, 1933, Hindenburg appointed Hitler Chancellor.

McDonough concludes that Hindenburg was the politician primarily responsible for Hitler’s ascendancy. But the stage had been set by Germany’s military defeat in World War I, the unilateral guilt imposed by the Allies, Weimar’s obsessively proportional electoral system, and the disappearance of responsible politicians.

In this environment, Hitler presented himself to the masses as an anti-elitist and anti-capitalist. To big business, he showed himself as someone they could do business with. In the final analysis, mass electoral support was decisive in propelling Hitler to power. A plurality of the German people wanted Hitler.