Excerpts from Eric D. Weitz, Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy
(Princeton, 2007/2018)

chapter 9, "Revolution and Counterrevolution from the Right" (pp. 331-360).

Instead, the republic’s most dangerous antagonists always came from the Right.  Some of them were well established and lodged in the most powerful institutions of society—the army, the Protestant and Catholic churches, the state bureaucracy, industry and finance, schools and universities. . .  In the middle and top levels of the major institutions, there existed significant personnel continuities with the pre-1918 imperial system and the brittle anti-democratic inclinations of clerics, officers, civil servants, professors, and businessmen.  But Weimar’s opponents were also a ragtag collection of displaced World War I veterans, disgruntled teachers and shopkeepers, street-corner agitators, and lay Catholics and Protestants. 331-2


The members of the radical Right were often too unpredictable, violent, and lower-class, too lacking in deference, for the generals, archbishops, estate owners, bankers, professors, and state secretaries who comprised Germany’s traditional conservative elite.  332


The old established elite was willing, in short, to countenance new ideas and practices to fight the republic, and behind them was a large middle class that longed for nothing so much as order and stability.  Ultimately, it took the combined political and economic crisis of the depression, coupled with the dynamic of the Nazi Party and Hitler’s personal magnetism, to bring together the diverse grave-diggers of the republic.  However tenuous and tension-ridden the coalition, all through the Weimar period  the established and the radical Right shared certain ideas and values that worked with a common language that enabled them to unite at critical moments.  Members of both camps [the radical Right and the established Right] . . . . ultimately supported or accepted the Nazi assummption of power.  332-3


“ . . . this great personality . . .  333


The “conservative revolutionaries,” as they were already dubbed in the 1920s, played a key role in the development of the right-wing mind set.  As the oxymoronic phrase indicates, they merged certain old-style conservative tenets, lkike the commitment to a hierarchical orde and desire for one great leader, with the modern emphasis on technology, propaganda, and the power of popular mobilization.  Many of the leading figures—Edgar Jung, Martin Spahn, Carl Schmitt, Oswald Spengler, Ernst Jünger—were brilliant intellects who had benefited from Germany’s superb elite educational system.  The notion that right-wing politics generally and Nazism in particular were the work only of material-minded, self-interested elites coupled with a collection of thugs and brutes is only one of the major misinterpretations that has managed to prevail over the decade.  In fact, Germany’s conservative revolutionaries were, in many cases, serious thinkers and writers, who also happened to be profoundly antidemocratic and, in many but not all instances, anti-Semitic as well.  334


Whatever his quirkiness, Spengler expressed the fascist mentality with its celebration of violence and death. . . .  The Spenglerian way out of the German crisis meant unending warfare, the militarized state and society of World War I perpetuated as an ongoing, normal condition of life.  It was a vision that glorified the actions of those Germans who thrilled after violent combat, whether in formal battle or in riots and street brawls against Communists and Jews. . . .  Spengler spoke to the many Germans who believed that a great figure would lead them out of their travails to that higher, virtually cosmic level of personal and German grandeur.  It was a seductive and dangerous gift that Spengler offered, an easy solution—the one great man  in whom Germans could vest all their hopes.336-7


they enobled male combat, male comraderie, and mass killings.  They created an aesthetics of death, destruction, and mass murder. 338


they talked about race, German-ness, degeneration, rebirth, the leader, hard struggle and the enemies who had to be eliminated.  Their unforgiving hostility to the republic and everything it represented effectively served the Nazis’ first aim: destroy the republic from within by unrelenting attacks and by creating an alternative vision of a racially based national community.   341



The Nazis invented nothing ideologically or rhetorically.  Hitler spoke the same language,  used the same words and phrases as did Spengler, Jünger, Althaus, and all the other forces on the right, only did so less knowledgeably and gracefully, than the others.  341 [ATWATER]


existential struggle; a vast world of conspiracy  342


The Nazis spoke the common language of the Right.  Their innovations were tactical and strategic.  They developed a consistent (and at least from 1926 onward), aggressive political strategy that placed primacy on constant action; built alternative institutions in the party, its paramilitary units, and its youth organization; and, in Adolph Hitler promoted a brilliant rhetorician and political tactician.  And more fervently and consistently than any of the estasblished conservatives, they targeted the particular, singular enemy whom they identified as the cause of all of Germany’s travails—the Jews.  342


Hitler had learned from the fiasco of the 1923 putsch.  He would never again trust the established conservatives and decided that the road to power lay through the democratic procedures of the Weimar Republic.  Never again would he attempt an armed putsch.  Instead, the Nazis would use the freedom of the press, assembly, and speech that Weimar offered to build a mass following, and the electoral system to win the chancellorship or presidency  of Germany.  In the years before the Depression the Nazis constituted a tiny part on the fringes of German politics and society.  But they used these years to good effect by building a party of supremely deidcated followers and by establishing Hitler’s role as the preeminent leader, the embodiment, supposedly, of the German people’s destiny.  The party was also for some a revolving door—many people joined and left.  But those who stayed developed into highly committed activists.  342-3


Who were they?  A diverse lot.  Over time and especially after they were in power, a greater proportion of the party membership would come from well-established and elite backgrounds.  But the most salient point is that the Nazis formed Germany’s first Volkspartei, that is, a people’s party with members from all across the social spectrum.  Every other major party had a particular social or confessional profile—the Social Democrats and the Communists had predominntly working-class memberships; the Center Catholic; the German National People’s Party estate owners, busisnessmen, and peasants.  The Nazis attracted people from every class and virtually all Christian denominations.  That said, the party did include an overrepresentation of people from lower-middle and middle-class backgrounds: clerks, teachers,civil servants, shopkeepers.  Workers and Catholics joined the party too, but they were underrepreented because so many of them were already well organized into the milieus of the socialists labor movement or the Catholic Church, which the Nazis had a difficult time penetrating.  343


. . . the members of the Nazi Party were predominantly men who constituted the Weimar generation.  The very top leadership was slightly older and comprised many World War I veterans, like Hitler, Ernst Röhn, Rudolf Hess, Herman Goering, and Reinhard Heydrich.  But just below them were those who felt that the great challenge of war, the great opportunity to test their manhood and committment to the Fatherland, had passed them by because of their late birth.  Some of them were footloose young men who, in the difficult economic and social conditions of Weimar society, had never established a “normal” path into a steady job and a settled family life.  Some were street toughs who who enjoyed the opportunity for brawls, or cashiered army officers wo felt comfortable only in military-like settings.  Still others were highly educated men of the middle class who had come to believe that Germany had, indeed, been betrayed by the enemies at home and abroad, that race was the way of the world, and that Germany needed a full-scale revolution that would drive out the traitors, make war against the foreign oppressors, and create a racial society everywhere that Germans ruled.   343-4


The Nazi Party fomented disorder, yet—in a very nice game—successfully presented itself as the party of law and order against the Communists and “alien” elements so many Germans feared. 349