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Regimes: Democracy and Dictatorship

Weimar Lessons / Hermann Müller and Ramsay MacDonald / Tradition and Contingency / Stability and Crisis / England and France / Social Democracy and Radical Republicanism / Parliamentarianism and Authoritarianism / Cabals and Intrigues / Papen and Schleicher / Hitler and Hindenburg / Access to the Ruler / Emblematics of Contingency / Dictatorship and Dictatorship

The twenty-seventh of March 1930 is a fateful date in modern German history. It marks the resignation of the last parliamentary cabinet of the Great Coalition—a cabinet led by Chancellor Hermann Müller, a Social Democrat—hence the fall of the Weimar Republic’s last parliamentary government. This decisive turn preceded another date, now become a negative temporal icon: 30 January 1933, the date Hitler was sworn in as chancellor. Even contemporaries regarded the latter date as a momentous shift of epochs. The former date takes on crucial meaning in historical hindsight and in the framework of historiographical interpretation. Müller’s resignation did not provide a hint of the coming catastrophe. This only became generally visible once Hitler took the reins of power. In the interim, one presidentially appointed cabinet succeeded another as the carousel of the Weimar crisis spun gradually out of control. So what justifies stressing the downfall of the Müller government in 1930?

The answer to this question lies in a distinctive quality of the historiography of Weimar, where a disciplined, empirical reconstruction of the past is inevitably shadowed by an urgent issue: that of possible alternatives, not only to Hitler but to the broader course of events, dramatized in retrospect as a crossroads in German history.¹ These events, then, are constantly reexamined in a search for conceivable escapes, historians of Weimar thus repeatedly, explicitly and implicitly, asking: did things have to turn out the way they did?

The question of possible alternatives to what transpired defines Weimar historiography as political to a high degree. This is already manifest during the Weimar Republic’s time span. Its history unfolded in a temporally compacted space; at its end, weeks, days, even hours are of urgent interest.² The steadily contracting arena for constitutional and political action was occupied by steadily fewer persons. Increasingly, what counted were their inclinations, obsessions, idiosyncrasies, in situations changing at an ever faster pace. The observer is thus drawn into the orbit of a reality reminiscent of court intrigue. Both witnesses to the events looking backward and a horrified posterity have been fascinated by the period’s economic, financial, and social policies, the pace of inflation and the rate of unemployment, and the legal and intellectual reflections on unfolding events. All this has been oriented toward that subliminal epistemological question: did it have to turn out the way it did? And beyond this, Weimar historiography took on special political significance in offering the West German polity an arsenal of experience for constitutional formulations, political action, and the formation of a postwar political culture. By 1949 at the latest, the Weimar period had become the Federal Republic’s permanent point of reference: Bonn was to become what Weimar had been denied. In this way, in its encapsulation of historical experience,the Weimar Republic emerged as a constitutive storehouse of memory and experience for the second German republic. It was imperative to learn from Weimar’s mistakes and avoid its aporias. Finally, what happened then was never to happen again.

An entire torrent of secondary conclusions has issued from Weimar historiography’s primary political lessons. Real and imagined certainties about the past have been reflected in findings engraved into Germany’s institutional self-awareness.³ One such certainty about Weimar revolves around the calamities of its democracy—or, more precisely, around the paradigmatic opposition and strict dichotomy manifest in this period between democracy and dictatorship. This dichotomy has emerged as a kind of emblem of the interwar years—and this far beyond Germany. It amounts to one of the fundamental insights into the epoch’s experience. If only for the sake of civic education, after World War II a sharp demarcation line between democracy and dictatorship had to be established in Europe’s “post-Fascist” societies, especially West Germany. But in fact, under close scrutiny, insights into both the Nazi dictatorship’s rise and the horrors it perpetrated that emerge from this conceptual schema hardly prove adequate.⁴ In this context, in the face of the catastrophe following the erosion of Weimar’s republican and parliamentary options between 1930 and 1933, rather than juxtaposing democracy and dictatorship, it might prove more productive to juxtapose dictatorship with dictatorship.⁵

One advantage of this shift of perspective is its potential for closing a yawning gap in the approaches taken to reconstruct political causalities: the gap between, on the one hand, the theoretically highly unified structural discourse regarding a German “special path,” a Sonderweg emerging from the nineteenth century and, on the other hand, those various approaches beginning with the facts and circumstances of Weimar’s demise. The question of the validity of the notion of a special German path would be posed in a less-dramatic manner if it did not involve a constant groping into a very distant past in search of preconditions for much later events.⁶ Nevertheless, questions regarding continuity and contingency and the circumstances leading to the worst of all conceivable scenarios continue to be disturbing, their potency undiminished. Even after we shift our perspective from democracy versus dictatorship to dictatorship versus dictatorship—in view of Nazism’s drastic consummation, probably a kind of volte-face—the question still needs to be asked: did it have to turn out the way it did?⁷

In historical retrospect and in view of the emerging catastrophe, the path from the fall of the Müller government, by way of various presidential cabinets, to an increasingly authoritarian regime began with an apparent trifle. Social Democratic Reichstag deputies indebted to trade-union interests refused to support the government headed by Social Democratic chancellor Hermann Müller in a fierce cabinet debate over a particular social-political issue. The German People’s Party (DVP), a coalition partner increasingly oriented to the interests of heavy industry, had plans to reduce unemployment benefits for workers; precipitating the government’s fall, the SPD faction’s move was meant to stymie these plans.⁸ Rising joblessness had made reform of Weimar’s unemployment insurance program unavoidable. Since reform required a national law, it was a task for the parliamentary majority, thus for the parties in government.⁹ Within the cabinet, the conflict might have been postponed for a while, but it was not amenable to resolution. The measures submitted by the two parties at the opposite extremes of the coalition, the SPD and the DVP, were at loggerheads. The restructuring program proposed by the SPD was designed to preserve the obligations of local and state authorities along with the national government by raising the monthly wage deduction to 4 percent and instituting a special emergency levy for unemployment insurance on all workers receiving a regular wage. The DVP, to the contrary, categorically refused to sanction any increase in the monthly compulsory deduction, pressing instead for a reduction in benefits.¹⁰ The SPD parliamentary faction also rejected a procedural compromise negotiated at the last minute by the Center Party and approved by the DVP. Given this situation, the government had no alternative but to resign. Müller was replaced by Heinrich Brüning, who was appointed by President Hindenburg. Brüning’s presidential cabinet by no means guaranteed that Hitler would come to power. But the Weimar Republic had been shunted onto a precipitous track, one leading toward increasingly authoritarian rule.

On27 March, dramatic proceedings took place in the SPD faction, which had been granted fifteen minutes to discuss a possible decision before the ministers convened their cabinet meeting. Labor minister Wissell stood opposed to interior minister Severing. Wissell was able to rely on the support of the national executive of the General German Trade Union Federation (the ADGB). Hermann Müller-Lichtenberg (the chancellor’s namesake), a member of the ADGB and its most outspoken advocate within the SPD faction, threatened the party with ADGB opposition should it opt for the proposed compromise. There was probably no need for such verbal threats. The SPD faction was already convinced that the party could not distance itself unduly from the unions, and the compromise was rejected with few dissenting votes. In the cabinet, the DVP proclaimed the coalition dissolved. This parting of the ways was all the easier since collaboration between the parties had in any case lapsed with ratification of the Young Plan for reparations payments. Choked with tears, luckless Hermann Müller thanked his cabinet members for their loyal cooperation.¹¹

Even contemporaries realized that the fall of the Müller government was a dark day for Weimar, an evil omen for the republic and democracy. Some were astonished at the insignificance of the issue at stake: a mere 0.25 percent increase in the payment for unemployment insurance, a sum of some 70 million marks, to be divided equally between employers and employees. Was that sufficient cause to sweep the Social Democrats from power and imperil the republic? The need to restructure the ailing unemployment insurance system had haunted the Great Coalition for some time. It had been a constant stumbling block between the two wings of the cabinet, the SPD and the DVP, with the Center Party repeatedly trying to forge a compromise between the workers’ party and the party of heavy industry.¹² Still, the unemployment issue was only one factor in the deterioration of relations between these parties in the wake of Germany’s economic downturn in 1928. For the SPD and even more so for the trade unions, this tension involved a symbolic conflict over the all-important preservation of Germany’s social-political achievements—the real success of the November 1918 revolution. Since these achievements meant more to the Social Democrats, especially to its trade-union wing, than rallying to the republic’s defense, the SPD faction’s decision on 27 March 1930 seemed far less momentous to the protagonists than it now appears in retrospect.

The faction’s stance, which in light of its consequences seems excessively rigid, was a reaction to an ongoing offensive by employers wishing to abrogate the terms of a November 1918 agreement with the trade unions, negotiated and signed in Weimar. This agreement had formed the basis of a compromise between the forces of the ancien régime and those of the German revolution.13 Facing the threat of insurrection, management had granted seemingly unavoidable concessions to the workers: social policy instead of nationalizations; an eight-hour workday at full wages; collective wage agreements.¹⁴ But as the republic sailed into smoother waters, these arrangements seemed increasingly open to revision. For years, the employers had considered the level of social benefits and wages too high. Given the general profit levels in German business, wages were indeed excessive, and they limited the capacity of German firms to compete in the international market.¹⁵ Still, there was a huge difference between trying to rein in social benefits and wages and a readiness to launch a frontal attack on the social and constitutional order. The employers attempted a rollback across the whole spectrum of social policy, hence a revision of the Weimar compromise also affecting politics. The measures taken included mass lockouts, in violation of state arbitration practices, during the “Ruhr iron dispute” of November–December 1928, the worst labor conflict that Weimar would have to endure.¹⁶ And all this occurred before the Great Depression struck the following year.¹⁷

From the very onset, the social-political conflicts in Weimar Germany were marked by the old regime’s desire to strike a debilitating blow at the republican and parliamentary order. These conflicts threatened to destabilize the country’s institutions. The encroachment of economic and social policy on the constitution and form of government was largely due to the state having assumed increasing responsibility for regulating the labor market.¹⁸ In England and France, events took a different turn; their political systems revealed themselves as less imperiled during the international economic crisis. In Germany, the situation had worsened since 1928; it threatened to spin out of control with the onset of the Great Depression in 1929, which left millions unemployed. The worldwide disruptions compounded long-smoldering difficulties, and crisis followed crisis.¹⁹

Even England, whose time-tested parliamentary democracy made it the most stable country in Europe, was faced with a severe domestic crisis in 1931. Like Hermann Müller in 1930, Ramsay MacDonald and his Labor-led government were forced to adopt drastic social measures to deal with the state’s deepening financial difficulties. In accordance with a “sound money” policy, painful cuts in unemployment insurance were necessary. And as in Germany, the Labor MPs, closely bound to organized labor, withdrew their support for the prime minister in August.²⁰ Instead of resigning, however, MacDonald turned against his party and assembled a government with the Conservative opposition and the remaining Liberals. The fact that he and his entourage were now excluded from their party did not intimidate the Labor leader. To the contrary, he announced new elections, which he and his National Government won by a large margin in October. For its part, the Labor Party was decimated, the only reelected Socialist MPs being those who had proclaimed their allegiance to the prime minister. Given his new majority, MacDonald passed a program of cuts in social spending and guided England through the crisis.²¹

Much has been written about the difference between British and Continental polities. The central question is what were the traditions and institutions saving England’s society and political institutions, despite some severe buffeting, from the convulsions besetting other states in the 1930s, casting some into the abyss? (A similar question can be posed regarding France’s Third Republic.) Ancient traditions and divergent social-political constellations here clearly played a role. In Germany, the Depression hurled the Weimar government’s decade-old parliamentary institutions into catastrophe. But not much analysis is needed to recognize that British history is guided by long-term continuities while Germany’s historical hallmark is recurrent rupture.²²

In 1931, the collapse of the world economy had actually plunged England into an unprecedented political crisis. In May 1926, it had already experienced a labor struggle—the miners’ general strike—that, as it were, immunized the polity against what was to come. The strike was called to protest draconian wage cuts instituted by the mine owners with the approval of the Baldwin government. The TUC (the British association of individual trade unions) then rallied to the strikers’ support, resulting in a work stoppage by virtually the entire unionized workforce, with England’s key industries being hardest hit.²³ The strike was discontinued after ten days, having revealed two things: first, a remarkable physical self-control on the part of both the workers and the Conservative government’s officials, in the context of a highly politicized labor struggle; and second, the drastic nature of the decision that had brought about the strike.²⁴ More generally, the upheaval of 1926 revealed a profound structural crisis in the British economy—one that was homemade and that went far beyond economic fluctuations and employment cycles. It differed from dislocations affecting other economies in that it was an expression of the “English disease”—the late result of an industrial prominence that the world’s first industrial power had gained in the nineteenth century—a prominence that eventually proved detrimental to continued modernization, leading to stagnation.²⁵ The branches of British industry that were traditionally strongest had already lost their dynamism by the turn of the century. Strong impulses for growth were no longer driving industries such as coal, iron, steel, shipbuilding, and textiles. Expansion lay elsewhere, in the chemical, electrical, and automotive industries, but here Germany and the United States had already taken the lead, their relatively late industrialization offering a distinct advantage. Also, Britain had introduced few production innovations. Its shipbuilding, for example, was slow to adopt electric welding. Likewise, goods were overpriced, partly owing to the trade unions and their organizational structure. The diverse processes involved in manufacturing a single product were handled in different plants by different union groupings, which frustrated initiatives for modernization. Such deficiencies weighed heavily on the British economy and contributed to mounting mass unemployment in the 1920s.²⁶

Against the backdrop of such troubles, the general strike of May 1926 exemplifies England’s political culture of moderation and restraint. While bloodshed accompanied similar confrontations on the Continent—in France and Germany—nobody was killed or injured in England, on either side of the struggle. The union leaders represented in Parliament insisted on abiding by both the constitution and the government’s duty to punish any breach of public order. While the TUC urged its members not to resort to violence against strikebreakers, the government, though prepared for confrontation and a possible state of emergency, tried to preserve calm and reason and even endeavored to maintain a semblance of neutrality. Stanley Baldwin, who shortly before, in Parliament, had accused the unions of trying to provoke civil war, now publicly expressed regret at the government’s uncompromising approach. In trying to convince the public that the Conservatives did not represent the class interests of one side or the other—that, to the contrary, their chief concern was the common good²⁷—he was following a Tory tradition established by Benjamin Disraeli: not to appear as the party of the rich but rather to speak in the name of all.²⁸ After the war, a new social policy had been introduced by the Liberal-Conservative coalition under David Lloyd George, involving measures such as the Housing and Town Planning Act of 1919, which affirmed the right to public housing, and the socially more significant Unemployment Insurance Act of 1920.²⁹ To be sure, in contrast to the moderate unions, the Conservative government under Baldwin had done little to avert the May 1926 strike. A year earlier, however, it had sought to alleviate the misery of the needy by passing the Pension Act. This measure guaranteed state benefits to the poorest of the poor—widows, orphans, and the elderly—and was supported by the minister of health at the time, Neville Chamberlain. Though pioneered by the Conservatives, it is regarded as one of the cornerstones of the comprehensive welfare-state system established by the Labor Party after World War II.³⁰

The traditional moderation of the political actors in Great Britain reflected the country’s proverbial contractualism, a form of exchange between workers and employers prevalent since the end of the eighteenth century. In Germany, it was customary for the worker to sell his labor, with the employer covering his living expenses in return; in England, the fiction was maintained of an exchange of goods in which the worker sold the product he made.³¹ Hence although the employer provided the worker with the equipment needed to produce the product, the worker formally controlled his own labor power. To that extent, he was a free man who could contract with another free man in an act of exchange. Correspondingly, his freedom as owner of his own labor power was transferred to the representatives of the workers’ collective interests, the trade unions.³² This idea of equal exchange was reflected in early British recognition of the unions, which were legalized in 1824, their legally protected scope for action then steadily expanding. This process included the 1875 law protecting workers from being prosecuted for taking part in labor disputes and the 1906 regulation shielding trade unions from damage claims resulting from strike action. During the late nineteenth century depression, employers did not exploit the moment to suppress the unions but rather tried to reach an arrangement with them.³³ Hence even in the grip of a crisis, they maintained a bargaining ethic. Having thus been socially integrated at a relatively early date, the labor movement would then be politically integrated with the rise of the Labor Party, which first came to power briefly under Ramsay MacDonald in 1924—a development that did not take place in France until the emergence of the Popular Front in 1936, when the French workers’ movement finally reconciled itself with the state.

The British labor movement’s moderation yielded results. The living standard of wage earners, especially unionized workers, rose steadily. This in turn encouraged the unions to choose leaders who knew how to preserve and increase the successes won through restraint and perseverance. Radical demands aimed at overcoming and revolutionizing the existing order, the state and its system of government, had no chance. The tradition of moderation also placed a check on Communist temptations in the interwar period. Both as a party and in the trade union movement, the British Communists were in a hopeless position³⁴— despite its combativeness, the British working class was basically immune to calls to action based on ideological creed. Lenin was badly mistaken in 1920 in supposing that the action committees formed during the Polish-Soviet War and the refusal by the British dockers’ union to load weapons and munitions on ships bound for the Polish forces reflected a revolutionary stance.³⁵ The dockers’ union was led by Ernest Bevin, later a great socially oriented politician and, as foreign minister beginning in1945, architect of Western militancy in the early stages of the Cold War. Even the threat of a general strike by the TUC, when, in light of General Tukhachevsky’s advance on Warsaw, England had begun preparing for intervention against the Soviets, was less an expression of solidarity with the Bolsheviks than a protest against British meddling in the affairs of others (i.e., other states).³⁶

The social legislation introduced in Britain in the 1920s was based on an assumption that the conditions stamping the Victorian and Edwardian eras would continue unchecked. Britain had emerged from the Great War without any major social or political upheavals. There had not even been a change of government after the armistice and peace negotiations, merely a reshuffle of Lloyd George’s Liberal-Conservative coalition following the “khaki election” of December 1918, which gave the Conservatives an overwhelming victory. This was the first election in which all men over twenty years of age and all women over thirty had the right to vote. Lloyd George, armed with a range of emergency powers, had guided Britain through the troubles of the Great War since 1916; he remained prime minister after England’s victory. Everything seemed to be following the norms of British tradition.³⁷

But the impression of continuity was deceptive. The “English sickness” was actually manifest everywhere. Although British political institutions were shielded from shocks grounded in social misery, there was serious potential for conflict in the economic sphere. The problem of mass unemployment seemed insoluble. After the collapse of the postwar boom in the winter of 1920–21, the number of jobless individuals doubled within a few months; in March 1921 it reached 16 percent of the workforce. But despite the high unemployment level and the strikes that accompanied it, the government’s authority remained unchallenged. Lloyd George now tried to ease the social and economic crisis through foreign policy initiatives;³⁸ most importantly, he widened exports to stimulate production and reduce unemployment. In the same manner, the Conservative government’s reintroduction of the gold standard in 1925, with gold being sold at prewar parity, was aimed at guaranteeing currency convertibility and thus stabilizing world trade.³⁹ No matter that such a policy overvalued the pound and led to increases in export prices, and consequently to a further rise in unemployment; to expand international trade, traditional relations with former trading partners—Germany, the Continental industrial locomotive, and newly Bolshevik Russia— had to be restored. London thus now tried to reach an agreement with the two ostracized powers within Europe’s new security order. Both Britain’s compliant policy toward Berlin and its attempt to restrain France on the question of reparations can be explained against this background.⁴⁰ Britain expressed regret over the occupation of the Ruhr by Belgian and French troops in January 1923, calling it a blow to world economic recovery.

By 1925, British industrial output barely exceeded that of 1913, and exports continued to plummet—a situation exacerbated by the deflationary effect of the gold standard. Furthermore, to increase trust in the City of London by the international financial community, the government had begun pursuing a policy of high interest rates.⁴¹ These measures were detrimental to exports. The government mistakenly believed it could adequately address unemployment through an adroit deflationary move. But the pound’s high value deterred British industry from introducing new manufacturing methods and products, which further aggravated joblessness. During the worldwide boom of 1925 to 1929, when worldwide production rose around 25 percent on average, British production maintained levels slightly below those of 1913.⁴² Nevertheless, the political impact of unemployment in Britain remained limited, especially since it was largely confined to certain sectors of the economy. British manufacturers sought to offset the higher prices of their products in the world market with a policy of wage cuts at home.⁴³

From today’s perspective, it seems odd that in this period the British did not attach much importance to the unemployment problem. Employment policy was secondary to classic factors such as free trade and import tariffs, as well as maintenance of a solid currency, a balanced budget, and industrial efficiency. Even the trade unions regarded unemployment as less important than wage policy and the struggle to maintain unemployment benefits.⁴⁴ In fact, this view was widespread on the Continent as well, with adherents on both the left and the right. French prime minister Raymond Poincaré, returned to office in 1926, was a firm believer in orthodox economic theories calling for rigorous austerity and stabilization measures to counter the monetary and budgetary crisis.So was Chancellor Heinrich Brüning, whose strict deflationary policy led to disastrous unemployment, a contributing factor in the demise of the Weimar Republic.⁴⁵ Rudolf Hilferding, the Marxist financial doyen of German Social Democracy, believed that the effects of a policy of tight money at high interest rates amounted to a necessary consequence of a crisis of readjustment—the deus ex machina of the utilization of capital.⁴⁶ John Maynard Keynes’ General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936), which was a reaction to the mass unemployment of the 1920s and 1930s, would of course eventually provoke a rethinking of such economic theory. But by that time it was too late.⁴⁷ The disaster had taken its course, even though trade-union circles had long been discussing ideas about adapting an actively anticyclical economic policy that would stimulate job creation. Notably, in Germany the Social Democrats opposed such notions. Like the British Conservatives, they believed that measures designed to stimulate employment would fuel inflation.⁴⁸

As indicated, the British government had tried to revive lagging exports by promoting a drastic cut in wages; the general strike of 1926—the fiercest social conflict in modern British history— resulted from the knife being applied to the coal-mining industry. Announcing their intention of abrogating the 1924 national wage agreement, the mine owners referred to fantastical wage cuts of between 13 and 48 percent—not in order to reap splendid profits but to offset ruinous losses.⁴⁹ No mediation could prevent a confrontation. In May 1926, it culminated in a test of strength in which the workers were forced to concede defeat.⁵⁰

While the general strike was still basically a labor conflict, the Great Depression threatened the fabric of the British system of government. Hoping to protect the parliamentary-democratic order by moderating the nation’s social antagonisms, Ramsay MacDonald formed a national government,⁵¹ a solution that in effect meant the British people accepting an authoritarian regime. On the one hand, the model of a government without opposition contradicted the traditional values and practices of British parliamentary culture. On the other hand, this exceptional solution, supported by an overwhelming majority of the electorate, gave expression to another powerful tradition in British society: solidarity in hard times. MacDonald, who “betrayed” his Labor Party by joining with the Conservatives in a policy of social dismantling, believed he was acting to preserve the workers’ interests. In the summer and fall of 1931, he feared possible financial collapse, with consequences for the working class going far beyond the necessary cuts in social expenditures and wages. Also, in that critical August he was convinced of one thing in particular: that after struggling for years to gain power, through its intransigent stance his party was now forfeiting its fitness to govern. It would thus be irresponsible to act solely with union interests in mind, a sectarianism other Labor leaders had already confronted. But MacDonald’s ideas of socialism were oriented more to community than class; his agenda stressed service to the community, mutual dependence, integration, prudent action, security for the poor and underprivileged. He wanted a just distribution of the social burden and participation by everyone in the political community’s institutions.⁵² The precondition for such goals was naturally a stable government, which was his overriding aim—if need be, even at his own party’s expense.

In this way the British answer to the Great Depression was stability and integration.⁵³ The class struggle was neutralized by its representatives being voted out of Commons, MacDonald’s coalition gaining 554 seats, the overwhelming majority Conservative, and the actual Labor Party reduced to a mere 53. The Liberals and others managed to win only 9 seats. In a situation of crisis, many traditional Labor Party voters had thus chosen a policy of national unity and social cutbacks over their own particularistic interests. With a resounding mandate, the National Government instituted the cuts it thought necessary, especially in social services. It was unable to achieve another of its objectives, preserving the pound’s value, and the gold standard was once again abandoned. At the same time, a century-old tradition of free trade was abandoned with the introduction of protective tariffs.54 The result was a more rapid recovery than that of other countries. Consequently, in 1934 it was already possible to reverse the earlier cuts in unemployment benefits. Nobody tried to maintain the social sector’s economizing measures simply because they had been passed into law a few years earlier. With government support, more than a million poor individuals were now furnished with housing. Before coming apart during the transition to a war economy, the National Government thus succeeded in politically neutralizing mass unemployment.⁵⁵

This experiment in solving economic crisis through “soft” methods had highly unusual consequences. The Tories became increasingly convinced of the advantages of state intervention and the need to curb unbridled capitalism through governmental regulation. The Conservative Stanley Baldwin, a minister in MacDonald’s cabinet, even affirmed that laissez-faire, like the former slave trade, was now passé.⁵⁶ Also, he voiced his respect for the Labor opposition, acknowledging a common objective: preserving British tradition on the basis of the (uncodified) constitution and parliament. Such crisis management through social consensus was virtually inconceivable on the Continent. Continental political culture lacked the tradition of moderation that was a British hallmark; it lacked parliaments committed to reaching consensus—even one marked by self-imposed authoritarianism. Britain was a democracy in which an optimum of stability was assured—a stability expedited by a somewhat less than fully democratic electoral system.⁵⁷

In the early 1930s, Britain’s moderate, consensus-based political culture together with a relatively aristocratic plurality-based voting system preserved a nation shaken by a twofold crisis from even graver troubles. The consensual politics and voting system were closely, even systemically, linked. In contrast to proportional representation, the system of majority vote does not offer much electoral equality: marginal parties and particularistic interests are clearly at a disadvantage. All votes beyond the majority obtained by the successful candidate, no matter how many, are only of statistical interest. Given the likelihood of casting a “wasted” ballot, voters avoid parties that have little chance of winning a mandate. Reflecting these structural constraints, the electoral will thus gravitates toward a two-party system. Since success can only be gained by attracting the floating vote, and thus by espousing a more centrist position, the majority system effectively cancels out the diversity of political views and particularistic interests that are, inversely, promoted by the system of proportional representation. England’s political forms and symbols of legitimacy have likewise been oriented in this centrist, consensual direction, with differences of opinion tending to be limited to strictly public issues. Questions of worldview and ideology couched in a discourse of sectarian ardor, and truths promulgated in a similar manner, are considered suspect and illegitimate. Extremist parties thus have little chance of winning a seat in parliament, but rather are consigned to irrelevance. Even at the height of the ideological decade, this proved a formidable barrier to Britain’s Communists and Fascists.⁵⁸

The situation was entirely different on the Continent, where ideology and worldview exerted a lasting impact on political institutions. Undecided voters, playing a crucial role in the British electoral system, were far less important here. Instead, solid bloc formations reflected prevailing political realities. In some places, the parties gained the contours of religious orders. They were similar to ideological armed camps and tended to affirm the validity of traditional affiliations and milieus rather than offer pragmatic, flexible, and changing perspectives. If voters switched parties, this was due less to the success or failure of the government in power than to a change in their underlying political disposition. And while the “landslide” was integral to the plurality system, radical shifts in the system of proportional representation augured revolution.⁵⁹ This was evident in Germany during the period of the presidential cabinets, when governments ruled by emergency decrees and arbitrary decisions. Brüning’s deflationary policies, introduced almost without Reichstag participation, produced hordes of unemployed workers and unsettled broad segments of the population.⁶⁰ Given these deteriorating conditions, every election was bound to have disastrous results. There was consequently nothing surprising about the Nazis being able to increase their Reichstag representation from 12 to 107 delegates in the elections of September 1930;in the elections of July1932,they succeeded in more than doubling this figure to a dizzying 230.

The system of proportional representation cannot be blamed for all the era’s afflictions. Nor can one specific electoral system be imposed on states with very different political traditions. As the history of the Kaiserreich strongly suggests, even with a plurality system, the territorial, religious, and ideological divisions in Germany would have produced more than two parties in the Reichstag vying for the voters’ preference.⁶¹ Nevertheless, such a system in Weimar would not only have encouraged the electorate to behave in a different way; at the same time, it would have resulted in a Reichstag whose overall composition strongly favored the parties of the Weimar coalition.⁶²

The effects of the Great Depression were different in France than in Germany or England. France being a state in the Continental tradition, politics tended toward polarization, and party disputes were ideologically motivated. In times of crisis, the French had a certain predilection for street violence. The variety of parties represented in the Chamber of Deputies was testimony to the benefits of democracy but also to the various disadvantages of the system of proportional representation introduced in 1927.

France’s postwar economy was stable and prosperous. It offered a diametrical contrast to the British economy, since its dynamism was fueled by the fall of the franc, which stabilized at a very low level.⁶³ Both workers and employers benefited from this situation, while the main losers were pensioners and others on a fixed income. The undervalued franc spurred exports and guaranteed full employment. On the eve of the Great Depression, production had risen by some 50 percent over the levels of 1913, while incomes were higher by a third.⁶⁴

France was indeed affected by the global economic crisis, but this happened relatively late and by degrees, leading to stagnation instead of shock.⁶⁵ Thatmay have been due to the fact that France’s foreign debt was relatively limited. Also, its economy was still mainly agrarian and thus far less export-oriented than Germany’s or England’s. While joblessness in Germany and England reached epidemic proportions, it remained relatively low in France. The structure of France’s labor market may also have been a factor at work here: in the crisis, large numbers of foreign laborers who had arrived after the war from Southern Europe and East Central Europe were dismissed and presumably sent home; in any case, they did not appear in the unemployment statistics.⁶⁶

Before the Great Depression, France had enjoyed not only favorable economic conditions but also a reasonably stable political structure. The frequent changes in governments and cabinets in these years are deceptive, since they took place without a need for requiring new elections—although they point to a certain unrest in the French system, it had a solid enough foundation. Despite the Third Republic and its constitution having arisen, like Weimar’s, from military defeat and severe territorial loss—that of the 1870–71 Franco-Prussian war⁶⁷—the social-political situation stabilized relatively quickly afterward. Under these circumstances, the republic was already able to prevail against its opponents at an early point,⁶⁸ and a tradition thus coalesced within the structure of its political system.⁶⁹ This system held its ground for three generations, until finally succumbing to the étrange défaite of 1940. During its long existence, patterns of political behavior had evolved that contributed to a significant degree of harmony between France’s historical parties, the parties of the notables.

The stability of the Third Republic during the great crisis is in fact far more noteworthy than its often accentuated opposite. The republic stood firm despite all the threats and shocks besetting its political system, street battles, strikes, and authoritarian decrees, which could have resulted in a transformation of its parliamentary democracy. There were certainly plenty of temptations. Prime Minister André Tardieu, who had entered from the left and shifted to the right, envisioned a Bonapartist regime appealing directly to the masses, thus reducing both the importance of the party machines and the influence of the notables, an enduring hallmark of French political life. His downfall in 1932 marked a reversal for authoritarian ambitions, but it also marked the onset of a chronic crisis in the French executive.⁷⁰ Such authoritarian tendencies were also evident toward the end of the 1930s, when it became customary to govern by means of so-called pleins pouvoirs. It is difficult to say what would have happened in the end if the war had not intervened.⁷¹

Consensus was also evident in the unusually strong integrative influence of the parliamentary committees, whose deliberations were closed to public scrutiny.⁷² In these deliberations, the traditional bonds of the “political class” were highly effective, with both compromises and less laudable arrangements being crafted across party lines. Such camaraderie outside parliament’s public arena proved advantageous, old ties now serving as bulwarks against the tide of political passion in the crisis years of the 1930s. Although the committees were derided in the street by antiparliamentarian groups on the far right, this vociferous scorn could not undermine France’s admittedly precarious political stability.⁷³ The public was all the more generously served with heated debate in the plenum. Here ideological confrontation seethed, with politicians addressing the people from the podium while actual decisions were being made in the private committees. This role playing between the National Assembly plenum and the closed-door committees encouraged the emergence of supportive decision making authorities mediating between the government and the opposition,⁷⁴ a generations-old tradition that made it possible to keep sharp political and ideological differences in check in the years of crisis. If that crisis threatened to carry open conflict from the street into the parliament, the chamber protected itself byissuing décrets-lois, emergency decrees circumventing the ideologically influenced decisions of the plenum and thus the public forum. A surface layer of parliamentary tradition that had evolved over decades disposed the legislature to grant pleins pouvoirs to the executive during an emergency, thus freeing it from the need to seek approval for every new measure. This approach, while unsavory from an institutional perspective, nevertheless benefited French democracy in stormy times. It protected the Third Republic from more far-reaching perils.

Operating in a gray zone of parliamentary legitimacy, the committees were one pillar of French democracy. The other pillar was the Radical Party in its balancing role. On the one hand, the party, whose name was misleading since it was neither radical nor left wing in a traditional way, served a conservative function in its capacity to enter into coalitions with either the left or the right. On the other hand, it was a bastion of French republicanism, thus standing in the grand tradition of the revolution, defending its achievements as a status quo emerging from the time-honored past.⁷⁵ This was the source of the party’s singular duality. As champions of France’s republican ideals, the Radicals were progressive when it came to political issues: those concerning state and government reform, freedom and equality, the separation of church and state, the preservation of democracy and parliamentarianism. But they were conservative, even reactionary, when it came to social and economic issues, particularly issues tied to the stability of the franc. In this respect, they represented the small independent landowners whose ancestors had profited from revolutionary secularization: the independent farmers, tradesmen, small shop owners, public officials, and self-employed professionals, the journalists and artists. Their traditional adversaries were the representatives of Catholicism and high finance and the great landowners.⁷⁶ The Radicals in fact represented the very milieu that in Germany lent massive support to the Nazis, the basic, defining difference being that the Radical Party opted in France’s crisis for political freedom rather than its opposite.⁷⁷ This underscores the long-term impact of differing traditions of political culture.

In this way, through their amalgam of social conservatism and political progressivism the Radicals provided a guarantee against civil war.⁷⁸ In 1936, when it was imperative to protect the Republic from the far-right Fascist leagues, they joined the left-wing forces, including the Communists, in the Popular Front without suffering any loss of face.⁷⁹ Their leader, Daladier, even resorted to Marxist rhetoric in publicly affirming that as a representative of the lower middle class, his aim was a natural alliance with the proletariat.⁸⁰ But when the left began extravagantly assailing traditional property owners with social legislation and lavish wage hikes, the Radicals shifted back to the right, putting an end to such projects. In 1926, 1934, and 1938, this left-right oscillation led to different majorities emerging in the Chamber of Deputies. It was especially during the crisis period and its aftermath that the Radical Party’s policies had a decisive impact on French politics. The chamber elected in 1936 not only produced different governments through party realignment but also diametrically opposed economic policies: a policy of social progress that was introduced by the Popular Front in 1936, and a policy of social conservatism and monetary orthodoxy in 1938. The Radicals belonged to both majorities.⁸¹ Pursuing their partisan interests, they helped assure the system’s stability.

In Germany there was no radical-republican, socially conservative party. The task of defending the Weimar Republic’s democratic and parliamentary institutions basically fell to the Social Democrats. Yet the SPD remained a party of social reform that made use of radical socialist rhetoric.⁸² Although practically the guardian of the Republic, it was just as much a party of partisan ideology and interests as most of the other parties. It, too, had a constituency to serve. While the Radicals occupied the middle ground in the French Third Republic’s play of forces, the republican-minded SPD leaned left of a political center defending parliamentarianism, hence Weimar’s status quo. The party saw itself as protector of the November 1918 revolution’s sociopolitical achievements, as codified in the Stinnes-Legien Agreement between employers and trade unions. It felt itself obliged to fulfill this “social-conservative” task.⁸³

It would be unfair to reproach the SPD for its policy of protecting vested interests: it was an “old” party that had emerged from the conditions of Imperial Germany, and in the “Second German Empire” the government was accountable to the kaiser, not the Reichstag. In that period, the Reichstag thus focused on promoting particularistic interests, not on maintaining a system in which its participation was restricted. In common with the other “old” parties, the SPD brought this way of proceeding to the Weimar Republic: its conduct was defensive and passive, as if it could unite within itself the dual role of being both a government and an opposition party.⁸⁴

Parties that have evolved by representing specific social interests have difficulty in acknowledging their responsibility to the system as a whole. This is already clear in the case of Great Britain. Even under the far more favorable conditions of its electoral and party system, realizing this “national” responsibility still required Ramsay MacDonald’s unconventional move away from the special interests to which the parties were committed. In Germany after the disaster of the September1930 elections, the SPD thought it necessary to support Brüning’s orthodox economic policies, even if only indirectly, by siding with the government in the no-confidence motions brought against it in the Reichstag. But it was acting under the pressure of circumstances, in the certainty that a new vote, loudly demanded at every opportunity by the Nazis, would only worsen the situation. Moreover, the SPD was obliged to support the coalition with the Center Party. Had Brüning (a member of the Center Party) been toppled by SPD misconduct in the Reichstag, this would have entailed extremely unpleasant consequences for the Prussian government, composed of the Social Democrats in coalition with the Center Party.⁸⁵

As is well known, in March 1930, the Weimar Republic’s last parliamentary cabinet, the Great Coalition under SPD chancellor Müller, had fallen over the issue of unemployment insurance. This involved an abdication of the party’s republican mission due to the special trade-union interests dominant in its parliamentary faction. The perception that what was here at stake was a choice between mere partisanship and the good of all, in other words the fate of the republic, is not a historiographical reconstruction. Rather, it corresponds very closely to the perception of the time. The expert in labor law Hugo Sinzheimer thus praised the parliamentary faction’s decision to reject Brüning’s proposed compromise on the issue by arguing that defense of the republic was “secondary” to defense of social rights and socialism. Rudolf Hilferding, by contrast, mindful of Reich President Hindenburg’s executive powers and seeing what was coming, denounced the decision as an evasion of republican responsibility.⁸⁶

With historical perspective, set against both the stance Ramsay McDonald embraced against his own party, facilitated of course by Britain’s electoral and party system, and the downright “natural” barrier raised by the French Radicals against the right-wing challenge, it is clear that Germany lacked a credible force at the center truly committed to defending the republic and parliamentary democracy. Certain personalities marked an exception: Otto Braun the long-time Social Democratic Prussian prime minister, thus urged his party to fill the political vacuum.⁸⁷ But the SPD, the most republican party in Weimar, found itself overtaxed by the demands of such a mediatory role—that of defending both the republic and the social gains it had achieved. It was not up to coping with such a strain.

It is striking that the only European polities to emerge from the convulsions of the international economic crisis as functioning democracies were those that had been democracies before World War I: France and Britain. All the other polities turned authoritarian, dictatorial, or Fascist in the interwar period.⁸⁸ Most of the democratic parliamentary regimes in Europe had no need of the crisis of the 1930s to shed the governmental forms they had been induced to adopt by the Allies at Paris in 1919. Especially in East Central Europe, the Balkans, and Southeastern Europe, states had already cast off the blessings of democracy and parliamentarianism by the 1920s. While the reasons for this differed, the overall picture suggests that these states, newly created or expanded after World War I, turned to authoritarian solutions to cope with shrinking external markets, chronic agrarian troubles, smoldering social conflicts, and problems of nationality.⁸⁹ These polities—for instance, Poland under Pilsudski and Yugoslavia under the royal despotism of King Alexander—were “functional dictatorships,” mainly concerned with preserving the state.⁹⁰ Aside from Czechoslovakia, which notably maintained its democratic parliamentary system, all the new or expanded states in Central, East Central, and Southern Europe became authoritarian or Fascist. But strikingly, among the modern, industrialized states, only Germany veered from democracy to dictatorship. This deserves an explanation.

Germany’s transformation into a very special type of dictatorship cannot be explained by pointing to other countries, such as Lithuania, Poland, or Hungary, that established authoritarian regimes in the interwar period. Evocations of a deep-rooted“special path” should also be viewed with skepticism. In political history, such long-term strands are not much use in interpreting short term sequences of cataclysmic events. In the face of these events, a group of facts clearly remains crucial: In 1918–19 Germany underwent a change in both its political system and its form of state;⁹¹ at the same time, Europe’s constitutional monarchies, including Belgium, the Netherlands, and the Scandinavian countries, survived the international economic crisis while preserving their political systems. Moreover, except for Britain and Belgium, none of these states was involved in the Great War; and both Britain and Belgium counted among the victors. France, Switzerland, and Finland had both a republican form of state and a parliamentary system of government, but otherwise differed substantially from Germany: France was another victor, Switzerland remained outside the war, and in our context Finland’s case has no importance.

Germany’s situation was different from that of the other nations. The Reich had accepted defeat reluctantly. Until the very end, the German army’s supreme command encouraged public belief in an imminent victory by the Central Powers.⁹² With defeat, the monarchic form of state was not so much consciously and willingly renounced as simply lost; not even the Social Democrats really envisaged the Reich’s transformation into a republic, even though that had been one of their official aims. Ultimately, they were “monarchists of reason.”⁹³ Philipp Scheidemann’s cry of “long live the German republic” to the crowd amassed in front of the Reichstag was in fact an “accidental” proclamation, primarily meant to forestall a radicalization of the situation in the streets, where the Spartacist Karl Liebknecht, it was believed, was about to pronounce a Socialist German republic. The widespread longing for a monarch remained; the misgivings of the constitution’s liberal fathers, “republicans of reason,” regarding the internal stability of a parliamentary republic were addressed by creating the office of a Reich president with expanded powers. Finally, the forces of the old regime managed to tie the system’s transformation through the “October reforms” to military defeat: the formation of a parliamentary government in Germany had been an Allied, in other words Wilsonian, precondition for the armistice; and indeed, the Allied intention had been to raze the last autocratic bastion in Germany, rendering the government accountable to the people.

Nevertheless, a parliamentary government did not emerge in Germany solely as a response to external pressure. The parties in the Reichstag’s “interfactional committee” had already demanded it in September 1918, which thoroughly reflected the will of the parliamentary majority.⁹⁴ Even in a monarchic framework, steps toward democratic parliamentarianism would have had a powerful political impact. But both the crown and the army were dead set against any further constitutional limitations on their power, and Wilhelm II was not prepared to abdicate in favor of a Hohenzollern prince not heir to the throne.⁹⁵ With the proclamation of the republic on9November 1918,the monarchy’s abolition meant the loss of a basic element of national tradition.And the in- ability of the new republic to gain the kind of peace expected of it in Paris discredited it in the eyes of a great many Germans.⁹⁶

For those raised in the Wilhelminian tradition, Germany now seemed a different country, the Reich staggering from one crisis to another, robbed of its once-enshrined ties. But making a historical necessity out of the path from such an inauspicious starting point to Hitler’s seizure of power is not very illuminating. We should here keep in mind that the latter event took place nearly fifteen years after the Great War, following a phase of recovery and stabilization. This forms a contrast with Mussolini’s march on Rome, which took place in 1922, with la vittoria mutilata at one’s back and the revolutionary unrest sparked by the war before one’s eyes. Classical Fascism’s historical matrix is located in this immediate postwar phase. The events of January 1933 in Germany do not, in fact, appear to have mainly constituted a reaction to the Great War, defeat, and the Versailles Treaty. While the treaty was indeed broadly perceived as a national humiliation, its stringent conditions regarding reparations and rearmament had already been eased during the period of the presidential cabinets—that is, before Hitler’s accession—and were in the final stage of further revision. In the final analysis, despite all that came before, it was the Great Depression that hurled Germany into the abyss.⁹⁷ The aftermath of Black Friday simply swept away the institutions of a republic that had been unable to adequately consolidate themselves, to develop a political tradition, or to gain widespread popular acceptance in the short period between World War I and the global economic crisis.

The successive presidential cabinets represented an attempt, long prepared behind the scene by the forces of the old regime, to transform parliamentary democracy along authoritarian lines. But only the Great Depression supplied the social and economic conditions allowing such a political intent to become reality. With the parliamentary stalemate having led to a successive transfer of power, in accordance with Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution, from the republican institutions—and especially from the legislature—into the hands of the Reich’s president and hence to the executive, a new institutional reality had emerged in Weimar. Although a government relying on presidential authority might conceivably have been brought down by a parliamentary majority, in those days of deepening crisis such a constellation became continually less feasible. Apparently, the state’s power had slipped into the blurred corridors of the old régime’s ruling elites.⁹⁸

The direction taken by the presidential cabinets tended to enhance the autonomy of the government, increasingly detached from the parties and parliament. The ground for this disentanglement had been laid by a basic dichotomy at work in the Weimar constitution between the sovereignty of parliament, whose possible “absolutism” was feared by the constitution’s authors, and the sovereignty of the president’s office, especially as manifest in his emergency powers.⁹⁹ Both forms of sovereignty were legitimized by general elections, and in normal situations there would have been no reason for parliament and president to thwart each other. Their evolving confrontation was chiefly a result of that increasingly evident parliamentary stalemate, which is to say of the parties’ structural inability to set aside their special interests and form a stable government. In general, the less the parties agreed among themselves, the weaker the government and the greater the powers wielded by the president. The intensifying crisis burdened the party system with mounting radicalization; the crisis favored extremist parties and those opposed to the “system” while paralyzing the Reichstag.

The collapse of the system was ushered in by presidential cabinet measures that took the form of emergency decrees—measures thus no longer really sanctioned by a sovereign parliament.¹⁰⁰ Deflationary policies and an accompanying surge in unemployment further aggravated the situation. In this manner, during the crisis years of Weimar’s presidential cabinets antidemocratic defiance grew precisely in that ostensible stronghold of democracy: the parliament. The September 1930 and July 1932 elections, held during ominous economic crises, led to a huge increase in the number of Nazi deputies. The Reichstag had now become a convocation of the existing order’s sworn enemies: together the Nazis and the German Communist Party controlled a negative majority.¹⁰¹

The Weimar Republic had maneuvered itself into an impasse. From the republican perspective, the parliament was overflowing with parties hostile to the system, while forces ill-disposed to democracy surrounded the Reich president. Further events unfolded between the fearsome representatives of these two authorities. On the eve of Hitler’s accession to power, there were two possible alternatives: the establishment of an authoritarian presidential regime, which risked violating the constitution and thus provoking civil war; or a return to parliamentary sovereignty and the formation of a Reichstag-backed government—a possibility that made the Nazis, now the strongest faction in parliament, a much-courted partner. As a result of secret right-wing machinations and intrigues, the two alternatives were combined. Hindenburg appointed Hitler chancellor in the expectation that he could muster a parliamentary majority; doing so would have freed the president from a burden of daily political accountability resulting from the cabinets being only responsible to him—a responsibility in accordance with the notorious “dictatorial” Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution.¹⁰² For his part, Hitler insisted on being appointed chancellor in a presidential cabinet since he did not want to depend on coalition partners in a parliamentary cabinet that could topple him at any moment. It was left to the previous chancellor Franz von Papen to obscure the difference between the alternatives, deceive Hindenburg, and launch Hitler’s cabinet. This was a result a more aware Hindenburg probably would not have accepted.¹⁰³

That cabal and deception, idiosyncrasies and resentment could have such a decisive impact on Germany’s fate and the world’s has its source in the circumstances surrounding the Weimar Republic’s downfall. With the collapse of democratic-parliamentary institutions and the location of power in a place where it was at the mercy of the moods, preferences, and machinations of a small coterie surrounding the president, the political vying for power took on atavistic and courtly forms. Consequently, the republic’s most dramatic moments, in all their world-historical significance, resembled a burlesque. That such a shameful charade was possible cannot be explained by simply pointing to one or another characters; it had to have deeper roots. But acknowledging this does not mean we can avoid considering what actually transpired during those fateful days—or asking if what finally came to pass was not to be avoided. At the same time, scrutinizing Weimar’s last phase offers more than insight into the stumbling and excesses of mediocre personalities. Rather, we confront fundamental questions involving the relationship between historical tradition and the circumstances of political action, between possibility and reality, contingency and necessity, personal character and structure. The short stretch from Weimar’s agony to Hitler’s assumption of power is a morality play in two senses: it offers lessons about both the realization of the worst of all possibilities and the meaning of history itself.

To again take up our narrative: by refusing to accept the “Brüning compromise” regarding unemployment insurance, the Social Democratic faction in the Reichstag brought about the collapse of the Müller government, Weimar’s last parliamentary cabinet. But the Social Democrats were not solely responsible for that collapse. Although a majority of the DVP faction had endorsed the compromise at the last moment, this was essentially a tactical move: the SPD was meant to shoulder the blame for breaching the coalition. Word had got out that Hindenburg was not prepared to either grant Müller plenary powers—based on Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution—or accede to parliament’s dissolution. The cabinet, it was reported, would thus have no choice but to resign. In its place, the ideas of the enterprising Kurt von Schleicher, head of the Wehrmacht Office in the Reich Ministry of Defense, were being adopted. Schleicher had been trying to usher in a change of regime for some time,¹⁰⁴ his aim being a cabinet based on the bourgeois parties with the “backing” of the Reich president. “Backing” was here a euphemism for separating the government from the parliament, in other words, restructuring the constitution and the state along authoritarian lines. State secretary Meißner intimated as much when he casually informed Center Party minister Josef Wirth that President Hindenburg would refuse to sanction this government, again based on Article 48.¹⁰⁵

The DVP was thus aware of the growing prospect of a “Hindenburg cabinet” detached from parliament. Under such circumstances, it was not particularly disposed to reach an understanding with the SPD. At the same time, Heinrich Brüning and the Center Party, which had given parliamentary democracy a last chance with the Great Coalition, were also familiar with the basic plan. Confidants of the president had already initiated contacts with Brüning in the spring of 1929. It is thus not surprising that the Center Party politician and his parliamentary faction believed that if this last effort at a compromise failed, the fate of the cabinet and indeed of this form of government would be sealed.¹⁰⁶

With Müller’s resignation, the SPD made it easier for its political and social opponents to embark on a presidential path whose course had already been set. This path led to major changes in monetary, economic, and social policy; it led to an authoritarian regime whose open aim was to drive the SPD from the corridors of power. Yet Brüning, having assumed administrative control directly after Müller’s fall and soon installed as presidentially appointed chancellor, only realized this aim in a limited fashion once the Social Democrats decided to tolerate his government in response to the catastrophic September 1930 elections. The SPD ensured his parliamentary position by thwarting attempts to topple the cabinet with a vote of no confidence. By opting for this strategy, designed to prevent new elections and even worse, the SPD was stigmatized for associating with a “hunger chancellor” whose deflationary policies sought to free Germany from the burden of reparations at the cost of a growing horde of jobless workers.¹⁰⁷ Brüning in turn forfeited Hindenburg’s confidence, failing, in the president’s view, in his task of ridding himself of the SPD and securing a “national” majority; he fell, as he himself put it, “a hundred meters short of the goal.”

It would be up to Brüning’s successor, Franz von Papen, to bring the Nazis, whom Hindenburg considered plebeian but still part of the national camp, into “participation in the state.”¹⁰⁸ The Brüning cabinet had received parliamentary support through the SPD’s policy of toleration. But the Papen “cabinet of barons” aroused intense mistrust in the Reichstag when it reconvened in September 1932, following a disastrous set of elections in July in which the Nazis more than doubled their mandates, making them the strongest faction in the Reichstag. With an order from Hindenburg for the dissolution of parliament in his pocket, Papen hoped to buy more time for his government. Lacking a majority, he was in a legally precarious position, mainly because his advocate Kurt von Schleicher had failed in behind-the-scenes negotiations to convince Hitler to back Papen’s cabinet. After his overwhelming victory at the polls, Hitler insisted on being named chancellor. His demand was rejected by Hindenburg in a brusque and humiliating fashion after a short meeting between the two in August. Hindenburg had nothing but contempt for Hitler; moreover, he considered the reckless demagogue a political danger and feared he would establish a party dictatorship. Appointing him chancellor was completely out of the question. And while Schleicher was trying to bring the Nazis into the government and thus tame them, Hitler was adamant, obsessively bent on a strategy of “all or nothing.”¹⁰⁹

This strategy proved detrimental to his party. There was widespread discontent when the Nazis were not granted a role in the government after the July elections. And when new elections were held in November, a clear shift became evident: the wave of popularity for the Nazi Party had begun to ebb. Though it remained the strongest single party in the Reichstag, its electoral losses had been substantial—some two million votes. Also, the party’s coffers were rapidly becoming depleted; further elections would bring financial ruin. Finally, the signs that emerged in autumn that the economy was recovering—even if this still was having no perceptible impact on the labor market—boded ill for the Nazis. Sooner or later a weakened party would back the government, without Hitler having been awarded the prize he so ardently desired— thus Schleicher’s calculation.

Kurt von Schleicher has often been described as a modern reactionary. In contrast to the conservatives, he did not wish to resuscitate the Wilhelminian era. He also did not consider “sitting on bayonets,” in other words open military dictatorship, to be any kind of alternative. He was well aware of the drastic changes that came with modern mass society.¹¹⁰ In his thinking, a temporary breach of the Weimar Constitution, namely, setting a date for Reichstag elections going beyond the limit prescribed by Article 25 of sixty days following parliament’s dissolution, could be realized through a consensus of various social groups, especially the trade unions. In this, his ideas differed considerably from those at work in Papen’s “emergency” project. Papen not only cultivated wild plans for an authoritarian “new state” but also intended to install a regular “battle cabinet” in opposition to the Reichstag.¹¹¹

Schleicher tried to stabilize the situation by increasing public backing for his emergency plans, proposing a “trade-union axis.” He approached Hitler’s deputy, Gregor Strasser, whom he introduced to Hindenburg as a possible vice chancellor, while concurrently conducting talks with the leadership of the League of German Unions (the ADGB); his aim was to remind the unions of their “national duty,” a process resembling the crisis management that had taken place during World War I. The SPD leadership rejected this initiative.¹¹² Tensions had surfaced everywhere between the Social Democratic Party and the free trade unions. These tensions were only partly due to the party’s reduced influence resulting from its exclusion from the Reichstag; more importantly, there had been a realignment of interests. The ADGB was operating across the lines of the hostile camps and—in a direct reversal of the situation in March 1930, when it allowed Hermann Müller to fall—was now cooperating with those it had traditionally disdained. The common concern was implementing an unconventional policy to reduce unemployment; for its part, while biding its time the SPD continued to espouse positions that were ideological and legalistic. Already in October 1932, Theodor Leipart of the ADGB had publicly affirmed the free unions’ willingness to cooperate with a presidential regime.¹¹³ Schleicher had gained their support by agreeing to revoke Papen’s September decrees, which gave employers the option of paying less than the agreed-on wage levels. Long-term measures to generate jobs were planned to alleviate the crisis—a project under discussion in the ADGB but stubbornly opposed by the SPD, which believed it would only fuel inflation. But such fears would prove unfounded.

A Reichskommissar had meanwhile been instructed to agree with the Reichsbank on far-reaching plans for a crash program to create employment.¹¹⁴ This program, however, failed to fulfill the expectations aroused by Schleicher. The economic upturn finally perceptible in the spring of 1933, from which Hitler would profit, was due to more than job creation schemes, although these did send out positive psychological signals to the population. The plan, attributed to Schleicher, of a corporatist “cross-front” in which the employer organizations of the otherwise politically hostile parties, the party militias, and the entrepreneurs would operate in tandem, was still undeveloped, though Schleicher enjoyed being dubbed the “social general.”¹¹⁵ The East Elbian Junkers suspected him of trying to institute a kind of “countryside Bolshevism” when he proposed that heavily indebted estates be requisitioned for settlement purposes—the same “eastern relief project” that had earlier been Brüning’s undoing.¹¹⁶ On the other hand, Schleicher had little to fear from heavy industry, whose leaders were receptive to his stabilization policies; later, they would regret his fall.117

As a man of the Reichswehr, Schleicher was revisionist in his views on foreign policy and the eastern frontier; he envisaged a possible war with Poland. In view of approaching German parity in rearmament policy, he saw the storm-troop battalions and the Stahlhelm as grateful partners in his scheme to “transform” the Reichswehr, enlarged by militia units—a step leading to general conscription.¹¹⁸ The Reichswehr’s rearmament was always Schleicher’s main priority. He had engineered the system of presidential cabinets in order to neutralize the SPD, which was opposed to defense, and to promote the army’s interests in the disarmament negotiations.¹¹⁹ At the same time, he devised some unconventional solutions to the political crisis. That none of these was realized and instead Hitler was appointed chancellor by the Reich president is the great enigma of German history.¹²⁰

The man who finally opened the gates to Hitler’s chancellorship was Franz von Papen, whose government succumbed to a no confidence vote in September 1932 under dishonorable circumstances. Papen had succeeded Brüning in June. Considered an extreme reactionary, he had managed to incur the wrath of most of the country’s interest groups. He had resigned from the Center Party to preempt his expulsion from it. He had estranged the workers and their movement by arbitrarily cutting unemployment benefits and forcing applicants to submit to a rigid and demeaning review. By contrast, he had appeased the employers with a series of tax relief measures and the above-mentioned possibility of setting new workers’ wages below the agreed-on levels. Also, he had made himself unpopular through various plans to change the constitution. In the eyes of the republican parties, he was the chancellor of a looming civil war.¹²¹ Derided as a “gentleman rider,” he seemed ready to risk a general strike and further escalation when, faced with another hostile parliament as a result of the November elections, he tried to persuade Hindenburg to dissolve the Reichstag once again in order to circumvent the sixty-day constitutional limit for calling new elections. But Schleicher and the other cabinet ministers were not ready to risk an open battle in the streets. It was imperative, they believed, to preserve both state and Reichswehr from civil war, hence from Papen’s planned declaration of a national emergency.¹²² Schleicher’s “Ott Scenario,” a simulation played out for the German high command, was meant to show that Papen’s adventurism would end in horror. Along with civil war, this scenario included a Polish invasion of the Reich. Incapable of coping with its internal and external enemies, the army would be destroyed. A shaken president now decided he was too old to assume responsibility for a civil war, thus foiling Papen’s scheme to breach the constitution; Papen was obliged to resign. Hindenburg accepted the decision, but reluctantly, since a relationship of deep mutual trust had evolved between the two men.

When Hindenburg appointed Schleicher chancellor in December 1932, he asked Papen to continue offering him advice. Also, at the president’s request Papen was allowed to retain his official residence in the chancellery. He thus remained in Hindenburg’s immediate proximity, since the latter had temporarily relocated to the chancellery while the presidential palace was being renovated. Through this direct access, Papen assured himself a substantial measure of courtly power, now a determining factor in the arena of national politics.¹²³ Papen knew how to take full advantage of his political capital. In order to destroy Schleicher, a former mentor and sponsor who had engineered his downfall, he was prepared to press for Hitler’s appointment by Hindenburg as chancellor.

By early January 1933, it was clear that Schleicher’s support was crumbling. In this atmosphere, Hindenburg let himself be persuaded by his political camarilla, especially by his confidant Papen, to withdraw his trust from Schleicher and name Hitler chancellor.¹²⁴ That the president, the only remaining authority between Hitler and the chancellorship, finally abandoned his resolve to deny state power to the “Bohemian corporal” was partly due to Papen having deceived him regarding the makeup of Hitler’s cabinet. Hindenburg had been unwilling to grant the leader of the largest faction in the Reichstag a presidential government for which he would have had to assume responsibility. He was thus willing to suppress his misgivings about a Hitler chancellorship only in the case of a government appointed by the Reichstag. A majority consisting of Nazis,German Nationals,the Center Party, and the Bavarian People’s Party was statistically conceivable.¹²⁵ But Hitler had no intention of relying on the moods of a Reichstag majority, which could withdraw its parliamentary support at will. He wanted to head a presidential cabinet and, armed with a presidential decree, to dissolve the Reichstag, declare new elections, and gain a comfortable parliamentary majority as the legitimate state power.The Reichstag would then pass an enabling act granting him a free hand and disencumbering him from the objections of both president and parliament. The path to dictatorship would lie open—and this in a legal constitutional manner.¹²⁶

To reconcile Hindenburg’s wishes with Hitler’s nonnegotiable demand for a presidential government, Papen resorted to duping the elderly president. In league with Hitler, he presented Hindenburg with a list of names for a cabinet in which the post of minister of justice was still vacant. This gave Hindenburg the impression it would be filled after negotiations with the Center Party, which was slated to join the coalition.¹²⁷ To underscore his point, Papen observed that even in the case of Müller’s Great Coalition, the Center Party had only joined later. At this time, Hitler knew that the head of the German National People’s Party (DNVP), Alfred Hugenberg, himself known for his antiparliamentary views and opposed to the Center’s social demands, would not insist on its inclusion in the coalition. And Papen correctly assumed that Hindenburg would not rescind his decision once the cabinet had been sworn in and was functioning de facto on presidential authority. It seemed necessary to act without delay: rumors were rife that Schleicher and Hammerstein (commander of the Potsdam garrison) were scheming to have the Potsdam garrison arrest the president and his family, a military putsch to be forestalled by prompt inauguration of the new government and, above all, of its minister of defense. Such false reports played their role in the investiture of Hitler’s cabinet. The following day, 31 January 1933, Hitler, newly appointed as German chancellor, raised untenable demands leading to the breakdown of negotiations with the Center Party—negotiations that in any event had only begun for purposes of show.¹²⁸ Armed with a presidential decree, Hitler dissolved the Reichstag on 1 February and set new elections for 5 March. The fate of the Weimar Republic was sealed.

Hitler had thus succeeded in breaching the dike around the president, in penetrating his carefully guarded inner sanctum of power. This access to the august potentate proved decisive for Germany’s fortunes. Like a dwarf from the netherworld, the mediocre figure of Franz von Papen had wielded the key to Hindenburg, which he decided to pass on to Hitler so that the latter could gratify his greed for power. Hitler, in turn, had installed himself in Papen’s inner chamber in order to win Hindenburg’s trust. The dice were thus tossed within a narrow circle of individuals— Papen, Hindenburg, Meißner, and Hugenberg—whose decisions were determined by personal feelings,¹²⁹ namely, feelings of vengeance, hatred, ambition, and opportunism. Although the transfer of state power to Hitler thus occurred in circumstances evoking bygone eras of court intrigue, the historical consequences were monstrous. This conclusion might be unsatisfying to an observer whose perspective has been sharpened by the structures of modern mass societies. But in fact, such a regression could occur only against the backdrop of a mass society whose institutions lay dying. In such a situation, with society’s representatives no longer able to fulfill their tasks, it became possible to do away with the president’s powers.¹³⁰

Hitler’s play for power was veiled; few perceived what was taking place. Even some of those hastily summoned to the chancellery to be sworn in as ministers were unsure until the last moment whether Papen or Hitler would head the cabinet.Neither the public nor the parties expected a transfer of power to Hitler.The danger that many dreaded was a second Papen cabinet. Papen was thought capable of the worst, which at the time meant suspending the constitution, precipitating a civil war, and establishing a dictatorship. The representatives of the Weimar Republic’s two remaining founding parties—the SPD and the Center—watched the unfolding legal procedures virtually paralyzed. Would it come to a breach of the constitution in the form of a proclamation of national emergency? It was well known that Schleicher was contemplating such a move. But for various reasons, Hindenburg could not be persuaded to dissolve the Reichstag without first setting a legal date for a new poll. Schleicher’s plans would involve a flagrant breach of the constitution, based on the hope that a parliament with a functioning majority could emerge from a later election (perhaps in autumn), in the midst of an improved economy. The Reich president was probably still under the sway of the persuasive Ott Scenario, with its bloody vision of civil war.

Schleicher had also been quietly informed of another, “soft” approach to breaching the constitution. This was a notion first submitted in 1928 by the legal theorist—and eventual “crown jurist of the Third Reich”—Carl Schmitt. He suggested a constitutional interpretation in which a negative majority that might bring down a government would be obstructed if it was not in a position to establish a government by itself. Such a desired “constructive vote of nonconfidence,” not envisioned by the Weimar Constitution, would defy any further “act of obstruction,” paralyzing the parliamentary system.¹³¹ Schmitt’s point was that the political parties should be deprived of the possibility to vote down a government by this means. Such a negative majority, he argued, was meant to be ignored; despite the loss of its parliamentary margin, the government could continue to rule until a new cabinet had been installed.

Schleicher did not make use of this proposed constitutional interpretation when he asked the president on 28 January for a decree dissolving the Reichstag—without, however, requesting a delay in new elections. He no longer dared to press Hindenburg that far.When the latter refused to issue the decree, and Schleicher realized he was facing dismissal, the only option he could imagine was that Papen would be called on to succeed him, a danger he and the Reichswehr were determined to forestall at any cost. “Chancellor Hitler” seemed preferable to the prospect of another Papen government.¹³²

The SPD and the Center Party were also inclined to this view. In November 1932, the Center deputy Joseph Wirth, who had exclaimed following Rathenau’s murder that “this enemy is on the right!” informed SPD faction leader Rudolf Breitscheid that the Center was contemplating a coalition with the Nazis to prevent the dismissal of the Reichstag and the destruction of democracy and basic civil rights.¹³³ Some voices in the Center’s sister party, the Bavarian People’s Party, were even prepared to consider Hitler as chancellor.¹³⁴ In the face of the state’s dire crisis, the arguments advanced by the Social Democrats were no less legalistic and inadequate. In contrast to the Center, the SPD categorically ruled out any coalition with the Nazis. But the party considered a parliamentary government under Hitler an acceptable alternative to Schleicher’s unconstitutional proposal and certainly preferable to Papen’s dangerous experiments with the constitution, which risked civil war. Already in conversations at the end of November, Breitscheid had informed Schleicher that the SPD would fight with all necessary means against a breach of the constitution.¹³⁵

In January 1933, that fateful month of German history, everyone’s priority appeared to be the defense of legality. The SPD executive announced that the proclamation of a “so-called national emergency” by the Schleicher government would create an unlawful situation and should be opposed by all means.¹³⁶ The Center’s press justified the party’s legalistic preference of a parliamentary government under Hitler to a state of emergency established by Schleicher by arguing that an “emergency dictatorship” would be based on a narrow political stratum, that of the Stahlhelm and the German Nationals,¹³⁷ which could only lead to unrest and bloodshed. On 28 January 1933, the Social Democratic paper Vorwärts aired the view that although Schleicher’s imminent down- fall would not mark an end to the reactionary course of events, it would at least spell an end to the “maniacal phase of reaction.” In the Reichstag, the paper indicated, the SPD would resolutely oppose the anticipated constitutional government of Hitler, Hugenberg, and the Center.¹³⁸

At the end of 1932, the SPD clearly believed that Schleicher posed a far greater threat to the state than Hitler. This is not at all surprising. In November it seemed that Hitler was defeated; the SPD executive issued an “all clear.”¹³⁹ The Social Democrats had the impression that their consistent opposition to Hitler and his cohorts over the years had finally proven successful. Their toleration of Brüning had also derived from this basic policy, although it had cost them dearly.¹⁴⁰ The increase in votes for the Communists at the expense of the SPD was due at least in part to that party’s strategy of backing the “hunger chancellor ” Brüning against the Nazis. Still, the SPD had waged five electoral campaigns under the banner “Beat Hitler!” and it viewed the results of the November 1932 poll as a significant achievement. Nobody could now seriously imagine a Hitler dictatorship.¹⁴¹ That was not just the attitude of the Social Democrats; it was the general consensus.

The Nazis also believed that their chances of seizing power were vanishing. On 15 January, they had managed to achieve a small victory in local elections in the small state of Lippe-Detmold; they had mobilized the entire party leadership, complete with a military parade by the SA. Although they tried to see this as a source of courage and confidence, for experienced observers the results were not very convincing. The NSDAP had not rebounded from its November setback. Even among party activists, the impression was growing that it would be best to avoid further elections in the Reich.¹⁴² It is thus not very surprising that in expectation of Schleicher’s fall, Vorwärts commented in late January that Germany was faced with one alterative: either “Carnival Chancellor Hitler” or the return of “Papen the Gentleman Rider.”¹⁴³

The view that a parliamentary cabinet under Hitler was a lesser evil than a declaration of national emergency by Schleicher or even Papen was the result not so much of political blindness as of moods and perceptions that at the time were thought realistic. Why not give preference to a parliamentary solution,even if it was called “Hitler”? The restoration of parliamentary government meant the return of the parties, which, excluded from responsibility in a regime of presidential cabinets, had been languishing for nearly three years. Moreover, the Nazis had been weakened. That was at least the prevailing view. It was also likely that the economy would soon begin to recover,¹⁴⁴ which would sound the death knell of the NSDAP, as a party of the desperate; it would contract to its former dimensions. In any case, there would be no real prospect of a presidential cabinet under Hitler; Hindenburg’s profound aversion to the Nazi leader was well known. On the other hand, the threat of a renewed presidential cabinet under Papen seemed very real indeed. And while Papen could only be disposed of by physical force, even perhaps through a civil war, Hitler could be toppled by a vote of the Reichstag; his party only controlled a third of the deputies. And what despite all differences seemed right to both Weimar Republic parties, the SPD and the Center, was also fine with Schleicher and the leadership of the Reichswehr. On the day he resigned, Schleicher tried to persuade Hindenburg to appoint Hitler instead of Papen, who in his view was the greater threat to the state.

From a historical perspective, this view of things seems hopelessly out of focus. Hindsight makes the events that followed—the catastrophe that the Third Reich and Hitler’s policies brought upon the world—into a basis for judgment. Already soon after Hitler’s accession, it became clear that a change of the highest order had taken place and that earlier views had been deeply mistaken.Since then,the disaster resulting from Hitler’s takeover has reconfigured its prehistory and functions as a mnemonic vortex from which neither historiography nor the consciousness of posterity can escape. In history, contingencies are continuously swept up in a torrent of seemingly inexorable necessities, a process also shaping the narrative describing Hitler’s path to power. Given the events that transpired, this has probably been inevitable, even if such a perspective runs counter to the situation of those who had to decide how to proceed. In its basic approach, the questions it poses, and the methods it employs, the historiography of Weimar tries to somehow shield these people from the approaching catastrophe—to counsel them on the proper course of action.The belated perspective at work here can only be alarmist and teleological; against such a backdrop, historians tend to seek out traces that might have given the events a different turn, yielded a different outcome. In this manner, the historical consciousness seems constrained to both grant necessity to what happened and repel that necessity. In its own volte-face, it thus resists the vortex of the apparently unavoidable by stressing the element of chance attending the events. The account of what happened is then narrated as a concatenation of such“chance” turns. And there are plenty of contingencies in the events leading up to 30 January 1933.¹⁴⁵

The historical cornerstones of the transition from Weimar to Hitler are thus composed of accidents. As such, they become the emblems of a historical paradox. Historiography makes use of these emblems without openly admitting it: an ironic stylistic means to satisfy the desire for what did not occur. The events of the last three months before the transfer of power to Hitler, in particular the final days of Weimar, resemble a panopticon of the grotesque: the above-cited characterization of Hitler, at the end of January 1933, as “carnival chancellor” in the SPD journal Vorwärts; or Papen’s effusive chatter to the effect that Hitler had been “hired” and would in a few months be pressed into a corner until—understood, like a rat in a trap—he squeaked. Or the choreography of the morning of 30 January, when the illustrious band comprising Hitler’s future cabinet was guided by Papen, who was familiar with the grounds, through the Reich chancellery gardens to the building’s rear entrance to elude the rumored imminent attack by the Reichswehr. Or the dispute between Hitler and Hugenberg over a further Reichstag election, which could only result in further losses for the already decimated German National People’s Party and on account of which Hugenberg, the stubborn party chairman, threatened to torpedo the entire business of working with Hitler. The swearing-in ceremony was scheduled for 11:00 a.m. The hour had already come and gone in bickering, interrupted by state secretary Otto Meißner, who warned Hitler and Hugenberg that Herr Reichspräsident could no longer be kept waiting. The gentlemen then followed him into Hindenburg’s office. The president administered the oath. This scene reflects like none other the emblematics of contingency at the Weimar Republic’s end.

Fate is the metaphysical equivalent of chance. Against a backdrop of inevitability, the observer is struck by events imbued with a sense of contingency. This accrual of moments of randomness and contingency corresponds to the political conditions in Weimar’s final phase. Rule by a small group of individuals bound only to the letter of the constitution, not to its spirit, took the form of a court intrigue that was neither regulated nor publicly transparent, and that was certainly beyond control. Once the institutions had become unanchored, anything was possible. In such circumstances, an arbitrariness prevails that, in a setting stamped by the habitual procedures, forms of social communication, and calculability of modern industrial mass society, takes on the character of blind chance. To both contemporaries and posterity, an appointment of Hitler as chancellor following the July elections, in August or September1932,could only seem the logical outcome of an unavoidable process that had begun in 1930, if not earlier. Few signs of accident could be found here. While the catastrophe’s impact would here endure undiminished, one might at least seek consolation in reflections on historical inevitability. In January 1933, however, Hitler’s appointment as chancellor took on the character of something contingent, since it ran counter to general expectations and the general thrust of developments.After his cabinet was sworn in, Göring hurried breathless out of the chancellery and reported to those waiting outside that a miracle had occurred. Many leading Nazis viewed Hitler’s ascension to power as so unexpected and uncanny that Hindenburg, precisely because he had always resisted Hitler, was now seen as an “instrument of God.”¹⁴⁶ What appears to posterity as chance was for the Nazis a stroke of fate.

Focusing on the role of key actors in the events of January 1933 also encourages a sense of historical contingency. But with methodologically imposed distance, the importance of individuals fades. It simply seems unreasonable to attribute the destruction of the Weimar Republic in the phase of the presidential cabinets to the actions or failures of specific persons.¹⁴⁷ Structures, traditions, and mentalities thus come into the picture; the discourse concerning Germany’s special historical past thus continues to unfold. For clearly, that history’s duration cannot be measured against the short-term rhythm of unfolding events—in weeks, days, and hours. But again, it remains difficult to imagine the consequences of the long historical movements that led to this catastrophe without considering Hitler’s person. Indisputably, Hitler managed to become chancellor through a personal strategy of “all or nothing,” in defiance of a demoralization besetting his party after the November losses. Paradoxically, then, it was precisely Hitler’s maneuvers against the political current that brought him to power. Unquestionably, it was ultimately factors of historical of longue durée that made him and his success possible. But with out his person,the factors would not have produced the results they in fact produced. Historical possibility and concrete reality are two different matters.

The final weeks, days, and hours of Weimar, as well as their historical treatment, are fitting material for a didactic play on the writing of history—its procedures, modes of representation, and choice of perspective. But the possible approaches are by no means arbitrary. The topic itself prescribes limits to the range of interpretations. Due to the swift pace of events, Weimar’s final phase can hardly be described in terms other than those of political history. Such a description examines the conduct of the actors in view of conceivable alternatives, thus addressing issues of guilt and responsibility. In this respect, an approach focused on structural history can have only limited usefulness, since it is not very well suited for probing human inadequacies, idiosyncrasies, and other unpredictable characteristics. Such an approach might indeed offer an adequate account of why the Weimar Republic, with its specific prehistory, was doomed from the start. But it cannot shed light on the difference between the dictatorships that were possible at this historical moment, although it is precisely here—in the difference between dictatorship and dictatorship— that we can locate the key epistemic question regarding the end of Weimar. The enigma of German history is not that Weimar was buried but rather the identity of those who dug the grave.