a continuation of the previous conflict and of the tensions arising from the reorganization of national borders in the attempted resolution of that conflict. Defeat in the Second World War was the precondition for the division of Germany – a division that was, however, also predicated on the new Cold War that had arisen between two superpowers that had largely been drawn into European affairs as a result of German aggression. It was the end of the Cold War, initiated by a crumbling Soviet Union, which was the precondition for the end of the division of Germany. From the 1990s onwards, processes of European integration and expansion were in large part both powered and shaped by united Germany, while in the twenty-first century it enjoyed growing visibility and respect in a global context. German history cannot be understood without reference to wider developments on an international stage.
But nor can developments in Germany be explained solely in terms of that wider context. Clearly, at every stage the balance of domestic forces played a major role in the pattern of developments. And here we come to the aforementioned set of domestic factors. First, there is the issue of the roles and relations of different elite groups within any particular political system. When elites fail to sustain that system – as in the Weimar Republic – it has little chance of success. When elites condone it or acquiesce in it – however apparently unjust the system may be – then it has less chance of being brought down by internal unrest. This proved to be the case, in rather different ways, in both the Third Reich (where elite resistance to Hitler’s dictatorship was belated and unsuccessful) and the GDR for a considerable period of time. In the latter case, semi-critical members of the intelligentsia, for example, were in the end accused of having helped to sustain the regime. Interestingly, the speed of the ultimate collapse – effectively a capitulation in the face of mass protest – of the GDR regime had much to do with dissension within the ruling Communist Party itself (both within the GDR and in the Soviet Union) as to the best way forward out of a crisis. By contrast, when a variety of elites in the main support a given political system, then it is much easier to maintain stability (provided of course that other factors are favourable). Thus, much of the success of the Federal Republic could be explained in terms of the support for West German democracy (in contrast to that of the Weimar Republic) on the part of the vast majority of political, economic, moral and intellectual elites.
The issue of elite support is a complex one, with cultural and moral elements involved as well as material factors. But the latter certainly play an important, indeed major, role, and need to be singled out for attention in respect of implications for popular as well as elite responses to the regime. Industrial and agrarian elites will clearly prefer a political system that appears to work to their economic advantage – again, contrast the critiques of Weimar democracy on the part of certain hard-pressed sectors of business and owners of impoverished, indebted agrarian estates, with the support for West German democracy among thriving industrialists and the well-represented farming lobby. At the level of mass politics, too, material success is important. Most ordinary working people will for obvious reasons tend to prefer a political system that appears to deliver the material goods. The importance of rapid economic growth for the anchoring of democracy in the early years of the history of West Germany cannot be overstated. Basic material satisfaction need not however be of this standard to ensure a more negative, but no less important, outcome: the lack of mass support for political opposition movements. At a rather basic level, people are less likely to rise in protest against an unjust and repressive system if the risks of rising are not counterbalanced by the pressures of acute material distress: consumerism is always a technique for rulers in repressive regimes to seek a modicum of popular quiescence. (‘Bread and circuses’ policies are as old as Roman civilization.) This was the case in the peacetime years of the Third Reich: mindful of the need to sustain his personal popularity or ‘charisma’, on which the political system of the Third Reich was so dependent, Hitler had constantly to balance considerations of consumer satisfaction with the economic imperatives entailed by preparations for war. Similar considerations were pertinent again for much of the 1960s and 1970s in the GDR, when a combination of limited pride in economic achievements, stress on social policies and eventual consumer satisfaction, and hopes that hard work might bring a better future, helped to remove any potential mass support for the more ascetic programmes of dissident intellectuals. In contrast, much of the political turbulence of both the early and the later years of the Weimar Republic had to do with acute material distress for large numbers of people, hit either by catastrophic inflation or by the fear or reality of rising unemployment. This led to the willingness of large numbers to countenance radical political movements – of the Left or Right – claiming to offer some form of future salvation.
Finally, there are the key issues of political dissent and opposition and of patterns of political culture under given circumstances. It is important for regime stability that political dissent be contained within certain bounds and that it does not develop into broad, proliferating movements of opposition with mass followings. There are a variety of ways in which this containment may occur: through general satisfaction, for example, squeezing dissenters to a marginal fringe; through massive repression and intimidation, effectively excluding dissent from any articulate body politic; through isolation and limited toleration, allowing controlled ventilation of grievances; and in many other ways. The Weimar Republic was subjected to sustained assaults from a variety of quarters, from Left and Right; it ultimately fell prey to the latter, and its successor regime dealt exceedingly brutally with opposition from the former. The Third Reich itself was ultimately felled from without only because of lack of effective opposition from within. For much of the GDR’s history it proved possible to contain and isolate intellectual dissent. But for a variety of reasons, dissent was able to proliferate in East Germany in the course of the 1980s, providing the foundation for the broad-based pressures on the regime in the situation of crisis which was inaugurated by Hungary’s opening of the Iron Curtain and the ensuing flood of refugees in summer 1989. Clearly, again, no simple formula will adequately summarize the range of approaches, views and ideals of different groups of dissenters at different times. The character of dissent is affected by inherited cultural traditions as well as institutional and other structural circumstances. But it in turn can closely affect patterns of historical change. Thus, for example, the nonviolent dissent shaped under the protection of the East German Protestant churches in the 1980s played a key role in the ‘gentle’ pattern of the East German revolution and was a very different phenomenon from earlier ‘revolutionary’ movements in twentieth-century Germany.
Of course this set of factors cannot in any simple way unlock the course of history: there is a role for chance, for accident, for unforeseen combinations of circumstances, for the impact of personality. It must be the task of a narrative account to bring into play, at each turning, the role of specific elements in the actual pattern of events. But I would suggest that the elements briefly introduced here together provide a useful framework for interpreting and seeking to explain the turbulent, often tragic, course of German history since 1918. In the chapters which follow, their implications at each stage will be explored in more detail. Let me conclude this chapter by outlining the structure and organization of the book.
The subtitle of this book is The Divided Nation. Germans in the twentieth century have been ‘divided’ in at least three different, but interrelated, ways. Most obviously, Germany itself was divided after the war: what remained of Hitler’s defeated Reich became two German states, truncated parts of a German nation. The legacies of this division, though fading, are still evident in the united Germany of today. The division of Germany after the war was integrally related to the failure, before 1945, to resolve the problems and tensions of a divided society – tensions which by the end of 1932 had led to near civil war conditions and which Hitler’s enforced creation of a ‘national community’ merely exacerbated and displaced. Under Hitler, there were divisions between those accepted as ‘folk comrades’ and those rejected as ‘community aliens’; there were also divisions within people themselves, between public and private selves, between conformity and distance, in psychological compromises made in order to survive through a dictatorial regime. Finally, the consciousness of the century itself is divided: by the historical caesurae of 1933, 1945 and 1990. For those ousted from the new racially defined Volksgemeinschaft (ethnic community) under Hitler, 1933 was the key turning point that irredeemably altered their lives. For those who
