which criminalized homosexual acts between men; the difficulties faced by gay men in face of the prejudices of the time were poignantly captured in the 1919 film, in which Hirschfeld played himself, Anders als die Andern (‘Different from the Others’). But in the view of conservatives, the Weimar Republic itself was held responsible for decadence, and for the penetration of Western forms of shallow, superficial ‘civilization’ into the purer German ‘culture’, defiling it in the process. And while the Left attacked capitalism, the Right attacked democracy: with the exception of a few individuals, most notably (and belatedly) Thomas Mann, few spoke out to sustain the Weimar Republic in principle.
Nor was ‘culture’ in the wider sense to sustain the new Republic. The social institutions which had the most influence on popular attitudes were still the churches and the schools: and both religious and educational institutions by and large tended to undermine Weimar democracy. Both the Catholic and the Protestant churches propagated essentially conservative, monarchist and anti-democratic sympathies; they were moreover highly critical of the moral decadence, as they saw it, of a society in which birth control was for the first time becoming widespread. The education system was also, in general, conservative and anti-democratic in outlook. Many schoolteachers were traditional conservative nationalists. Student fraternities and university teachers were similarly preponderantly right-wing and anti-democratic in sympathy: the Left was only to dominate German student politics for the first time in the West Germany of the late 1960s. However, in the sphere of education, as in virtually every other aspect of Weimar life, quite different tendencies coexisted. Alongside the highly conservative educational establishment ran currents of reform and progressive schools. After the Second World War largely unsuccessful attempts were made to resurrect some of the more progressive elements in Weimar education.
If one turns from culture, at both elite and mass levels, to society more generally in the Weimar period, then a similar range of complexities, ambiguities and conflicts appear. Women were formally ‘emancipated’ in what was essentially a highly progressive welfare state. But this was an ‘emancipation from above’: despite the existence of minority feminist movements, both bourgeois and socialist, the majority of women continued to have rather traditional conceptions of their role. Being a wife and mother was held to be the essential fulfilment of womanhood: paid employment outside the home was preferably to be undertaken only before marriage, or only if economically absolutely essential. Weimar ‘emancipation’ was more theoretical than real: while women gained the vote (of which they made slowly increasing use), they remained in predominantly low-paid and low-status occupations. While women had always formed a considerable proportion of the agricultural labour force – peasant farms, for example, being family concerns where women brought in the hay, fed the chickens and milked the cows as a matter of course – women in the Weimar Republic were increasingly employed in white-collar occupations in the new middle class, a trend evident since the beginning of the century. A minority of women did achieve a certain status, if not actual power: the first Parliament of the Weimar Republic, for example, had a distinguished group of women members. But by and large, despite the spread of birth control and the progressive framework of the constitution, attitudes both of and towards women remained highly traditional. In the Depression, with rising unemployment after 1929, there was criticism of ‘double earners’ (Doppelverdiener), as people complained of the unfairness of some families having two incomes while others had no income at all. And when women voted they tended to vote disproportionately for parties which did not hold progressive attitudes on women’s questions, such as the conservative and Christian parties. The two parties with the most progressive views on women’s issues, the SPD and the KPD, failed to attract a proportional share of the votes of women.10 Formal appearances notwithstanding, most women neither were nor seemed to want to be ‘emancipated’. The minority who adopted what they held to be an emancipated style – smoking cigarettes in long holders, cutting their hair in short fashions, driving cars and indulging in an apparently glittering nightlife – attracted criticism from many of the more staid and stolid Hausfrauen of Weimar Germany.
There was nevertheless widespread experimentation in lifestyles among some groups, with ‘reform’ movements in the areas of food and health, for example. There was an emphasis on nature, with members of youth movements indulging in long hiking trips through the German pine forests, swimming in lakes and rivers, camping and youth hostelling at every opportunity. There had been a tradition of such youth movements in Imperial Germany, such as the largely middle-class Wandervogel movement, and the comparable SPD youth organizations. Their activities continued to flourish in the Weimar Republic. Perhaps partly in reaction against the constraints and repressions, the restrictions and gloom of life in large cities, emphasis was given to escape into the countryside. But appeals to youth were similarly riven with political divides; both the far Right and the Left sought to mobilize youth for their diverse purposes. The right-wing mobilization of paramilitary groups that sought to forge a glorious future and make up for the humiliation of national defeat and the ‘shame’ of Versailles was to prove the most threatening in assisting Hitler’s rise to power, while the reformist and often pacifist youth cultures of the Left were ultimately defeated by the superior military might of the Right.
In every possible way, the nature and possibilities of modernity were contested, challenged, reshaped. For a few brief years, manifold possibilities for creating a different future fought to achieve dominance. Conflicting visions of the future and critiques of the present battled alongside and against each other, in an effort to create not only a new society, but also to reshape the very nature of what it meant to be human. Yet this battle was fought in highly unstable political and economic conditions. The fragility of the social compromise that marked the beginning of Weimar democracy became all too evident when it was rocked by the shocks of world depression. Whatever the ambiguities of Weimar society and culture, perhaps the deepest and most fatal splits were embedded in the Weimar social compromise and in the institutional framework of relations between the classes. It was these which contributed mightily to the breakdown of the Weimar political system, creating the opportunities which the Nazis were to seize. We must turn now to the complex and contentious task of explaining the ultimate collapse of the short-lived Weimar Republic.
3 The Collapse of Democracy and the Rise of Hitler
Two rather different processes coincided in the late 1920s and early 1930s. One was the collapse of the democratic political system of the Weimar Republic. The other was the rise of Hitler’s Nazi Party, immeasurably aided by the economic depression after 1929. The collapse of democracy effectively preceded, and was an essential precondition for, the rise of Hitler; and the appointment of Adolf Hitler to the chancellorship of Germany was by no means the only possible, or inevitable, outcome of the collapse of Weimar democracy. Given the consequences of this appointment, it is scarcely surprising that the causes, the relative contribution and importance of different factors have been so hotly debated.
The Flawed Compromise
We have seen that Weimar democracy was born under difficult circumstances. The 1918–9 revolution in effect represented a temporary abdication of responsibility on the part of old elites unwilling to take the opprobrium of defeat or shoulder the burdens of postwar reconstruction. Fearful of more radical revolution, they made crucial concessions to moderate socialist forces; but they did not view these concessions as permanent, and remained in the wings, waiting and watching for chances to revise both the domestic and international settlements of 1918–9. On the part of the urban working classes, on the other hand, the participation for the first time in government of the SPD and the newly recognized and established position of the trade unions awakened expectations which an impoverished postwar country would find it hard to deliver. Defeated in war, burdened with the harsh provisions of the Versailles Treaty, essentially contested in its very essence and attacked from both Left and Right, the Weimar Republic certainly bore a considerable weight of problems from the very start.
Yet it survived the difficulties of the early years. A general strike in 1920 served to defeat the Kapp putsch; the hyper-inflation
