I t is now over half a century since Hitler came to power in Germany, inaugurating twelve years of bloodshed and destruction without parallel in human history. Throughout this period the Nazi phenomenon has posed a major challenge to human understanding.
Why should fascism, in such an extreme, racist and destructive form, have taken power in Germany and not elsewhere? Why should German parliamentary democracy have collapsed so totally and so easily in the economic crisis of โ33โa crisis which, after all, had a severe impact on other countries besides Germany? In recent years the argument that these structures remained uniquely backward and overwhelmingly hostile to parliamentary democracy has gained a wide currency.
It is an argument with a long pedigree. Harold Laski, writing in , argued that Germany had never experienced a bourgeois revolution, and that its traditional ruling class had never adapted to the twentieth century. The crisis of these values in the Weimar Republic produced the desire to recover them through the institution of the Nazi dictatorship. Ralf Dahrendorf, writing in , cited the verdict of Thorstein Veblen, published as early as , that Germany had experienced a capitalist industrial revolution while retaining a feudal social tradition and a dynastic state; the bourgeoisie had adopted the values of the aristocracy and the landowners continued to control the major institutions of the stateโthe army, the bureaucracy and the court.
Dahrendorf might have added that such a view found support in the writings of other, less theoretically-minded contemporaries of Veblen.
The most crucial point in the struggle for survival of the pre-industrial, feudal or semi-feudal aristocracy was, it is widely agreed, the Revolution. Only Japan among the major industrial powers bears comparison in this respect. The Junker oligarchy remained extremely powerful nationally and almost omnipotent in the local politics of rural Prussia. Attempts to wrest power away from them by the commercial and professional classes failed in and again in Richard J. Email required. Password required.
