The “Young Right” was an oppositional current within the Social Democratic Party (SPD) of the Weimar Republic whose core members were born in the 1890s and molded by the youth movement of the late Wilhelmine era and patriotic fervor during World War I. It arose among university students in the youth organization of the SPD who held a rally at Hofgeismar on Easter Sunday 1923 to express solidarity with their fellow Germans in the occupied Ruhr and then organized a series of follow-up conferences. Stefan Vogt skillfully explains in chapter one the ideas that they adopted from Eduard Bernstein, the Marburg School of neo-Kantian philosophy, the social psychologist Hendrik de Man, and the Berlin circle of “Religious Socialists” led by Paul Tillich. The Young Rightists believed that Marx's materialistic understanding of human nature had made the SPD far too radical in theory and passive in practice; they propagated instead an activist reformism based on dedication to the welfare of the German people. They gained a foothold in party offices in the late 1920s, and three of them became Reichstag delegates, Carl Mierendorff, Kurt Schumacher, and Gustav Dahrendorf. They also founded a monthly magazine that gained a respectable circulation of three to six thousand in the years 1930–33. Vogt studies this little-known group to evaluate the arguments recently advanced by Wolfram Pyta and Heinrich August Winkler that the SPD should have considered cooperation with the “presidential” governments of 1930–32 to reform the Weimar constitution so as to prevent the Nazi seizure of power. Vogt also seeks to analyze the extent to which the Young Right deserves credit for the “modernization” of the SPD after 1945 (pp. 15–16).

The Young Right accomplished something constructive in at least three policy debates. This group first articulated the argument widely echoed by historians today that the SPD was foolish to reaffirm its identity as a “workers' party” in the Heidelberg Program of 1925, ignoring the interests of professional people, small business, and pious Christians. The Young Right developed a cogent critique of the SPD's tendency to support the development of trusts and syndicates as a step toward socialism, and its call for trust-busting probably represented the most promising strategy to broaden the SPD's base of support (pp. 178–80, 246–47, 279–82). The Young Right also helped to “modernize” the SPD program on national defense in 1928–29, persuading many party colleagues that their reflexive antimilitarism developed under the German Empire had no place in a democratic republic (pp. 313–15). Finally, the Young Rightists developed more effective campaign tactics for the SPD as activists in the “Iron Front” created in 1931 to combat the street terror of the Nazis and Communists. Mierendorff took charge of all SPD propaganda for the Hessian state election of June 1932; he sought to appeal to visceral emotions as well as reason, and the SPD voting share rose from 21.4 to 23.1 percent, a most unusual success during the Great Depression (pp. 322–27).

Despite these accomplishments, Vogt is sharply critical of the Young Right. He is no doubt correct that it gravely weakened its own influence within the SPD through persistent efforts to promote dialogue with “conservative revolutionary” intellectuals who were fundamentally hostile to democracy. Young Rightists displayed great interest in the writings of Oswald Spengler and Arthur Moeller van den Bruck and a puzzling sympathy for Otto Strasser (pp. 151–52, 171–73, 255–56). Vogt shows that the Young Rightists always rejected specific proposals that were incompatible with parliamentary democracy, but these contacts encouraged a misguided tendency in 1932–33 to search for anticapitalist allies on the “left wing” of the NSDAP.

Vogt's weakest arguments come in chapter four, when he seeks to refute any suggestion that the SPD should have cooperated with some forces on the right to amend the Weimar constitution. Vogt begins with a harsh critique of the foreign policy of Gustav Stresemann, declaring that he spoke of international reconciliation only as a means to the end of restoring Germany as a Great Power. Vogt dismisses the contrary findings by Peter Krüger and has not consulted Jonathan Wright's important new biography of Stresemann (pp. 260–62). Vogt apparently assumes that only Social Democrats displayed genuine concern for democracy and international understanding. Regarding the difficult question of whether Chancellor Heinrich Brüning sought to restore parliamentary democracy or dismantle it, Vogt proclaims that Karl Dietrich Bracher offered the definitive answer in a book first published in 1956—Brüning's policy was aimed from the outset at “a confrontation with parliament in an effort to achieve the goal of a ‘government without parties,’ which had long since been demanded not only by rightist intellectuals but also by highly influential circles of big business, the bureaucracy, and military” (p. 302). If that is true, then obviously there is no foundation for the recent arguments by Pyta and Winkler, but Vogt simply ignores the extensive recent literature on this topic. Vogt also ignores the “W-T-B Plan” advocated by the Free Unions in 1932 to spend two billion marks on public works. This program represented the most important attempt within the labor movement to become more moderate in theory and more activist in practice, but Vogt is under the impression that the Free Unions, SPD leadership, and Young Right all remained committed to the SPD's official position that the only appropriate response to the Great Depression was to nationalize large-scale industry (pp. 283–88). Vogt also condemns the Young Right's plea in October 1932 for SPD leaders to develop their own plan to amend the constitution to prevent worse revisions from being imposed by Franz von Papen. The Young Right suggested the creation of a second house of parliament based on economic interest groups and the transfer of two key powers from the president to the Reich chancellor: command over the armed forces and the right to dissolve parliament. Vogt labels this plan a huge concession to the “conservative critique of liberalism” (pp. 305–08). Its net effect would, in fact, have been to reduce the presidency to a purely ceremonial office, which was the most important innovation in the constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1949.

Vogt readily acknowledges in chapter five that the Young Right played a most courageous role in organized resistance to the Third Reich, especially in the Kreisau Circle. Vogt emphasizes that the constitutional plans of the Kreisau Circle were often backward-looking, and he suggests that the very willingness of Young Rightists to risk their lives exposes their ideological affinity with the NSDAP. “Relatives often develop especially acute enmities, and the same is doubtless true of ideologies” (p. 455). Vogt makes only a cursory attempt in his conclusion to answer in the negative the question of whether the Young Right helped to “modernize” the SPD after 1945. Kurt Schumacher's role as party leader is not discussed. Instead Vogt presents two harshly negative conclusions. The Young Rightists did not offer any constructive ideas for saving the political and social order that converged with authoritarian and fascist ideas in important points (pp. 457–58). Looking at the broad sweep of European intellectual history, Vogt concludes that “the paradigm shift of bourgeois thought from reason to irrationality, which characterized the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century and finally culminated in Fascism and National Socialism, did not leave Social Democracy unaffected” (p. 459). These conclusions do not seem a balanced summary of the evidence in the body of the text. This book accomplishes the unusual feat of generating more sympathetic interest for its protagonists than the author himself deems appropriate.