The question of how the Nazis came to power in 1933 used to occupy legions of modern German historians. For a long time, the events leading up to Adolf Hitler's appointment as Reich Chancellor on January 30, 1933, were the bread-and-butter of modern German history. From the 1980s onward, however, scholarly attention shifted: the regime's racist policies, particularly its antisemitism, became the primary focus of most major works on the Third Reich. Instead of the backroom politicking of men like Franz von Papen and Kurt von Schleicher, which helped to facilitate Hitler's entry into the Chancellery, the mass murder of the Jews and ordinary Germans’ complicity in the regime's persecutory policies moved to the center of scholarly analysis. Instead of 1933, the year 1941 became the new “vanishing point” of German history writing, as Helmut Walser Smith has argued in an influential study (The Continuities of German History: Nation, Religion, and Race across the Long Nineteenth Century [2008]). Around the same time, historians of Weimar Germany overcame their erstwhile fixation on the failure of Germany's first democracy. A number of important historiographical interventions by Peter Fritzsche, Benjamin Ziemann, Rüdiger Graf, and others stressed that the year 1933 was not the predestined telos of the republic's history. As a result, the history of Weimar democracy has no longer been written, in recent years, first and foremost from the perspective of its demise.

Both of these historiographical developments, important though they were, have meant that the study of the political history of the final two years of the Weimar Republic has been somewhat neglected in recent scholarship. In this major new study, Larry Eugene Jones, one of the best-known scholars of the German right, now returns to what used to be well-trodden ground: the divisions on the German right that ultimately led to the Nazi takeover in 1933. His book homes in on one of the lesser-studied chapters in the history of Weimar's end: the two rounds of the presidential elections held on March 13 and April 10, 1932, in which the eighty-five-year-old Reich President Paul von Hindenburg, who had been in office since May 1925, faced off against Hitler, the leader of the insurgent NSDAP—and won both times.

Although Hindenburg had been catapulted into office in 1925, in large part, by voters affiliated with those parties of the German right that were deeply skeptical of the republic, his reelection in 1932 rested on the support of moderate conservatives and, crucially, the pro-Weimar parties, i.e., the Social Democrats, the Catholic Center Party, and the Deutsche Staatspartei (the successor of the Deutsche Demokratische Partei). The presidential elections of 1925 and 1932 were thus marked by a near-total reversal of voter coalitions, as Jürgen Falter showed in an article published more than twenty-five years ago (“The Two Hindenburg Elections of 1925 and 1932: A Total Reversal of Voter Coalitions,” CEH [1990]: 225–41). Jones, like others before him, nevertheless argues that Hindenburg's victory against Hitler was no victory for the republic. Though defeated at the ballot box, the real victor, Jones contends, was Hitler, who emerged from the elections as a leader of national stature. Through the intense 1932 campaign, which saw the Nazi leader embark on his infamous “flight over Germany,” the Führer cult, which had hitherto been the property of a small group of die-hard supporters, achieved a breakthrough on the national stage, generating considerable momentum for the forthcoming regional elections in Prussia and Bavaria and the all-important national elections that July. A little more than nine months after defeating him in the presidential contest, Hindenburg would appoint Hitler as Reich Chancellor, thereby paving the way for the establishment of the Nazi dictatorship.

Based on an impressive array of new and newly-interpreted archival sources, Jones tells the story of the making of the presidential elections in granular detail, focusing not just on the actual campaigns that preceded the two rounds of voting in 1932, but also on the strategic calculations that surrounded the Hindenburg and Hitler candidacies, and on the political repercussions of the elections. The chronological focus is on the chancellorship of Heinrich Brüning from March 1930 until May 1932. Jones closely chronicles the divisions on the right prior to 1932, which, he suggests, created a vacuum that the Nazis eventually managed to fill.

After introducing his two protagonists—Hindenburg and Hitler—in an illuminating opening chapter that mostly synthesizes the secondary literature, Jones's next five chapters deal with Brüning's appointment; the short-lived “Harzburg Front,” a radical right-wing alliance of the NSDAP, German National People's Party (DNVP), and veteran's leagues; the Agricultural League; the Pan-German League; and the growing fragmentation of the radical right up to 1932. Three subsequent chapters examine the campaigns and elections themselves, and the final chapter assesses their fallout and the end of the Brüning era. An insightful epilogue sketches the repercussions of the clash between Hindenburg and Hitler and what it means in broader terms for our understanding of German political culture in the interwar period. In pitting two figures against each other who relied on myth and charisma to appeal to the Volksgemeinschaft, Jones contends, the elections of 1932 accelerated the demise of the Weimar Republic, based as it was upon more rational modes of political legitimation and democratic governance.

One could ask, of course, if irrational modes of political legitimation had not already been present in Weimar political culture for much longer: after all, Hindenburg's first presidential campaign in 1925 had already been built around his myth. Furthermore, there is arguably a disjuncture between Jones's central thesis, his own explanation for why the story he tells in his book matters, and the bulk of the book's content. The study includes fascinating new details about the rhetoric and visual languages of the Hitler and Hindenburg campaigns, and about the ways in which each leader was built up as the embodiment of national unity, but then quickly returns to a discussion of the political schisms on the German right. Little of Jones's exhaustive empirical material is concerned with German society's expectations, redemptive longings, and irrational faith in the supernatural powers of a leader; his primary focus is on the strategic calculations, backroom negotiations, personal betrayals, petty jealousies, and power games of a selection of men who represented different organizations of the moderate to radical right. Jones tells this complex story in intricate and illuminating detail, and, in so doing, he makes an important contribution to our understanding of the political forces that ultimately brought the Nazis to power in 1933. The book deserves to be read widely by students and scholars of the German right, the Weimar Republic, and Nazi electoral strategy. The author reminds historians of Weimar that even a seemingly well-trodden path like the political history of the early 1930s can lead into interesting new directions.