This updated translation of Dirk Schumann's Politische Gewalt in der Weimarer Republik, 1918–1933 (Klartext, 2001) represents an estimable contribution to the scholarly literature on the Weimar Republic. Well researched and rich in detail, the work attempts to open a new perspective on a perennial topic in the scholarship: the role of political violence, in this case, in the important Prussian province of Saxony. Schumann aims to disprove a) that political violence in interwar Germany was an inevitable product of the Bolshevik revolution, and b) that it was primarily the result of the infusion of wartime violence into postwar civilian life. The former contention, a right-wing canard, hardly seems to need disproving given the well-known centrality of violence to the right-wing nationalist and fascist projects. The latter line of interpretation, similarly, is made to bear too much weight; to be sure, as Schumann points out, there was in most cases no direct line of continuity (in terms of personnel) from the violence of the trenches to the street battles of Weimar, but as many scholars (e.g., Richard Bessel) have shown, the war experience was continually recapitulated and recast so as to retain its destructive and habituating power. There would, moreover, have been no Wehrverbände without the war, no matter how much organizations such as the Stahlhelm cast back to the public militarism of the Kaiserreich.

Schumann's contention that political violence did not threaten the political order—because it was “controllable,” if only authorities had had the will to control it (p. xiii)—likewise seems questionable, unless we consider Schumann's deeper, important point: that the importance of violence lay not in its “military” efficacy, but in its discursive effect; that is, that violence—both rhetorical and actual—helped to stoke “fear[s] of civil war” that were successfully instrumentalized by the radical right to the detriment of the republic. This emphasis on the meaning ascribed to violence (both actual and rhetorical, as opposed to the concrete effects of violence, is one of the work's two main strengths. The other is the nuance and detail with which Schumann considers well-known episodes of political violence.

The study is organized chronologically, with sections covering the “circumscribed civil war” of 1919–1921 (which included the Communist “March Actions” of 1921); the political murders of 1921–23; the founding of the right- and left-wing “combat leagues” in the period 1924–1929; and the period of escalating violence from 1929 through the end of the republic. This organization generally works, although the aphorisistic chapter titles and subject headings—“Subsistence Protest, Violence, and Criminality;” “Passive Burghers, Trigger-Happy Soldiers, Distrustful Workers”—read like legends for a series of vignettes, more descriptive than analytic.

Valuable is Schumann's questioning of the extent to which popular paramilitarism—much attention is given to the Einwohnerwehren studied decades ago by James Diehl—was linked to an actual willingness on the part of the bourgeoisie to practice counterrevolutionary violence. Schumann is quite right in stressing the diversity of motivations that led rural and urban burgers to sign onto paramilitary formations, and also in emphasizing the relatively nuanced attitudes (e.g., toward working-class strikes) that, if the radical right had been less successful in seizing the interpretive high ground with respect to the responsibility for the war and to the legitimacy of working-class demands, might have led to a very different outcome in Germany. Issues of gender that have figured prominently in recent scholarship on Weimar radicalism and political violence make a necessary appearance, although no one central theoretical perspective informs the study; rather, the study finds its greatest strength in a careful consideration of the various modalities of political violence, and of the consequences of that violence for the fate of the republic.

Schumann for the most part avoids the danger of reifying “political violence” into a hermetic phenomenon, separate from the battle over meaning of which it was only a part; sometimes explicit, more often implicit, in the study is the notion that struggles over public space were also simultaneously struggles over discursive space, and it is here that the study most engages with the scholarly questions of the future. In noting that political violence was the product of choices made by political actors rather than the result of irresistible forces—and by emphasizing the corollary that the destruction of the first German democracy was far from inevitable—Schumann issues a pertinent warning while making a first-rate contribution to the scholarly literature on the Weimar Republic.