This volume contains the scholarship presented in a colloquium sponsored by the Stiftung Bundespräsident Theodor Heuss-Heuss-Haus Munich, the Institute of Contemporary History, and its Center for Holocaust Studies. In this diverse collection of fourteen papers, the editors offer the reader an insightful series of essays summarizing the recent scholarship on the ambivalent, often tortuous relationship between “universalist” German liberalism and the increasingly dominant, ethnicized conception of völkisch nationalism that emerged in German political culture after 1890. The essays are grouped chronologically, with the largest cluster focused on the response of individual liberal thinkers and social groups to the increasingly radicalized ethnic nationalism of the First World War, the Weimar Republic, and the Nazi dictatorship. The wide range of topics reflects the editorial history of the volume. Some of the essays are general overviews; others are research studies focused upon individual, representative liberals. Scholars of liberalism in Germany during the long nineteenth century will likely find the former group of essays to be of greater interest. On the other hand, those who detect a continuity of liberal passivity, compromise, and accommodation from 1848 to 1933 may perceive the ghost of the Sonderweg approach in the case studies offered in the essays of Thomas Vordermayer and Eric Kurlander.
In their excellent introduction, the editors reject that conclusion, proposing instead the stimulating thesis that liberal nationalism and National Socialist ideology shared significant points of contact. They insist that liberalism was neither “a forerunner nor a victim of National Socialism.” Therefore, the interaction of liberalism and National Socialism should be understood as a “relationship story that was far more complex and ambivalent than one-dimensional interpretations of the failure of liberalism or a German Sonderweg would suggest” (36). The essays in the volume focus upon “ideological overlaps” and seek to identify “mutual perceptions.” Accordingly, the intent is to challenge students of the unification era and the Kaiserreich as well as scholars of the Nazi period to reconsider old positions and pose queries about German liberalism in new, instructive ways.
Reflecting the breadth and scope of the scholarship included, the book consists of four sections: “Long-Term Continuities and Breaks,” “Mutual Perceptions and Programmatic Ambivalences 1930-1939,” “Perpetrators, Profiteers, Oppositionists: The Scope and Form of Liberal Action in the Nazi Regime and in Europe,” “Transatlantic Perspectives on National Socialism: Liberals in Exile,” and, finally, “Outlook: Difficult Liberal Learning Processes after 1945.” The first group of essays all presents a spirited defense of the ideological continuity thesis from the late Kaiserreich to the Third Reich. Given the editors' stated objective, it is no surprise that most of the essays focus on the analysis of the political rhetoric of representative liberal writers and journalists. The chapters by Ulrike Jureit, Thomas Vordermayer, and Jörn Leonhard, for example, analyze the affinities between liberalism and völkisch nationalism from an ideological and political perspective. Despite “deep ideological rifts,” (36) the authors conclude that both streams of thought reveal common social Darwinist patterns of thought and shared hegemonic conceptions of space. Vordermayer's paper follows the Kehrtwende of Wilhelm Stapel, a left-liberal publicist won over to radical völkisch nationalism by the Great War. Jureit notes that the “astonishing versatility” of European imperialism enabled it to adapt to a wide variety of political constellations.” For the last two centuries, imperialism “was and is a structural element of European liberalism” (63).
The next group of papers offers further evidence of ideological and programmatic affinities between liberalism and National Socialism during the Third Reich. Frank Bajohr explores National Socialist attitudes toward liberalism and, not surprisingly, finds that few leading figures in the regime viewed liberalism as a serious ideological or political threat to the new order. Christopher König's focused study addresses the question of muted opposition to the regime through an examination of the hesitant accommodation and occasional criticism of the regime's policies to be found in the pages of the Protestant magazine Christliche Welt.
Of particular note among the timely essays in this section is Eric Kurlander's intriguing study of the conflicted response of liberal women to the rhetoric and policies of the regime as exemplified by the experience of Gertrude Bäumer. Bäumer, in Kurlander's view, was a representative figure for those women who rejected Nazi violence and political agitation but nevertheless hoped that the regime would firmly establish Germany's position among the leading global powers. Furthermore, they hoped that Nazi social policies would lead to a new, more expansive form of modernity that included social welfare for families and, while affording opportunities for women, would reject the “the materialism, mass culture, and soulless science of Wilhelmine and Weimar modernity” (138).
The next section contains five essays examining the scope and forms of oppositional action available to those former liberals holding positions within the regime and in occupied areas of Europe. Philipp Müller explores the linkages between economic liberalism and National Socialism, while Joachim Scholtyseck examines the ways in which young entrepreneurs profited from the Aryanization process while finding ways to assuage their conscience. The final section of the volume features an instructive look back at the delayed crisis confronting liberals in the postwar period as they struggled to come to terms with their shared history as passive observers and muted critics of the policies imposed by the National Socialist state. Kristian Buchna's essay on the politics of the past explores that challenge through an analysis of the FDP's attempt to restore a positive liberal narrative.
How to summarize this wide-ranging offering of essays? Scholars of the long nineteenth century as well as of National Socialism will find much to ponder in this impressive collection. Taken as a whole, the various essays offered here—both the overviews and the case studies of individuals—offer a compelling restatement of the continuity thesis in the history of liberalism in Germany. In this collection of stimulating essays, a few stand out. Ulrike Jureit's exploration of the structural affinities between the liberal imperialism of Friedrich Naumann and the later National Socialist variant, for example, makes the case that shared nationalist and racial-biological concepts cannot be argued away. Eric Kurlander's study of Gertrude Bäumer reminds us that the Nazi promise of the Volksgemeinschaft offered a vague but captivating vision of a revolutionary modernity. Finally, the introduction by Ernst Wolfgang Becker, Elke Seefried, Frank Bajohr, and Johannes Hürter provides the reader a useful overview and guide to the broader context of the essays by the various contributors. As is the case in such collections, the task of combining fourteen diverse essays into a coherent whole is a difficult one. All in all, this volume affords the reader a worthwhile and instructive engagement with one of the most important issues in modern German history.
