Since 1933 many scholars and others have attempted to explain the collapse of the Weimar Republic. One might assume that by now all possible approaches to the problem have been tried. William Smaldone, however, has found a new way to treat the crisis of the Republic; he investigates it from the perspective of individual Social Democratic leaders. The overarching issue in the book is the failure of the Social Democrats to halt the advance of National Socialism. Why did they not develop “political strategies and organizing techniques” to combat the Nazis, he asks, and why did they take a “wait and see” policy before Hitler's appointment in January 1933? He puts it succinctly: “Why did they not fight?” (p. xiii).

To search for possible answers to these questions, Smaldone explores the political careers and thinking of ten leading Social Democrats: Siegfried Aufhäuser, Rudolf Breitscheid, Rudolf Hilferding, Marie Juchacz, Carlo Mierendorff, Antonie Pfülf, Toni Sender, Carl Severing, Friedrich Stampfer, and Otto Wels. In each biographical essay he surveys the life of the subject from birth through 1933, usually adding a footnote on the person's fate after the Nazi take-over. He commonly includes information on a variety of topics: their families and early lives, education and training, how they entered politics and became socialists, the impact of World War I, activity during the revolution of 1918–1919, views of class and gender, commitment to parliamentary government, the issue of whether to participate in coalition governments, relationship to the Communist Party, understanding of National Socialism, and what they recommended the party do to counter the appeal of the Nazis. The disadvantage of organizing a book around individual biographies is that, with very minor exceptions, the chapters cover many of the same topics and events and therefore repetitiousness is nearly impossible to avoid. At the same time, these biographical accounts are in themselves informative and help to illuminate the political thinking and behavior, not only of these leaders, but of much of the party during the final years of the Weimar Republic.

A theme that reappears again and again is the uncertainty, cautiousness, ambivalence, and reluctance of these ten Social Democrats to embrace extra-parliamentary action. The one exception was the general strike in March 1920 that brought down Wolfgang Kapp and his fellow conspirators, but in the crisis of 1929–1933 Aufhäuser and Sender were the only two among these ten who clearly advocated employing a general strike. What stands out among all of these leaders is their shared belief that they should hold fast to working through parliament, a stance that, to be effective, depended on the mistaken notion that opponents of the Weimar Republic, especially Nazis and Communists, would play by the same rules. Another significant and recurring theme is that, in general, Social Democratic leaders had a limited understanding of the nature of the National Socialism. This is not surprising because most contemporaries did not comprehend the impulses that motivated the Nazis or anticipate the ruthlessness with which they would enforce their policies. A common explanation for National Socialism overstressed various kinds of relationships between it and capitalism. At one brief point, Aufhäuser took the anti-capitalist rhetoric of the National Socialists seriously and speculated that on that basis they might collaborate with Social Democrats and Communists. Although Rudolf Breitscheid understood National Socialism much better than most Social Democrats, still, “he overestimated the political influence of ‘Capital’ on the NSDAP” (p. 64). In turn, Hilferding's inability to fashion an effective response to the Nazi threat resulted in large part from his inclination to exaggerate “capitalist development as an inexorable process that human intervention could not substantially change” (p. 95). These inadequate perceptions of National Socialism are stunningly illustrated by the fact that Otto Wels, an able parliamentary leader who earned great respect because of his forthright speech rejecting the Enabling Act on March 23, 1933, believed firmly that no significant difference existed between Communism and Nazism.

In the concluding chapter, Smaldone ventures into entirely new territory as he seeks to place the failure of the Social Democrats in an international context. This is, as far as I am aware, the first attempt to view German socialists in a non-European comparative framework and for that he must be applauded. He “examines three other major moments in the global history of twentieth-century democratic socialism: the defeat of Chilean socialism in 1973, the reversal of the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua in 1990, and the aftermath of the African National Congress's electoral victory in 1994” (p. 254). This is obviously a big undertaking to complete within twenty pages. The results are uneven. The situations of these three countries are so different from Weimar Germany, and even to each other, that Smaldone has to search diligently to find sufficient similarities to warrant the comparisons. The inclusion of the African National Congress (ANC) is particularly problematic, and the author himself admits as much. It is also puzzling that although the book is a close examination of leaders of Social Democracy, he chooses explicitly not to compare the leadership of the four countries. But then he briefly asserts that in the cases of Chile, Nicaragua, and the ANC failure is not to be ascribed to the leaders, but to “a range of structural factors” (p. 270). Were there not also structural factors in Germany that hindered Social Democratic operations? At the end, he capitulates and concedes that in all four states leaders “made important decisions that contributed to their eventual defeat” (p. 273). In a book chiefly about political leaders, a more extensive comparison of the role of leadership would have improved the persuasiveness of the global orientation.