9 - Democracy or Reaction? The Political Implications of Localist Ideas in Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany

Summary

The search for usable traditions in Germany's political development has lost much of its attraction since the 1950s, when a number of historical studies attempted to create for Germans of the Bonn Republic a collective memory of constitutionalism and responsible reform. In the concluding lines of his massive volume on German local government in the nineteenth century, Heinrich Heffter suggested that - “tender plant” though it was - Germany democracy in the form of self-administration and communal autonomy was a far more authentic foundation for the political future than imported English or American institutions. Fifteen years later, such essentially hopeful sentiments about the legacy of the past had become uncommon, or at the very least, discredited by association with a conservative establishment. With the work of Fritz Fischer and Ralf Dahrendorf, the focus of German political archaeology became instead the finding, indeed the rooting out, of unusable traditions. The scholarly act shifted from one of affirmation to one of criticism. Fritz Fischer, for instance, believed that “it is by facing the obscure forces within us and the unpleasant truths about ourselves that nations, like individuals, can cope with the world around them and face the future.” And although the triumph of this therapeutic mode of historical inquiry was and remains more decisive outside Germany than inside it, the pursuit of history-as-expurgation has proven stunningly productive. The German past would seem easily to provide more material for discard than for retention. Authoritarianism has not been a tender plant, nor have its victories over democracy and self-government been all that difficult to achieve.