16 - The Formation and Dissolution of a German National Electorate

Summary

Electoral politics is rarely a force of national integration.

the problem

The collapse of the Weimar Republic presents some of the most disconcerting problems facing not only historians of modern Germany but anyone concerned about and committed to the health and viability of political democracy. How are we to explain the willingness of millions of Germans in free elections to cast their votes for a political party advocating the destruction of democracy and racialist and aggressive values that must be utterly reprehensible to any thinking human being? It is not adequate to dismiss the problem by claiming simply that these millions of people somehow were hoodwinked, tricked into voting for Hitler against their own true interests. For those of us accustomed to put our faith in democracy and the rightness of government by popular consent, the electoral success of the Nazi movement must be profoundly disturbing.

The problem is made more disturbing by the fact that the German Empire, as Stanley Suval demonstrated so well, saw the formation of viable electoral system. Thus, historians are faced with a fundamental and fascinating paradox: namely, that although the German electorate took shape within a political system that lent it very little power, it dissolved once it could vote for a real parliament; or, as Stanley Suval has put it, “the most positive citizenship roles were fulfilled in an authoritarian state and diminished in a democratic one.”