11 - Weimar Populism and National Socialism in Local Perspective

Summary

Historians agree that National Socialism should not be regarded as an unfortunate accident, or Betriebsunfall, marring German history but troubling the sweep of German tradition only very little. It is misguided to understand the Nazis in terms of accidents or emergencies. Yet metaphors and images that draw attention to the chaos and breakability of Weimar continue to circulate widely. These seem to be indispensable components of an explanation of 1933. The mind's eye of the historian imagines economic crisis and political extremism pushing burghers farther and farther to the political periphery until they hit Nazism. Hans Fallada's Little Man, What Now? (1931), the chronicle of one young German who becomes a social castaway in Depression-era Berlin, is only the most literary example of this dominant historiographical trope.

Demolition is the most useful and orthodox strategy used to narrate twentieth-century German history. To get to Nazism, historians usually wreck all sorts of things in the 1920s: They undermine cherished assumptions about national identity, upend long-standing political loyalties to liberal and conservative parties, and destroy worlds of economic security and social intimacy.