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Hitler, for Example: Registers of National Socialist Exemplarity in Contemporary Germany

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 December 2021

Nitzan Shoshan
Nitzan Shoshan*
Affiliation:
Centro de Estudios Sociológicos, El Colegio de México, Mexico City, Mexico
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Abstract

This article examines whether and how the figure of Adolf Hitler in particular, and National Socialism more generally, operate as moral exemplars in today’s Germany. In conversation with similar studies about Mosely in England, Franco in Spain, and Mussolini in Italy, it seeks to advance our comparative understanding of neofascism in Europe and beyond. In Germany, legal and discursive constraints limit what can be said about the Third Reich period, while even far-right nationalists often condemn Hitler, for either the Holocaust or his military failure. Here I revise the concept of moral exemplarity as elaborated by Caroline Humphry to argue that Hitler and National Socialism do nevertheless work as contemporary exemplars, in at least three fashions: negativity, substitution, and extension. First, they stand as the most extreme markers of negative exemplarity for broad publics that understand them as illustrations of absolute moral depravity. Second, while Hitler himself is widely unpopular, Führer-substitutes such as Rudolf Hess provide alternative figures that German nationalists admire and seek to emulate. Finally, by extension to the realm of the ordinary, National Socialism introduces a cast of exemplars in the figures of loving grandfathers or anonymous fallen soldiers. The moral values for which they stand, I show, appear to be particularly significant for young nationalists. An extended, more open-ended notion of exemplarity, I conclude, can offer important insights about the lingering afterlife of fascist figures in the moral life of European nationalists today.

Keywords

moral exemplarityfascismGermanyEuroperight-wing nationalismNational Socialismanthropology of moralityneo-Nazism
Type
Fascist Revivals, Neofascism, and the Youth
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 64 , Issue 1 , January 2022 , pp. 179 - 207
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History

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Footnotes

Acknowledgments: I would like to thank the SSRC, the University of Chicago, CONACYT, the DAAD, and El Colegio de México for their support of the research I draw on here. I am also grateful to my many interlocutors in Germany, to the editorial team at CSSH, and to the anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful engagement with my argument. All translations from German are mine unless otherwise noted.

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