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Imperial Germany had a monopolistic elite which managed to establish and uphold, with the assistance of an authoritarian welfare state, the apparent paradox of an industrial feudal society. Members of this elite held many of the leading positions in German society themselves, but others they passed into strange, if safely controlled hands. The monopoly broke along with the political system of Imperial Germany. But the memory of—and at times nostalgia for— the masters of the monopoly, whose passing turned out to be a long process, followed their surviving servants throughout the Weimar Republic. In any case, no distinct new political class emerged before that created by the National Socialist leadership clique and this was, once again, if in a more precarious version, monopolistic. East German society has followed in this tradition in its own, apparently similar, although substantively peculiar, manner. Moreover, there can be no doubt that these traditions reverberate in West German society as well; not even total defeat produces a social tabula rasa. But two features characteristic of traditional German elites are now absent: first, the monopoly of one elite, or indeed the claim to it; and secondly, the nostalgic memory which the leadership groups of the Weimar Republic had of such a monopoly.
This is a chapter from the book Gesellschaft und Demokratie in Deutschland, of which an English translation is to be published in 1967 by Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
1 Hartmann, H.: Authority and Organization in German Management, Princeton, 1959, p. 250 Google Scholar.
2 Cf. Janowitz, M.: ‘Soziale Schichtung und Mobilität in Westdeutschland’ Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie, 10, Cologne, 1958 Google Scholar.
3 Zapf, W.: Wandlungen der deutschen Elite, Munich, 1965, pp. 196 Google Scholar ff.
4 Ibid., pp. 199 ff.