Artisans and Ideologues in Pre-Hitler Germany

Abstract

Both Struve's1 and Lunn's2 books are important departures from a set of assumptions that have since World War II been prominent in the interpretation of modern German history. In the 1950s and 1960s Fritz Stern, George Mosse, Peter Gay, and others argued that behind Nazism lay the failure of the German people-and especially the German intellectuals-to face up to the harsh facts of modernity, that an irrational if socially explicable yearning for the supposed folkish simplicity of the preindustrial order forced the German reaction to the industrial age into the path that led to Hitler. Underlying this view was the end-of-ideology liberalism of the 1950s and early 1960s: industrial and scientific modernity, via the welfare state, would reduce or eliminate all serious conflicts between capital and labor; Marxist notions of inherent conflict and instability in our social order were a product of ideological irrationality on a par with antimodernist, populist, and nationalist critiques of the quality of life in industrial societies. If the Marxist framework could lead to totalitarian communism, the antimodernist one had led to fascism. But disillusion with American foreign policy, the resurgence of social strife in America along racial and generational lines, the waning of America's cold war siege mentality, and acute skepticism as to the beneficence of science in an age of nuclear proliferation and possible ecological collapse have undermined the foundations of this optimistic modernism; and new interpretations of a host of historical questions, perhaps most obvious in the revisionist controversy over the origins of the cold war, have been forthcoming. Struve, organizing a great deal of recent scholarship on German social history, implies that the real conflict that led to Nazism was one within economic modernism itself, the conflict between elitist German capitalism and forces demanding democratic control over state and society-that is, the Marxist Left. He minimizes the distinction between liberal modernist theorists such as Weber, rightist Mittelstattd theorists such as Spengler, and Hitler himself, by underlining the similar brand of antidemocratic elitism permeating their thought-for example. by pointing out that even Hitler's totalitarianism was modernist in the sense of wanting to replace hereditary elites with a democracy of personnel selection. Struve's conclusion makes unmistakably clear the contemporary relevance he wishes his work to have: