From Democracy to Dictatorship: Historiographic Problems of the Sociopolitical Development of Germany in 1918—1933

Abstract

The article attempts to analyze one of the most difficult historiographical problems of the recent history of Germany — the transition of the first German democracy to the National Socialist dictatorship. Its necessity is dictated by the fact that in recent years new assessments and judgments of historians have appeared in historiography, which significantly supplemented traditional approaches. The authors of the article are of the opinion that due to the relatively late political unification of Germany and the preservation of medieval monarchical traditions and structures of domination, the subjects of modernization changes that began at the turn of the 19—20th centuries were social groups, associations, unions, political movements and parties. The war unleashed by the German monarchy and its subsequent tragedy clearly showed the reverse side of national unity under the influence of the euphoria of the “spirit of 1914”. The confusion and fears of the uncertainty of the future that followed the defeat in the war again forced the nation to unite, however, no longer on the basis of a common conviction that war was inevitable, as a means of overcoming land hunger, but in connection with the vision of political prospects and the intention to achieve them through parliamentary compromise. However, the fragile foundations of the first German democracy were again shaken by the upheavals of two world economic crises in the early and late 1920s. The fear of social and economic disasters was exacerbated by the lack of discussion about Germany's guilt in starting the war, which contributed to the emergence of a completely different belief in the form of a legend about the innocence of the Germans (“the stab-in-the-back myth”). Its dangerous potential, legitimizing the mass consciousness, could at any moment undermine the foundations of the fragile German democracy. The conviction that the defeat of Germany could be explained by circumstances not of a military nature, but of a domestic political nature, became part of the so-called “conservative revolution”, which arose as an opposition to the Weimar Republic and contributed to the radicalization of the right forces along with the subsequent rise of National Socialism.