Ordnungen in der Krise: Zur Politischen Kulturgeschichte Deutschlands 1900-1933

Abstract

That the first three decades of the twentieth century constituted both the climax and crisis years of classical modernity in Germany—a period of rapid socio-economic and cultural change as well as profound upheaval in the wake of war, defeat, revolution, and economic depression—is not a new insight. It is only in the last two decades, however, that historians inspired by the ‘cultural turn’ have contributed to a fuller understanding of this period by investigating the ways in which the modernization process (and its crisis) in Germany transformed the important (but historiographically often marginalized) concepts of gender, time, and space as fundamental ‘orders’ of human existence. Based on a conference held at Berlin's Humboldt University in 2004, Wolfgang Hardtwig's edited volume on ‘orders in crisis’ aims to integrate the stimulating research that has been undertaken in these fields in recent years into a ‘new’ history of early twentieth-century German political culture that challenges both the still dominant periodizations of a ‘long nineteenth’ and ‘short twentieth’ century and a narrow understanding of ‘political culture’ as a set of norms and values restricted to the realm of high politics. In his introduction to the volume, Hardtwig convincingly argues that a periodization which separates the interwar period from the modernization processes of the late Wilhelmine period is of limited use to scholars interested in a broadly defined history of political culture. Most of the causes of and debates about Germany's ‘crisis of modernity’, he suggests, had their origins in the period around 1900. Without denying the watershed quality of the Great War (and its outcome) for notions of crisis in Germany, the volume therefore advocates a more long-term perspective on continuities and discontinuities in the history of political culture in Germany from the turn of the century until the Nazi seizure of power. Hardtwig rightly argues that during this period the widespread perception of a fundamental ‘crisis of orders’ overshadowed Germany's socio-political and cultural life and ultimately increased the population's receptiveness for radical (fascist and Communist) ideas of reorganizing society.