The Middle Classes

Abstract

This chapter surveys the history of the middle classes in Weimar Germany from social, political, and cultural perspectives. Divisions—between industrialists and master artisans; conservatives, liberals, and left-wingers; Protestants, Catholics, and Jews; modernists and anti-modernists—were by no means new. But they were exacerbated during the First World War and in the subsequent period of rapid shifts and drastic ruptures. Occupational interests diverged, depending on how the respective groups were affected by the democratic transformation of 1918/19 and the hyperinflation that peaked in 1923. As a result, many members of the middle classes turned resentfully against the republic. Still, we should be wary of adopting the ubiquitous rhetoric of decline, for studies of associational life have amounted to a rather different picture of confidence and renewal. This middle-class renewal was initially not anti-democratic per se. But it increasingly defined itself against the perceived threat of socialist revolution and, by the mid-1920s, began to fuel the rise of the extreme right. That said, the middle classes in Weimar Germany should not be seen solely in a political perspective. They exhibited remarkably diverse consumer choices and cultural activities, although it was precisely this diversity that the extreme right targeted with considerable success.