Wie bürgerlich war der Nationalsozialismus?

Abstract

‘Bürgertum und Nationalsozialismus’ might have been a more fitting title for this rich and multi-faceted conference volume if the question, ‘How bürgerlich was National Socialism?’ were based on National Socialists’ self-assessment. The short answer could then be only: ‘not very’. Antagonism toward bourgeois values was a central element in National Socialist self-presentation and propaganda in the years before 1932 and then again during the first phase of the Nazi seizure of power in the winter and spring of 1933. While it abated between the summer of 1933 and the fall of 1942, public expressions by the regime disparaging the bourgeoisie re-emerged in the last years of the war. At that point anti-bourgeois epithets were revived and the German press suggested that no ‘bourgeois’ state would survive the war: it was the enemy powers England and the United States that were connected with the pejorative term Bürgertum. The Nazis did not so much oppose the Bürgertum as a socioeconomic category as they ranted against its cultural attributes. Their focus of derision was the impact of bourgeois values and behaviour on German society and politics: a class-ridden educational system, the exclusion of the working classes from the political mainstream—and, most damning of all from the Nazi standpoint—the alleged lack of moral fibre, toughness and fighting spirit that were necessary for the nation to survive and thrive in a world full of enemies. Herein lies the more complex answer to the volume’s title: given this attack on bürgerlich values, what attracted members of the Bürgertum to the National Socialist state?