The Collapse of Germany Democracy and the Rise of National Socialism (9/15/1940).

The first comprehensive draft of the ISR's Germany-project.

Victor Brauner. Hitler. 1934.

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We intend to use the Weimar Republic like a corpse, dissecting it in the hope to find an answer to the question: why did it happen?

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Editor’s Remarks: Reconstructing “Collapse.”

The document below is a partial transcription of “The Collapse of Germany Democracy and the Rise of National Socialism” (9/15/1940), sourced from the Max-Horkheimer-Archiv [MHA].¹

Context: “Collapse” in the Decline.

“Collapse” is the most substantial of the numerous early drafts the Institute for Social Research (ISR) produced for its amorphous “Germany-project,” which originated in mid-1939 and was drafted in parallel to the earliest proposals for the anti-Semitism studies.² Though “Collapse” was more polished than its immediate predecessor, “German Economy, Politics, and Culture, 1900-1933,”³ the authors include a disclaimer on the table of contents that the “Collapse” proposal was merely meant to delimit a series of problem-areas in German culture, and its social bases, to “be dealt with in the project” itself but that were not, therefore, necessarily “already discussed in the outline.”⁴ Much as “Collapse” would be a repurposing of its predecessor, “Collapse” itself was cannibalized for another iteration of the Germany-project, “Cultural Aspects of National Socialism” (CANS), which was itself subject to intensive (and theoretically compromising) revisions in consultation with American scholars. CANS was submitted for review by the Rockefeller foundation in early March, 1941. Horkheimer writes in a letter to William and Charlotte Dieterle:

These lines are just to express our thanks for the letter and the attached [script] on February 18th. In the last two weeks the Institute has worked literally day and night on the final draft of the big project [ed.: CANS]. A small miracle has happened. A young American professor ([Eugene] Anderson from the American University in Washington) has turned up who has followed our work for many years with the warmest sympathy, even with enthusiasm, without us ever having met in person. But now his path has led him to New York and we have decided that he should lead the great work together with me if it comes to fruition. First of all, we, the whole group with Anderson, completely reformulated the project and I can say that this strenuous time was extremely fruitful for both parties. Here there was a working community between American and European traditions as intensive as has probably never existed before in the Geisteswissenschaften. The whole [affair] seemed to us a kind of model: this is how things should proceed in such areas from now on. Yesterday we both handed the project over to Rockefeller. If it is accepted, perhaps some dreams will be realized. If it is rejected, which I think is likely given our manner and method of thinking, the struggle will continue.⁵

The struggle would indeed continue. For a period of nearly five years—beginning with Institute-in-exile’s first truly fatal financial crisis in fall 1938,⁶ ending when the severely reduced ISR managed to secure external funding from the American Jewish Committee (AJC) for the “Studies in Anti-Semitism” project in early 1943⁷—the ISR underwent an almost total restructuring. In the mid-1930s, the focus of the ISR was primarily the publication of the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung (ZfS) (1932-1939) and finishing the synthetic multidisciplinary research projects initiated prior to exile, particularly the Studien über Autorität und Familie (1936). Through the multilingual ZfS, the ISR presented itself as a defiantly independent organ for free thinking in the tradition of the internationally-oriented German Geisteswissenschaften that had since become impossible in Germany under Nazi rule. When World War II broke out in fall 1939, the ISR’s Parisian publisher could no longer print the ZfS. It was succeeded by the short-lived, English-language Studies in Philosophy and Social Science (SPSS) (1940-1942).⁸ In the 1940s, the ISR would become a different creature entirely. Contrary to interpretive convention, the ISR’s primary focus from 1940 through 1948 would be empirical social research.⁹ “Collapse” is a unique transitional document produced in the midst of the de- and re-composition of the ISR between 1938 and 1943: it is the ISR’s attempt to reconstitute itself mid-disintegration as the preeminent scientific organ for integrated research into the decline of liberal democracies into fascism.

Method of Presentation: Spiral of Spirals.

Regarding the methodological approach of the proposal, the hybrid structure of “Collapse” makes it unique, as the project is divided into a first section for “Synthesis” and a second for “Single Studies and Documentation.” The short ‘Preface’ on method at the beginning of “Collapse” was meant to answer the kinds of questions Horkheimer received when the ISR sent out a copy of the earlier shape of the Germany-project, “German Economy, Politics, and Culture, 1900-1933,” in the summer of 1940 to prospective advisers in American universities. In a pair of letters written in English and dated 7/30/1940 (included in full in the Appendix below), Adorno attempted to reassure two respondents of the project’s viability on Horkheimer’s behalf—James T. Shotwell and Charles E. Merriam. Both had been asked to serve as advisors for the project and both expressed serious reservations: aside from their confusion about what, precisely, they were expected to contribute, both were particularly concerned about the seemingly “encyclopaedic” ambitions of the project. Adorno’s defense of the project can be broken down into three methodological formulations. The first two have a general pattern of inquiry I would call (after Hegel’s “circle of circles”) a “spiral of spirals”: on the basis of a presumptive, underlying unity of investigations across various branches of social-scientific inquiry as well as their object of research, society itself, undertaking specialist studies as a collective with the aim of discovering what that presumed unity might consist in. Both the vagueness of the presumptive unity and the element of discovery in its articulation distinguish the approach from the practice of science a priori. This is the approach, as Horkheimer and Adorno write in their contemporaneous methodological text “Notes on Institute Activities” (1941), that is supposed to enable the social theorists to avoid both the unjustifiable hubris of dogmatic-metaphysical monism and the false humility of relativistic-epistemological pluralism. The three methodological formulations from Adorno’s letters to Shotwell and Merriam are:

1. Conducting divergent specialist studies in multidisciplinary coordination from an integrated and integrative social-theoretical perspective. Immediately after his assurances to Shotwell that the project does not aim to be “an encyclopaedic survey of German history from 1900 to 1933,” Adorno claims that, notwithstanding the limits placed on the project by available materials and the specializations or interests of participants, the outline “has been so drawn up as to allow an enlargement of the scope of the plan while the work is actually being undertaken” and “[t]he end result might, therefore, be much more comprehensive than the project suggests.” According to Adorno, a particular advantage of the project is the ISR’s practice of dividing scientific labor on a certain collective presumption of the underlying unity of their divergent investigations in a social-theoretical perspective. The investigations, Adorno continues, are both to be on the basis of this presumptive unity and to “elucidate” what exactly this unity might consist in. Two forms of ‘elucidation’ are provided. The first is more direct: connections between independent investigations may be expressly included within the investigations themselves. (The authors of “Collapse” tend to designate these connections with the term “cross section.”) The second is more indirect: a synthesis of the independent investigations is to be presented in an introduction written for the collection as a whole.

2. Double-contextualization of particular cultural tendencies (a) by respective counter-tendencies and (b) general social bases. Likewise with Merriam, Adorno insists that “[t]he project is not intended to result in an encyclopaedia,” but “has much more the object of throwing light on the tendencies in the specific sections of German culture.” Where in the letter to Shotwell, Adorno focused on the manner in which the division of scientific labor would be aimed at articulating a presumed unity of social-theoretical perspective, in the letter to Merriam Adorno focuses on the unity that is both presumed from the beginning and articulated as a result between the various spheres of German social life. The “tendencies” at which the project aims to cast light are not just any tendencies but “the most essential progressive tendencies of German culture since 1900.” These progressive cultural tendencies in German culture (A: philosophy, literature, music) “suppressed by National Socialism” are to be “saved” through a combination of empirical documentation and theoretical interpretation. The uniqueness of the ISR’s programmatic approach to ‘rescue’ particular cultural tendencies, however, is that this operation only be successful if these tendencies are comprehended in their total social context: (a) in their conflict with particular counter-tendencies, with which they are co-constitutive; (b) in being traced back to the roots they share with their respective counter-tendencies in general social bases (A: economy, political history, the labor movement).

3. The reciprocal correction of theory and research; the rejection of abstract theory and isolated fact. In a recapitulation of Horkheimer’s inaugural address to the ISR, “The Present Situation of Social Philosophy and the Task of an Institute for Social Research” (1931), and methodological foreword on the concept of social research to the first issue of the ZfS, Adorno opens his letter to Merriam with “a few words about our program”: the “continuous interplay between theoretical and empirical work” in which “problems and hypotheses are derived from our theoretical consideration” while “the empirical results of our research lead to substantial modifications of our theoretical formulations.” Adorno explains that this results in a double-edged critical procedure: measuring the “the ideological, speculative character of the German socio-philosophical tradition [against] concrete social reality” and criticizing “mere fact collecting” from the perspective of a social theory that is both the assumption and result of their social-scientific specialist studies.

Particularly in this last point, it becomes clear that the goal of the ISR’s multidisciplinary projects like “Collapse” is to develop a second-order theoretical perspective of the relationship between given social theory (or theories) and empirical social research, or to present an “integrated picture” of modern society through “a more comprehensive undertaking,” as we read in the ‘Preface’ to “Collapse,” that includes both theoretical and empirical moments. In “Collapse,” as in all of the ISR’s most ambitious research projects, the development of a critical theory of society is too big a task for any single researcher to take on alone.¹⁰

Problem: The Concept of Democracy.

The ‘Preface’ to “Collapse” opens with the question of the reversal of German liberal (and social) democracy into National Socialism: What made it possible for Germany, a model of cultural and social progress, to be transformed into a ruthless and brutal dictatorship? The project is conceived as a kind of comparative cultural anatomy of “democratic societies”: we shall treat the Weimar Republic as an anatomical specimen to be dissected in search of an answer to the question: Why did it happen?

The point of departure for the project is a thoroughly ambivalent concept of democracy. According to the authors, it is not enough—or true—to say that Germany was simply never really democratic, or that Germany simply lacked the required number of democratic citizens, or that German democrats simply lacked the requisite will to fight for it. Any definition of democracy in the abstract that fails to account for the reversal of actual democracy into its opposite—whether it’s called totalitarianism, authoritarianism, or, in this case, fascism—is an utterly inadequate concept for any self-professed partisan of democracy, for “[d]emocracy will not live unless the people are willing to fight for it” but what the case study of Weimar Germany proves is sheer will is not enough: “It is not true that German democracy failed because there were no German democrats. For long periods, millions of Germans were willing to fight for democracy but their spirit was finally broken.” It is not enough to “know” (and teach) “the values of our democratic culture,” or even “the methods for retaining them,” but methods for fighting “the dangers [by] which [these values] are threatened.” The implication is that American democrats are as in much need of these methods in 1940 as the German democrats were in the events leading up to 1933.

The the central insight that unified each of the successive drafts of the Germany-project through the final version of CANS submitted to the Rockefeller Foundation in the Spring of 1941 was the internal connection between liberal-democratic capitalist societies and fascism. This did not go unnoticed. The American historian Eugene Anderson, the ISR’s chief consultant during the intensive revisions to CANS, was concerned that the ISR was presenting the outgrowth of National Socialism from the culture of the Weimar Republic as a necessary, even inevitable process, and encouraged them to both avoid explicit or implicit claims that the problem was “constitutional” and instead consider “alternatives which could have happened.”¹¹ Despite the substantial revisions under Anderson’s guidance, CANS would be rejected by the Rockefeller Foundation so decisively that the ISR would abandon it and instead seek patrons for their anti-Semitism project more aggressively. John D. Rockefeller Jr. himself found the conclusion of the project “that the cultural trends leading to fascism in Weimar Germany were also present in America” so objectionable that an associate of the ISR described his reaction as so “absolutely hostile to [the] research project” that he was “not willing to finance it even if the Library of Congress should request it.”¹² Even prospective sponsors who did not notice the radical implications of the project were suspicious of the ISR’s capacity to undertake such a study because of their reputation. In August 1941, Neumann writes to Horkheimer about his most recent failed effort to secure a new source of funding for CANS:

So yesterday I had the discussion with Carl Friedrich¹³—or rather the first part of it. I asked Friedrich for his opinion on our project “Cultural Aspects of National Socialism.” He replied that the project was excellent, provided that it was carried out by competent, unbiased and undogmatic scholars. After this explanation it was immediately clear to me that Friedrich considered the institute to be a purely Marxist affair and therefore did not trust us to be able to carry out such a project impartially. The only question was how I had to decide at that moment which tactic to adopt. I could have reacted indignantly to the veiled accusation, or I could have at least played with half of my cards on the table. I decided to go for the latter. So I asked him quite openly whether he meant that the institute was purely Marxist and, because of its dogmatic commitment, could not guarantee that it would carry out the project objectively. His answer was: yes. I then explained to him that, first of all, there is a distinction between Marxists and Marxists and, further, that it is incorrect to say that the Institute is made up of Marxists. Some are Marxists, others are not. In any case, none are directly or indirectly affiliated with the Communist Party. A conversation lasting nearly half an hour ensued in which I explained to him the theoretical foundations of the Institute and the tasks that we believe it is our obligation to fulfill. After this conversation, I asked him again whether he still maintained his original assumption. His answer was: no.¹⁴

Whenever one representative of the ISR managed to successfully convince a peer they were not too Marxist to be rigorously social-scientific in their approach, it was not uncommon for the interlocutor to respond with confused irritation: If you’re not Marxist, then what exactly are you? And if you are, then why be so confoundingly indirect?¹⁵

In at least one respect, however, “Collapse” went further than CANS. What is unique to it is the repeated appeal to a positive moment in the ambivalence that characterizes the ISR’s concept of democracy. It was almost certainly not the kind of hypothetical “alternative” of something that could have happened that Anderson had in mind. Instead, the ISR invoke a determinate kind of democracy that any self-professed partisan of democracy, whether German or American, must, on pain of destroying democracy itself, realize they are fighting for in the struggle against fascism: “a socialist order.” This is the democracy that would have demanded such “extraordinary concessions to the underprivileged,” the social-democratic government of the Weimar Republic could not stomach it. Appeal to this socialist social political order is made again and again: we are told that by the time “transformation into a socialist state… had become completely utopian in 1932,” there were no forces left to prevent the ascendancy of the National Socialists; that the identification of social democratic rule with the triumph of socialism and the suppression of revolutionary socialists by progressive social-democratic reformers was crucial for fostering proto-fascist forces of reaction and facilitating the ascent of National Socialism;¹⁶ that as soon as the social democrats ceased to consider, as the revolutionary socialists still did, the Republic a “temporary resting place and not their home,”¹⁷ was a compromise with the enemies of the radical edge of the labor movement, the only factor capable of introducing “democratic and socialist forces” into German culture,¹⁸ and initiated the process by which “[t]he socialist idea, the quasi-religious devotion, and the active solidarity were replaced by specific devices for mass domination, petty considerations[,] and passive discipline.”¹⁹ In “Collapse,” the closure of the revolutionary socialist horizon—”the impetus of the movement was no longer directed against these relations but against certain groups and conditions which most obviously hinder the functioning of the apparatus”—coincides with the emergence of a new ‘democratic’ machinery of social domination, Massenkultur and the disciplining of labor, that would train the masses for fascism.

The socialist aspect of the concept of democracy become adequate to itself in “Collapse” provides us with a key to the implied connection between the critical theorists’ continued reliance on the critical criterion of classless society and “the true idea of democracy—which even now leads a repressed, subterranean existence among the masses” in their fragmentary writings on the theory and sociology of the racket.²⁰ To paraphrase a letter Adorno writes to his parents in 1943, throughout the ISR’s wartime research projects, all of their efforts to present themselves as social scientists investigating methods for the defense of democracy from fascist forces, they maintain a single assumption: that there is about as much similarity between the activities of the ‘National Socialist’ oppressors and socialism as there is between heaven and hell.²¹ The critical theorists argue that liberal-democratic capitalist societies have reached a crisis-point in which their democratic defenders are forced to decide between fighting for true democracy or endlessly engendering its opposite: socialism or barbarism.

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“The spoils which fall to the fascist belong to him by right: he is the legitimate son and heir of liberalism. The wealthiest estates have nothing to reproach him with. Even the most extreme horrors of today have their origins not in 1933, but in 1919, in the shooting of workers and intellectuals by the feudal accomplices of the first republic. The socialist governments were essentially powerless; instead of advancing down to the very basis of these events, they preferred to remain on the loose topsoil of the facts. In secret, they held the theory to be a quirk. The government made freedom a matter of political philosophy instead of political practice. Even those who may privately have every reason to do so should not wish humanity to repeat this. It would run the very same course as the original.”

—Horkheimer, ”The Philosophy of Absolute Concentration” (1938).

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On Reconstructing “Collapse” from the Archive.

The transcription below includes the “Preface” and “Introductory Survey”—with two significantly distinct variants (“1a)” and “1b)”) of the latter—and the six-part “Section One: Synthesis”: I. The Heritage of the Past; II. Friends and Enemies of the Republic; III. The Cultural Crisis; IV. The New Ideology; V. New Methods of Mass Domination; VI. The New Imperialism. Neither V. nor VI. are included in the polished copy of the final draft of the proposal—“1a)”—which is available in the archive. Both are, however, still listed on its table of contents (admittedly, with the proviso that just because something is listed in the ToC, “[t]hat does not necessarily mean that they are already discussed in the outline…”). Because I have been unable to locate the final drafts for V. and VI., I have transcribed their English abstracts from draft “1b).” The rest of subsections V. and VI. were drafted for “1b)” in German, and I have not yet had the opportunity to translate them.

Similarly for the contents of “Section Two: Single Studies and Documentation”: A. Economic Structure 1910-1939; B. Social Structure; C. Political and Legal Structure; D. Culture I: Philosophy, Literature, Music; E. Culture II: Education, etc. None of these special studies are included in the final revision of the project, “1a),” and the two sections on “Culture” (D. and E.) seem to have survived only as German drafts (by Adorno) with a number of handwritten corrections. Because A. and B. had already been typed out in full in English for “1b),” I have included my transcriptions for those below as well. In draft “1b),” there is no distinct sub-section C., so I was unable to supplement this gap in typescript “1a).” (Though I assume C., D., and E. were originally included in the “1a)” typescript as finalized English drafts, I haven’t been able to confirm this.)

While authorship of individual parts of “Section Two: Single Studies and Documentation” is relatively easy to determine—Friedrich Pollock was most likely the author of “A. Economic Structure 1910-1939” and “B. Social Structure,” whereas part “D. Culture I: Philosophy, Literature, Music” is explicitly attributed to Adorno in a handwritten comment on the typescript—it has been much more difficult to determine authorship of the whole. Though both Adorno and Horkheimer devoted more “libido,” to use a phrase of the latter’s, to the project on anti-Semisim, it is evident that they spent a significant amount of time and energy on the Germany project as well as it was revised again and again between Summer 1940 through Spring 1941. Aside from Leo Löwenthal, who likely performed his typical role as ISR’s in-house editor-in-chief for the duration, the bulk of the text for “Section One: Synthesis” transcribed below was most likely a result of the combined efforts of Franz Neumann and Pollock. (Neumann’s thematic area from CANS, “The Ideological Permeation of Labor and the New Middle Classes,” is effectively a condensation of the “Introductory Survey” below and the better part of the material from sub-sections I-VI.)

Future translation projects for “Collapse”:

1. Translation of the surviving German drafts for sub-sections “V. New Methods of Mass Domination” and “VI. The New Imperialism” from draft “1b)” of “Section One: Synthesis.”

2. Translation of Adorno’s German draft of parts “D. Culture I: Philosophy, Literature, Music” and the German draft of part “E. Culture II: Education, etc.,” both of which are also from draft “1b)” of “Section Two: Single Studies and Documentation.”

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Contents.

Horkheimer—Letter: “… A kind of message in a bottle.”

The Collapse of Germany Democracy and the Rise of National Socialism (9/15/1940).

Preface.

Introductory Survey.

• 1a) variant of ‘Crucial Events’:

• 1b) Variant of ‘Crucial Events’:

Section One: Synthesis.

I. The Heritage of the Past.

II. Friends and Enemies of the Republic.

III. Cultural Crisis.

IV. The New Ideology.

V. New Methods of Mass Domination.

VI. The New Imperialism.

Section Two: Single Studies and Documentation.

A. Economic Structure 1910-1939.

B. Social Structure.

Appendix: Letters on the concept of the Germany-project (1940).

• Adorno—Letter to Shotwell: Remembering what Germany Forgot.

• Adorno—Letter to Merriam: From the studies on State Capitalism to the Germany-project and research on anti-Semitism.

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Horkheimer—Letter: “… A kind of message in a bottle.” (1940)

[Excerpt from: Max Horkheimer to Salka Viertel, 6/29/1940.]²²

The Institute is planning a major study of the history of Germany from 1900 to 1933, particularly of the cultural movements involving art, literature, film, etc. The material on this history will be lost if it is not evaluated now; the people themselves will be scattered and die off. The only country where such a study can be carried out is the United States, and one of the few places [here] where the people and the documents can be found together is our Institute. Our collection of material is probably one of the most complete, and we know where to get what’s missing. A significant portion of our members themselves participated in the movements in question; many other friends of the Institute, who might be open to interview, are in this country. It is impossible for us to finance the investigation entirely from our own resources. As with other projects of ours, we need funds “from outside.” We had the notion that some of the leading figures in Hollywood, whose history is inextricably linked to the period in question, might be interested in preserving this [historical period] from oblivion through scientific presentation. In any case, given what is now breaking out in Europe and perhaps the whole world, our work at present is essentially fated to be passed down through the night which has come upon us: a kind of message in a bottle. Is there anyone in Hollywood who I could persuade to support our project financially?

The reasons that, apart from those mentioned, could also animate this at the present time include the following: The Institute has been working for six years within the framework of Columbia University. Its Advisory Committee includes many of America's most distinguished scholars. The foreword to the draft of the project was written by a friend of the Institute’s, Charles Beard. Since an understanding of recent German history is imperative for the fight against National Socialism, both internally and externally, such work is in the interest of American democracy, and our group has been assured by many outstanding experts that the Institute is the right place to carry out the plan. The help we receive for our work from private sources would enable us to make a contribution to American science that is more desirable today than ever before.

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The Collapse of Germany Democracy and the Rise of National Socialism (9/15/1940).

Preface.

Aims. Whatever the outcome of the present war, it is vital for Americans to obtain the clearest possible picture of the conditions in which the National Socialist regime grew, of its aims and inherent tendencies. The tensions under which we live, the rapidity of world developments, and the urgency of the decisions to be reached are not conducive to the writing of a history of Germany during the last four decades. Nor would such a history satisfy the need of the intelligent layman for an answer to the burning question: What made it possible for Germany, a model of cultural and social progress, to be transformed into a ruthless and brutal dictatorship?

Democracy will not live unless the people are willing to fight for it. In order to fight efficiently we must know not merely the values of our democratic culture and the best methods of retaining them, but also the dangers with which they are threatened. It is not true that German democracy failed because there were no German democrats. For long periods, millions of Germans were willing to fight for democracy but their spirit was finally broken.²³ Our project should be regarded among other things as a contribution to the much-discussed problem of how to revitalize American democracy. For that reason we shall treat the Weimar Republic as an anatomical specimen to be dissected in search of an answer to the question: Why did it happen?²⁴

We are not concerned solely with an anatomy of the past, however. It is the present National Socialist system which constitutes the external, and to some extent even the internal, threat to the existence of American democratic government and culture. [It is through the analysis of the National Socialist regime, its ideology, its system of mass domination, its new imperialism, that methods could be developed to defend American democracy.]²⁵

Organization of the Project. The organization of the project is indicated by the aims. No systematic comprehensiveness is planned. The results will be presented in two sections, differing in length, method, and structure.

Section One (probably a large volume) will present the synthesis. It will open with a rapid survey of German political history from 1914 to 1939, centering around those crucial events which determined the ultimate path that Germany was to take. Six subsections will be devoted to various problems of the Republic ([I.] The Heritage of the Past, [II.] Friends and Enemies of the Republic, [III.] The Cultural Crisis), and to the structure and trends of the National Socialist regime as it developed from the conditions of the preceding periods ([IV.] The New Ideology, [V.] New Methods of Mass Domination, [VI.] The New Imperialism).²⁶

Section one, standing by itself, should enable the intelligent layman to see the causes of the downfall of German democracy and the tendencies inherent in National Socialism. Though based on extensive research, this section will not be burdened with the scientific apparatus of tables, footnotes, and lengthy discussions of detailed questions.

Section Two (probably five volumes) has quite different aims. It will present the documentation for Section one and yet transcend it. Many of the specific problems will have been discussed in the first section, others merely intimated, and still others not mentioned at all. It will be divided into five parts: [A.] Economic Structure; [B.] Social Structure; [C.] Political and Legal System; [D.] Cultural Life I (philosophy, literature, music, etc.); [E.] Cultural Life II (mass culture, education, religion, press, and propaganda).²⁷ Each volume will open with a brief survey of the field. [The discussed material will be selected and analyzed according to its relevance for our three major problems: why did it happen, what are the trends within National Socialism, what are the lessons for the USA?]²⁸ They will not be textbooks, nor will they seek systematic completeness.

Method. Such a project is obviously beyond the competence of any single scholar. Nor would a mere collection of experts, producing some sort of symposium, achieve the desired result.

We hope to accomplish an integrated piece of research by the fact that the members of the Institute, each an expert in a different field of social science (philosophy, history, political science, economics, sociology, social psychology) have worked together for many years, striving to break down the boundaries between the academic disciplines and to study social phenomena not merely sociologically but also philosophically and historically.²⁹ The very fact that most of the collaborators on this project are accustomed to working together closely and for a period of many years have developed techniques of cooperative research, should assure unity and balance. The total product would be different from the mere addition of separate pieces of research undertaken by isolated individuals. The outcome would be the best possible interpretation of the German experience.

The many books that have been written on the breakdown of Weimar democracy and the rise and history of National Socialism have contributed greatly to an understanding of these problems. However, they either deal with specific elements or approach the problems from specific angles and so they cannot present an integrated picture. The time is now ripe for the more comprehensive undertaking proposed.

The outline of this project is the product of long preparation. In part it is based on studies already completed or on research now in progress. For many years the Institute has centered part of its activities around these problems. It has assembled much of the relevant material and has completed a series of specific studies: Character structure of the German worker during the last years of the Weimar Republic. Conditions of the German middle class. Dynamics of dictatorship. National Socialist propaganda. Development of the rule of law. Penal administration and penal law. Structural changes in German post-war economics. Problems of German preparedness economy. Post-war trends of philosophy, literature, music, radio, movies, education, leisure time, etc.

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Introductory Survey.

The Introduction provides a short survey of German history from 1914 to 1939, from the outbreak of the first world war to that of the second. The major emphasis rests on the crucial events of that period, those which are now revealed as the milestones in the process of the destruction of democracy and the establishment of the National Socialist dictatorship. Were there possibilities of avoiding the fate of the Republic, and what prevented the leadership from making the most of these possibilities?

Every social system must satisfy the primary needs of the people somehow. The Imperial System succeeded to the extent and so long as it was able to expand. Successful wars, a successful policy of imperialist expansion, had reconciled large sections of the people to its semi-absolutistic character. In the face of the material advantages gained, the anomalous character of the political structure was not decisive. The army and bureaucracy ruled. The Divine Right theory, the official political doctrine, merely veiled their rule. It was hardly taken seriously. The Imperial rule was in fact not absolutistic, for it was bound by law, proud of its Rechtsstaat theory. The system did not break down in a revolution. It was simply beaten in an exhausting world. It lost and abdicated when its expansionist policy was blocked.

The Weimar Democracy proceeded in a different direction. It had to rebuild an impoverished and exhausted country in which class antagonisms had become polarized. It attempted to merge three elements: the heritage of the past (especially the civil service), parliamentary democracy modeled after Western European and American patterns, and a pluralistic collectivism, that is by the incorporation of the powerful social and economic organizations directly into the political system.³⁰ The idea was that traditional civil service would retain for the Republic the stable basis of the highly efficient and well-trained public servant and thus the continuity of life would not be disturbed. Parliamentary democracy would give Germany the most liberal and the most democratic constitution yet devised. The pluralistic element was to provide a stable socio-economic basis for the system. Social antagonisms would be transformed into social collaboration. The organizations of capital and labor, of industry and agriculture, of handicraft and trade, of producers and consumers, would settle their differences with the guidance, but not interference, of the state, and would arrive at a common policy. The threatened supremacy of the bureaucracy would be prevented by transforming private organizations into administrative bodies, and through his collective organization the individual would become part and parcel of the state.

But the system produced the exact opposite: sharpened social antagonisms, breakdown of voluntary collaboration, destruction of parliamentary institutions, suspension of political liberties, the growth of a ruling bureaucracy and the renaissance of the army as a decisive political factor.

Why did it happen?

In an impoverished, yet highly industrialized country, such a system could operate only under the following different conditions. [Rebuild a working society with voluntary foreign help; extraordinary concessions to the underprivileged; a socialist order.]³¹ On the one hand, it could rebuild Germany with foreign assistance, expanding its markets by peaceful means to the level of its high industrial capacity. The essence of the Weimar Republic’s foreign policy tended in this direction. By joining the concert of the Western European powers the Weimar Government hoped to obtain economic concessions. The attempt failed. It was supported neither by German industry and large land owners nor by the Western powers. The year 1932 found Germany in a catastrophic political, economic and social crisis.

The system could also operate if the ruling groups made concessions voluntarily or under compulsion by the state. That would have led to a better life for the mass of the German workers and security for the middle classes at the expense of the profits and the power of big business. Germany industry was decidedly not amenable, however, and the state sided with it more and more.

The third possibility was the transformation into a socialist state, and that had become completely utopian in 1932. The crisis of 1932 demonstrated that political democracy alone without a fuller utilization of the potentialities inherent in Germany’s industrial system, that is, without the abolition of unemployment and improvement in living standards, remained a hollow shell.³²

The fourth choice was the return to imperialist expansion. Imperialist ventures could not be organized within the traditional democratic form, however, for there would be too serious opposition. Nor could it take the form of restoration of the monarchy. An industrial society which has passed through a democratic phase cannot exclude the masses from consideration. Expansionism therefore took the form of National Socialism, a totalitarian dictatorship which has been able to transform its victims into supporters and to organize the entire country into an armed camp under iron discipline.

National Socialism, notwithstanding its revolutionary characteristics, did not attain power by the violent overthrow of its constitution. The National Socialist Party had worked consistently since 1923 to seize power with the help of the existing coercive machinery of the state. Without the support of the army, bureaucracy and judiciary, without the disruption of the democratic forces, National Socialism would never have come to power. It is therefore imperative to analyze all those crucial events in the history of Germany during the past 25 years in which the anti-democratic forces showed their baleful significance and the democratic forces their inability to cope with them.³³

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[1a) variant of ‘Crucial Events’:]

These crucial events have a common basic structure. They reveal the growing loss of faith in the ability of democracy to make life livable, the gradual disappearance of liberalism, the emasculation of the Social Democratic Party and the trade unions, the numerical and political growth of the bureaucracy, the increasingly partisan role of the judiciary, and the politicization of the army as the focus of all anti-democratic trends. Today, we can see that the Weimar democracy owed its continued existence not to the intelligence and courage of its adherents but rather to the toleration of its enemies, who experienced the weakness of the democracy during those crucial events, and perfected the techniques of their own policy until the democracy was finally destroyed.

The following events require especially careful analysis:

• Revolution 1918: The breakdown of the Imperial system was not turned into a democratic revolution. The undemocratic heritage of the past was retained in large parts.

• The Weimar Constitution 1919: An admirable document on paper, it failed to create a reliable coercive machinery, to complete the unification of the Reich, to democratize the schools and universities. The Republic appeared to the masses as a merely transitory structure.

• Kapp Putsch 1920: Although blocked by a general strike, the Kapp Putsch strengthened all reactionary tendencies which were responsible for it.

• Murder of Rathenau 1922: The popular resentment against the murder did not crystallize into action. The Law for the Protection of the Republic was turned into a weapon against the democratic forces.

• Inflation and Occupation of the Ruhr 1923: The profound economic transformations ruined the middle classes. The occupation of the Ruhr brought out an increasing nationalism organized into fascist groups supported by the Reichswehr. The Republic failed to cope with them.

• Reich execution against Thuringia and Saxony 1923: The Reich Cabinet deposed the legally constituted governments in Thuringia and Saxony but did not institute action against the openly anti-constitutional Bavarian Cabinet.

• Hitler’s Munich Putsch 1923: Hitler’s trial turned into a farce: after a short period of repression, the National Socialist Party was allowed to reorganize.

• Stabilization 1925-1930: The New Deal of the Weimar Democracy seemed fully established. It concentrated, however, chiefly on the elaboration of its social legislation and failed to deal with the decisive problems of economic and political power.

• The Policy of the Lesser Evil 1930-1932: Social Democracy accepted the emasculation of parliamentary sovereignty and the suspension of many civil rights.

• The Papen Coup d’Etat 1932: The Social Democrats added ridicule to their weakness by countering the deposition of the Prussian Cabinet with nothing more than a law suit. The reliance upon legal and parliamentary action proved a complete failure.

• Hitler’s Access to Power, January 1933: Social Democracy, trade unions and liberals, as well as democratic Catholicism, fatalistically accepted Hitler’s appointment because in form it was done in the usual constitutional way. The election of March 5, 1933 foreshadowed the terroristic character of the new regime.

• The Submission of Labor, May 1933: The trade unions attempted to make their peace with National Socialism by dropping their political affiliation with the Social Democratic Party. They failed.

The analysis of these crucial events evokes the key questions which underline our whole project. They may be divided into six groups:

I. Economy.

1. Was the concentration of capital and the failure of antitrust policy instrumental in the collapse of the Weimar Democracy?

2. Why did heavy industry, in contrast to the light industries, join forces with National Socialism just as they had done in Italy?

3. Did the system of state interventionism (public ownership, currency control, public control of coal, potash, and other industries) have any bearing upon the strength of the democratic forces? Was it possible to organize the control of business (even economic planning) within democratic forms?

4. To what extent was the inflation responsible for undermining the economic strength of the middle classes?

5. Were the devices introduced to protect the economic status of the middle classes in the face of growing monopolization (credit facilities, cooperatives, political organization) adequate?

6. Was the retention of the traditional forms of agriculture inevitably bound up with inefficient obsolete methods of agricultural production?

7. Would more extensive resettlement projects have helped to solve the agricultural problem under German conditions?

8. Was the system of public works (with or without a resettlement policy) an adequate solution of the German unemployment problem?

II. Social Structure.

1. To what extent did the process of bureaucratization in key social organizations like the trade unions destroy their initiative and militancy?

2. What were the consequences of the direct affiliation of the trade unions with political parties?

3. Was the social legislation (social security, compulsory arbitration, etc.) a contributory factor in weakening the resistance of the trade unions against the incorporation of labor into a totalitarian system?

4. Why did the so-called “old middle classes” (handicraft, retail trade, free professions) join forces with the very groups who constituted the major threat to their existence, big business and the Junkers?

5. How did the increasing differentiation among the workers (supervisory workers, white collar workers, skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled laborers, women) affect their resistance to National Socialism?

6. Did the social composition of the bureaucracy contribute materially to its essentially anti-democratic character? Were the organizational forms incompatible with democracy?

III. Political System.

1. Why did the suspension of civil liberties in periods of emergency, intended to facilitate the fight against anti-democratic forces, actually strengthen reaction?

2. Was the concentration of political power in the hands of the Reich President a method of safeguarding democracy?

3. What were the merits and weaknesses of the Reich Economic Council, municipal self-government, and the pluralistic system as a device to check the growing power of the bureaucracy?

4. Did the system of proportional representation, with its protection of small minorities (splinter parties), facilitate the growth of National Socialism?

5. What effects did the federated structure of the Reich have on the attainment of a democratic consciousness?

6. What was the role of political Catholicism in the struggle for democracy?

7. Why did the most powerful democratic party, the Social Democrats, fail so completely?

8. Why have the liberal middle classes completely disappeared as a political force?

IV. The Army.

1. To what extent was the fact that the army was made up of professional soldiers under an officer caste decisive for its anti-democratic policy? Would universal conscription have helped to prevent the army from becoming a state within the state?

2. What were the relations between the army, high bureaucracy, big business and lard land owners?

3. Why did parliamentary control of the army fail?

V. The Legal System.

1. Why did the legal weapons against anti-democratic forces become tools for undermining democracy?

2. Was the system of career judges preferable to one of elected judges, and to the jury system which had been abolished in 1924?

3. Were the modern German schools of jurisprudence (sociological jurisprudence, rationalistic school, school of free discretion) instrumental in undermining the rational legal system?

VI. Culture.

1. Why did the progressive criticism of 19th century culture, as offered by Nietzsche, change into a retrogressive trend?

2. Were the anti-rational trends in philosophy (vitalism, Existenz-philosophy) intrinsically linked with the degeneration of democracy?

3. To what extent did the “mass-culture” of the Weimar period contain germs of totalitarianism?

4. Why did the German educational system fail to train militant democrats?

5. What were the National Socialist propaganda techniques and why did the democratic forces fail to utilize them?

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[1b) Variant of ‘Crucial Events’:]

The experience of the past few years has shed new light on political, social and economic trends which hitherto have been neglected. Certain historical factors such as the changes in the form of state and government had previously been overemphasized, while others, such as the role of the bureaucracy, the army, certain economic groups and their interconnections, are not yet adequately analyzed.

1914/18: Political Truce.

The constellation of the social-political forces during the World War becomes decisive for Weimar Democracy. The war reveals two trends, the limit of the integrating power of the Imperial system, especially of its bureaucracy and army, and the profound transformation of Social Democracy and the socialist trade unions.

The war clearly demonstrates that a semi-absolutistic state of the old Prussian type cannot, in an industrialized society, continue in its existence unless it succeeds in its expansionist policy. The war brings the scope and the efficiency of the bureaucratic and the army machines to their highest technical perfection (War Economy). Yet, it proves incapable of providing the integrating ideology for the subsequent defeat. There is a chance for the Labor Movement, which aims at the establishment of a new society, to disrupt the magic circle. But Social Democracy has entered into a truce; it will stick to it in spite of internal dissensions and the betrayal of every promise by the Hindenburg-Ludendorff dictatorship. The trade unions have become administrative agencies of the state. The marriage between the state and the social organization of labor is being consummated. Labor is unable to liberate itself from the impact of the past.

The following questions arise:

1. What was the impact of the War Economy on the future economic structure of Germany?

2. Why have the Social Democrats and the trade unions, in spite of their pre-war revolutionary ideology, opted for defense, and actively collaborated?

1918: Missing the first chance.

The breakdown of the Imperial system opened the way for a social revolution. It did not materialize. The anti-revolutionary policy of the Social Democrats expresses the sentiment of the politically untrained masses: yearning for demobilization, peace, democracy. Already the First Congress of the Worker’s and Soldier’s Councils (December 16th, 1918) decides with a huge majority for the convocation of the National Assembly. All revolutionary attempts for a radical transformation of the political system are violently suppressed. The new authorities do little or nothing to occupy the vital positions for preventing the old powers to regain what they lost.

Far from overthrowing the old bureaucratic machine, the Social Democratic leaders in fact strengthen it. Outwardly, at least, the decisive political force, they prefer to rely far more on the old bureaucracy than on the masses. They do not seize the opportunity of engendering a system of active, mass-borne democracy.

The following problems arise:

1. Why has, in contrast to Soviet Russia, the revolutionary movement failed?

2. Was the transformation of Social Democracy and the trade unions into reformist organizations inevitable?

3. What was the role of leading personalities?

4. Have foreign powers contributed towards the defeat of socialist revolution by strengthening reaction?

1919: The Constitution of Illusions.

The constitution of August 11th, 1919, as it stands on paper, is an admirable work. But its deficient social basis threatens its successful operation from the very beginning. Due to its pluralistic origin, the constitution is the result of a set of covenants between powerful social groups, mainly the following:

1. The agreement Ebert-Hindenburg of November 9, 1918, with the understanding to fight bolshevism and restore peace and order.

2. The agreement between the employers and the trade unions (the Stinnes-Legien compact) of November 15, 1918, which promises the workers equality in the shop, recognizes collective bargaining, and denies the employers’ protection to yellow labor organization.

3. The understanding between the government and the Social Democrats (March 22, 1919) promising the incorporation of the worker’s council system into the constitutional framework.

4. The agreement between the “revolutionary” governments of the Reich and the State (January 26, 1919) maintaining the federative structure and securing the indivisibility of the Prussian territory in spite of the unitarian program of the Social Democratic Party, to which most of their members belong.

5. Finally, the understanding between the partners of the Weimar Coalitions (Social Democrats, Democrats, and Catholic “Center”) which comprises all previous agreements and recognizes and secures in the very text of the constitution the status of the civil service and of the judiciary, while at the same time it secures the recognition of the churches and political corporations.

The constitution thus tries to mold into a whole the old Prussian tradition, the Western democratic models, and the demands of the working classes. But a pluralistic system, far more than an individualistic democracy, can only operate if the contracting social partners are willing to compromise. The constitution that embodies this system rests on the assumption that society’s basic interests are fundamentally in harmony. No attempt is made by the Republicans to give their state weapons ensuring its functioning when compromises no longer work. Then either one social group will conquer power, or the old bureaucratic and military forces will arrogate it to themselves.

The following problems appear significant:

1. What fundamental features of German society were neglected by the constitution makers? Could they have acted otherwise?

2. What is the role of political Catholicism in the Weimar Democracy?

3. What is the cause for the disintegration of the Democratic Party?

4. How did the pluralistic system operate?

1920: The democrats lack “Will to Power.”

March 1920. The reactionary Putsch led by Kapp and General Luttwitz breaks out. A general strike sweeps the Kapp government away. Wide masses of the bourgeoisie, frightened by the oncoming reaction, are willing to submit to the leadership of the Social Democrats. But the attempts to form a worker’s government to replace the Cabinet of the Weimar Coalition fail. The Reichswehr is allowed to shoot those workers who refuse to lay down the arms they have taken up for the defense of the Republic. The Republicans miss the opportunity to ensure the protection of the Republic after they have shunned the danger of the Putsch. The Social Democratic and Democratic parties are beaten in the June elections, 1920. The majority of the Independent Social Democratic Party, despairing of success by democratic means, joins the Communist Party which thus becomes a mass organization. The split among the German workers deepens. Since June 1920, a bourgeois Cabinet rules in which the German People’s Party, the representation of industry, shares power. The chance which the defeat of the Kapp Putsch offered to exterminate the counter-revolutionary forces is completely wasted. It is turned into its opposite. The reaction is strengthened.

The following problems deserve attention:

1. Is the Putsch an adequate means of counter-revolutionary activity in industrial society? A typology of counter-revolutionary tactics will be attempted (Junta; restoration; dictatorship; Fascism and National Socialism).

2. What was the impact of the general strike? Did it merely succeed because it was sponsored by the legitimate government? Is the general strike an adequate weapon to fight reaction?

3. What is the role of the army? Does its role depend upon whether it is built on universal conscription or whether it is composed only of professional soldiers?

1922/23: the democrats yield their power.

Under the protection of the Cabinet and the Reichswer, anti-democratic reaction becomes more daring. Secret military organizations appear. They already have a fascist character. In June 1922 the Reich Foreign Minister Walter Rathenau is murdered. Enormous popular resentment rises. A Law for the Protection of the Republic is enacted, but, in the hands of a reactionary judiciary, it soon becomes a tool for fighting left opposition while the counter-revolution remains unmolested. Another opportunity is missed.

On January 11, 1923, France occupies German territory as a pawn for reparation payments. The government of Chancellor Cuno organizes passive resistance against France with the active collaboration of the Social Democrats and the trade unions. Nationalism becomes ripe. Communists and fascists vie with each other in nationalistic demagogy. The outcome of the Rhineland occupation is a sharpening of the inflation which ruins the middle-classes and upsets the German social and economic structure. The middle of 1923 sees a genuine revolutionary situation. There are no forces to exploit it but the inflation profiteers. The Communist Party misses its opportunity and merely attempts a locally isolated Putsch which is bloodily, yet easily, repressed.

The following problems appear decisive:

1. The role of the judiciary in a democracy. Professional or elected judges? Is the jury system a guarantee of freedom?

2. Why has the Communist Party failed to utilize the revolutionary situation?

3. What was the economic and social impact of the inflation on the concentration of capital, on agriculture, and on the middle-classes?

1923/24: The old ruling groups back again.

The Cuno Cabinet is overthrown by a spontaneous strike wave. But the first Stresemann Cabinet in which the Social Democrats enter to end Ruhr resistance orders the Reich Execution against Saxony and Thuringia (October 29, 1923), the first Reich Execution to be enacted against any legally constituted state. The governments composed of Social Democrats and Communists are deposed. The successful democratization they had carried out within the administrative and judicial machinery is reversed. The very same Stresemann government, however, fails to enforce the fundamental tenets of the Reich policy against the reactionary Bavarian Cabinet which daily violates the constitution.

The Stresemann Cabinet ends the passive resistance and undertakes the stabilization of the Mark. But to attain economic stability, it, for the first time, fully uses the dictatorial powers contained in Article 48 of the Constitution, for purposes by far exceeding the powers granted by this article (e.g., for measures regarding currency stabilization, for the abolishment of the 8-Hour-Day, for the introduction of compulsory arbitration of labor disputes). So strong has the government become that Hitler’s Munich Putsch (November 9, 1923) is easily defeated. Having done their duty, the Social Democratic ministers are sent home. A pure bourgeois Cabinet is instituted. Neither the government nor the victims of inflation try to change the profound consequences in the distribution of economic power and wealth resulting from the expropriation of the middle class.

Problems:

1. Did the federative structure of the Reich play any role in the rise of German counter-revolution? Did it facilitate or hinder it?

2. How has the failure of the Bierkeller-Putsch influence the future policy and ideology of the National Socialist Party?

3. How does the impoverishment of the middle classes and the workers affect the economic structure as a whole?

1924/28: Stabilizing the new social structure.

The new cabinet, where big business finally shares the responsibility of government, appears to the Western democracies as a worthy partner. The Dawes Plan is the result. Yet, Stresemann’s policy of reparation fulfillment needs the consent of the Social Democratic opposition. It is easily attained. The Social Democracy does not prevent the enactment of the new tariff policy which will enhance the economic and political power of the big landowners. Socialism has ceased to play a decisive political role.

Loans flow into Germany. Industry is reorganized. It is standardized, mechanized, and rationalized. It attains the highest technical efficiency and the highest productive capacity of all European industrial systems while, at the same time, the process of cartelization and trustification rapidly progresses. The death of President Ebert brings Hindenburg, the nominee of the agrarians, the industrial monopolies, and the monarchist middle-class leaders, into the presidency.

Meanwhile, Germany again appears to be a normal country. Prosperity reigns. Social legislation is continually improved (establishment of Labor Law Courts, Unemployment Insurance, protection against dismissal of old employees, and so on). At the same time, the trade union machinery and the state machinery become more and more intertwined. The Social Democratic Party wins back the confidence of its adherents. The election of May 20th, 1928, brings it huge success. Again there is a chance.

1928/30: The policy of the lesser evil.

Will to power is not the result of the Social Democratic victory. A Socialist led Cabinet is formed to carry out Stresemann’s foreign policy (Locarne, League of Nations, French-German understanding), but it compromises Stresemann’s People’s Party, increasingly dominated by industrial monopoly interests.

The start of the Mueller Cabinet is ominous. While the Social Democratic Party went into the elections against the building of the battle cruiserA, one of the first deeds of the Cabinet was its decision to continue the naval building program. The socialist masses sharply resent the betrayal of the traditional anti-naval policy of pre-war Socialism.

The final blow against the Cabinet is caused by the socialist trade unions, in 1930, at the onset of the economic depression. At this stage trade unions are not willing to make concessions to the bourgeois partners of the Cabinet on the question of the unemployment insurance contributions. Mueller has to resign. Breuning is appointed. His emergency legislation, issued under Article 48, is rejected by the Social Democrats. The President dissolves the Reichstag.

New elections are held on September the 14th, 1930, and 107 National Socialist Deputies, corresponding to more than 6 million votes, are returned. The Social Democratic Party is frightened and will now yield to Beuning’s deflationist policy in order to “prevent the worst.”

Problems:

1. Why has the middle-way of the Social Democrats with their program of an economic democracy, in short, the New Deal, failed?

2. Is the politicization of the trade unions and their close interrelationship with the state a sound development?

3. Have state interventionism and social reform facilitated the rise of authoritarianism?

4. Why have the middle classes, although their existence was primarily threatened by the trustification of industry, opted for reaction and not for progress?

1930/32: End of parliamentary government.

As early as 1929, at the occasion of the fight against the Young Plan, had the agrarian-industrial reaction joined forces with the National Socialists. With the exception of parts of his own (“Center”) party and the insignificant Democratic Party, Breuning’s political strength depends entirely upon the “toleration” by the Social Democrats. Yet, neither they nor the “Center” are able to determine the policy of the Cabinet. It is the agrarian-industrial reaction and Breuning’s hope to tame the National Socialists by bringing them into his Cabinet that solely guide him. The result is a rigid deflationist policy in order to counter the ever-deepening depression and the strengthening of the presidential power through the application of Article 48. Parliamentary government has ceased to function. Breuning’s overthrow is due to the growth of the reaction whose claims are increasing every day, whereas the Social Democrats and the trade unions merely occupy defensive positions and the Communists concentrate their attacks on the “social fascism” of the Social Democrats.

Problems:

1. Is it compatible with the principles of a liberal democracy to suspend the fundamental liberties in order to fight against anti-democratic forces?

2. Is the concentration of political power in the hands of the executive and the suspension of parliamentary institutions an adequate means of fighting reaction?

3. Why have the democratic political parties in Germany not perceived that anti-democratic mass movement cannot be fought merely by parliamentary means?

1932: the first coup d’etat.

In logical pursuance of their toleration policy, the Social Democrats decide to vote for Hindenburg against Hitler as President of the Reich. Hindenburg is reelected primarily through the efforts of Breuning whom he soon throws out and replaces by von Papen. Papen receives the power to depose by federal action the Prussian Coalition Cabinet led by the Social Democrat Otto Braun. On June 20th, 1932, the “coup d’etat” starts. Neither the Social Democrats not the trade unions nor the Communist Party offer the slightest resistance. Without a shot, without a strike, the Social Democracy abandons its most powerful positions: the Prussian Administration. It restricts to merely parliamentary means its opposition to the Papen Cabinet. It even adds ridicule to its inability – the deposed Prussian Cabinet sues von Papen before the Reich Constitutional Court. Yet, in taming the National Socialists, neither von Papen nor his successor, General von Schleicher, will succeed. Combined intrigues of the East-Elbian agrarians and of the heavy industries (Thyssen) induce Hindenburg to appoint Hitler Chancellor, in succession of von Schleicher, on January 30, 1933. No violation of formal “legality,” awfully respected by the Republicans, occurs. Therefore, Hitler meets with no resistance at all.

Problems:

1. How is the legalistic fanaticism of the Social Democrats to be explained which, in contrast to the National Socialist legality, was not merely a ruse but honestly believed?

2. Why has the Communist Party again failed to take the initiative in the fight of the workers against the Prussian coup d’etat?

3. Why has heavy industry (Coal, Iron, Steel), in contrast to the light industries, actively supported the National Socialist movement in Germany, as in Italy before?

1933: the second coup d’etat.

The first month of Hitler shows a more or less normal reactionary regime, still clothed in the veil of legality. Hitler seems to have been, at last, tamed by the majority of “old guard” Nationalists in his Cabinet. But the fear that the coming Reichstag elections of March 5, 1933, might not bring the National Socialists the desired majority, and the brake which his coalition partners apply to his attempts to physically exterminate the opposition, lead the National Socialists to the famous Reichstag fire. They thus create a legal pretext to imprison all Communist leaders and prohibit the whole Communist and Social Democratic press. The elections are held but the terror reigns. That is Hitler’s coup d’etat. 51.8% of the frightened electorate approve of the new government. The coup d’etat has ensured the legal continuation of the terror regime, but has not brought about its own majority for the National Socialist Party. The Workers’ Council Elections held shortly afterwards show again that Hitler has not got the majority and, especially, that the inroads which the National Socialist movement has made into the working classes are negligible. Still no resistance arises.

[1933:] Labor’s capitulation.

Immediately after Hitler’s appointment the socialist trade unions began secret negotiations with the National Socialist organizations. They openly divorced themselves from their long association with the Social Democratic Party, they declared their political neutrality and they even acclaimed the legislative designation of May-Day as a national holiday to be the fulfillment of trade union wishes. Their negotiations were of no avail. On May 2nd, 1933, Brownshirts occupied the trade union buildings, arrested the leaders, and appointed National Socialist commissars. That period of conquest was soon followed by the complete destruction of all labor organizations and their replacement by the German Labor Front.

The Communist Party had already been banned before the elections. The Social Democratic Party was dissolved on June 22, 1933. On July 14, 1933, a statute against the formation of political parties was enacted. The familiar process of the coordination of the whole political and social life of all autonomous organizations, whatever character they may have and whatever aims they may pursue, was in full swing.

It is not necessary to trace the further development of National Socialism at this time. That will be done in the subsections dealing with Mass Domination, the New Ideology, and the New Imperialism.

Problems:

1. How is the futile expectation of the socialist trade unions in Germany (as previously in Italy) to be explained?

2. Why has German National Socialism, in contrast to Italian Fascism, completely dissolved the syndicalist structure?

3. That leads to the question of the sociological principles underlying the National Socialist policy of coordinating every social organization. We have to analyze the principles of atomization and differentiation.

[1934:] Democratic abdication.

After the purge of June 30, 1934, in which the last remnants of inner National-Socialist and conservative opposition were bloodily exterminated, the German people is no longer capable of influencing the direction of National Socialist policy. The regime is total. The opposition is exiled, imprisoned, terrorized, dead, or has changed camps. National Socialism can only be opposed by the surrounding world. From now on, the growth of National Socialism is primarily due to the foreign policy of the Western Democracies. No comment is needed at this time. The analysis of the foreign policy will be undertaken in conjunction with the investigation of the New Imperialism.

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Section One: Synthesis.

I. The Heritage of the Past.

It is much too superficial to label the phenomena of recent German history as characteristic products of the “German national character” or of the “Germanic race.” The heritage of the past undoubtedly has a certain weight in the present. This section will isolate National Socialism’s specific German traits which are rooted in the German socio-political structure. This isolation will enable us to find out to what extent National Socialism is merely a particular German phenomenon and to what extent a more universal trend. This heritage is complex, however. Its origin in the particular characteristics of the German political system cannot be grasped unless the complex “whole” is dissected into its historic components.

The historical residues that are still effective form several strata which overlay and interpenetrate each other. In a rough system of classification, we may distinguish the heritage of feudalism, of the mercantile, cameralist Prussian military state and of the imperial epoch.

Prussian tradition stretches into the present as the dual heritage of feudalism and the cameralistic state, transformed by the specific requirements of the period of capitalist growth. The originally feudal latifundia were transformed into capitalist grain factories because of the emancipation of the peasants in the first half of the nineteenth century. The large landowners, traditionally members of the socially and politically ruling stratum, merged with big industrialists to form an economic aggregate, which will be discussed in section II. The bureaucratization of the entire social organism during the early capitalist period became one of those basic structures from the past which the Weimar Republic was not capable of changing.

The bureaucratization of society and the ruling position of the large landowners are in turn components of an historical process which transformed the heritage of the middle classes. Progressive liberalism was defeated three times in a few decades: after the wars of liberation (1812-1815), during the revolution of 1848, and during the constitutional conflict with Bismarck (1861-1865).

The complete lack of a genuine liberal tradition was one of the decisive features characterizing the frustration of the Weimar Republic. In contrast to the Western European nations, the development of the modern German state took place in an economically backward country, which, for its growth, could not depend upon its strength in international competition. The Fascist slogan of the proletarian nation has a deep-rooted historical foundation. Germany had to look for other than economic means to win a place in the world market, means which, from the standpoint of the highly organized Western European countries, appeared terrifying and destructive. Since the German Reformation time and again there has arisen the cry for a movement “from below,” the appeal to the oppressed instincts of the masses, the demand that the people itself take the rights which other nations already possess. For more than four centuries, liberation and prosperity were associated in the consciousness of the Germans with violent and destructive action, with hatred of the “foreigner,” with expansion by war. German philosophy, literature, and theology are tinged with a militant chauvinism, with the glorification of irrationalism, and of the primeval entity of the Folk and its creative power. The fate of the Weimar Republic was determined by the fact that at the opposite pole of the society, within the labor movement, a reverse tendency had taken place. It is as if the forces of “law and order,” of peaceful legal stabilization and consolidation were diverted to those social groups which seemed destined to overthrow the social system. Since the turn of the century, large strata of the working population were slowly but systematically reconciled to the existing state. The Social Democratic Party was transformed from a revolutionary into a bureaucratic organization, and its economic, legal, and political apparatus became the guarantor of the functioning of the whole.

The bureaucratization of the Social Democratic Party gave birth to tendencies which prepared the workers for the reality of National Socialism. Eduard Bernstein’s famous statement that the movement is everything, the goal nothing, did not anticipate National Socialist slogans merely by accident. The goal of the establishment of a new society was abandoned because the movement was no longer directed against the existing society. The laws of the capitalist process were regarded as inevitably promoting socialism, and every step in the development of capitalism was interpreted as a step towards its transformation. A powerful organization was built up, and it complied in toto with those mechanisms and became increasingly detached from all aims transcending the existing order. Moreover, the abolition of this order became thought of as a “catastrophe,” as something that would frustrate the aim rather than fulfill it. The bulk of the members became the obedient tool of those who led and handled the apparatus, and the latter handled it so that the members might benefit from the given system.

The development gave large groups of people the idea that the complete rule of the social democratic apparatus was identical with the triumph of socialism, and that it could be achieved without a change in the fundamental labor and property relations. Accordingly, the impetus of the movement was no longer directed against these relations but against certain groups and conditions which most obviously hinder the functioning of the apparatus. The more this apparatus was officially recognized and incorporated into the legal and political system, the more it cooperated with, and later represented, the state itself, the more the members felt themselves to be parts of a whole which must be maintained and defended. Its enemy became their enemy as in 1914. The coordinated bureaucracy was suspicious of “destructive elements”; hatred of intellectuals was widespread. The revolutionary tendencies became an opposition within the “official” labor movement and remained its foe until the ascent of National Socialism.

The Social Democratic attitude received characteristic expression in the cultural activities of the party. They destroyed the original tendencies of Marxism and completed the reconciliation of the masses. The traditional culture must be saved and taken over by the masses. This meant ridding it of all those contents which transcend their horizon and do not appeal to them. The resulting Massenkultur merely adorned the life of the masses with some leftovers from a “better world.” Cultural education became part of the process of coordination.

One of the most spectacular features of cultural coordination was the reception of Marx by large Social Democratic strata. Marx became part and parcel of that same culture which his entire work repudiated. He was heralded as a great German, as a hero of science who discovered the basic laws of the social reality as Newton did of the physical reality. The revolution was dissolved into sociology and its theoretician was admitted into the ranks of the dead classics.

The ideological structures of nearly every section of the population were influenced by the bureaucracy and the army. The attitude of the civil servant was a composite of belief in incorruptibility, authority, monarchic tradition, and his personal living conditions. He considered himself superior to “the ordinary man” and his state, with the “best administration in the world,” far superior to its subjects and to the outside world. One result was a formalized concept of legality; it was directed towards the offices, the form, and red tape. The civil servant was not only free from parliamentary and other forms of public control and criticism, he was not merely respected as the incarnation of an education which grants social status. His permanent tenure made him a veritable rocher de bronze within the social whole. All this also applies to the army officer with slight differences. For him the concept of legality was replaced by that of subordination and the attributes of education by those of the uniform.

The underprivileged classes were socially and ideologically affected by the above two groups. The Prussian monarchist tradition popularized by the evangelical clergy—itself little more than a branch of the civil service—endowed the state with the halo of order and justice. This was the source of the Rechtsstaat-theory which dominated the average man’s political conceptions. He had a deep respect for order and official position and was inclined to regard the bureaucratic system as the ideal type of social technique. The national-socialist coup d’etat was not felt as such precisely because it was cloaked in law and order. The traditional Christian horror of terrorism was to be a hindrance, but it was neutralized by the no less strong, though more recent and more militant, tradition of the imperial power-state.

The citizen who built the Republic but did not defend it in the end passed through the two schools of the militaristic tradition. His formal training was received from educational civil servants most of whom were also reserve officers. Then, because of universal conscription, he was trained by the sergeant, his military educator. In both stages he learned that discipline was the highest value, that individual action is harmful, and that the distinction between jurisdictions of the various offices is extremely important and must be obeyed. He respected the higher rank, the tradition, the form, and the uniform. Legality, numbers, and education were the decisive historical factors. Knowledge, majority, and discipline become axioms. The depreciation of educational values during the crisis served only to enthrone the other two. They have the appearance of legality and paved the way for the subjection of the masses.

II. Friends and Enemies of the Republic.

The social system of the Weimar Republic, as it developed out of the military defeat of 1918 and the breakdown of the Imperial structure, was in every way a product of compromise, based primarily on the fact that only the reformist labor movement actively supported the Republic. But even they, because they never abandoned their Socialist program, considered the Republic a temporary resting place and not their own home. The view of a “state that also belongs to us,” which one can at least use as an instrument for the realization of more far-reaching aims and which one must therefore defend with every means, collapsed as the state proved unable to satisfy the daily needs of labor. This ambivalent attitude of the working classes can be explained by the constellation of historical forces at the end of the war and by the early history, organizational principles and ideological development of the German labor movement.

The compromise character of the new political system meant for the Socialists the renunciation of socialism in the economic sphere and the strengthening of state intervention in a semi-monopolistic system. In the social sphere it meant rapid incorporation of the trade unions into the state apparatus. Politically it prevented full democratization of the governmental institutions. Finally, it meant limitations upon direct self-government, set by compromises between the socially decisive extra-parliamentary powers.

Labor never ruled the Republic. Although the working class received political equality, it remained largely theoretical because the administrative monopoly of bureaucracy, in which they were hardly represented, was retained and the judicial monopoly of irremovable judges was actually strengthened. The causes are to be found in the fact that the democratic and socialist forces hardly penetrated the schools, that the army was reluctant to accept public control and to have its position taken over by democratic elements, and that the labor movement entered a phase which destroyed its political nature and eventually paralyzed its will to power, never too strong at any time.

In a period in which the technological basis of capitalism created differentiations within the working classes and the exercise of economic power by the workers could be achieved only by the occupation of certain key positions, the various branches of the labor movement were still operating with conceptions developed in the period from 1880 to 1910. The “organization”, considered their decisive weapon, was no longer the expression of a living movement. It had become institutionalized. The socialist idea, the quasi-religious devotion, and the active solidarity were replaced by specific devices for mass domination, petty considerations and passive discipline. Moreover, the labor movement was split and thus lost its claim to exclusive leadership of the masses. Conservative and immovable in its structure, the labor movement was incapable of lending the workers to a radical, active, creative participation in the state.

At the very moment when millions were doomed to permanent unemployment, the economic structure of the working class was decimated. Entire industrial regions died. Many despaired of ever finding productive work again. Older workers and white collar workers had to turn to public relief. Hundreds of thousands of youths could not obtain apprenticeships or other occupations. After leaving school they became declasses. It is here that there developed the hatred against the “system,” against bad parliamentarianism, against the rule of a party which protected the existence of the bureaucracy while denying bread and work to its rank and file. Anti-capitalist sentiments turned into a revolt against those who have a place in society, against those who appear to be profiteers of the “system,” the “bosses,” the old men, the Jews, the “November criminals,” etc.

This attitude of despair, the identification of the Republic itself with the prevailing misery, the degradation by the dole, the depression was linked with views which came to have an increasing hold over the middle classes. Instead of the middle classes being one over to the new democratic regime, which was alien to their cultural and social tradition, their hostility to democracy spread to broad sections of the presumptive adherents of the Republic. The middle classes were not a priori enemies of the Republic. Many had been mildly liberal during the Empire, and the political Catholics accepted a democratic and reformist course in the early years of the Republic. However, the indecision and the timidity of the new leadership soon drove them into the ranks of the conservative right. The inflation, a powerful lever of concentration of capital in the hands of the industrial barons and the large landowners, destroyed the economic and social basis of that section of the middle class which derived its income from interest, rent, and pensions. They were ruined and in many cases their sons were excluded from a socially acceptable career (the civil service and the free professions). During this period moderate republican selfish economic interests (Wirtschaftspartei, Houseowner’s Party, Revaluation Party, etc.) which were equally unable to save them. In the ensuing period of stabilization (1924-30) the process of trustification directly affected more and more independent workers in commerce, handicrafts, and industry. They lost their independence and their hope of rising in the social scale. The great depression ruined them completely. The Republic together with its defenders and exponents become their enemy. They became the reserve forces of a mass movement which rejected both capitalism and socialism, Empire and Republic.

There is a parallel growth between this trend and the inability of the Republic to harmonize the fundamental social antagonisms. When it was no longer possible to settle these antagonisms peacefully, big business turned to dictatorship as a solution. The National Socialist mass movement was available as a tool with which to destroy the Republic. Although we now definitely know the decisive part played by heavy industry and the large landowners in the Nazi seizure for power, we must not rashly assume that these forces stood by the National Socialist movement through thick and thin during the Weimar Republic. From the very beginning the large landowners and the leaders of the old army and bureaucracy were definitely hostile to the Republic because of their monarchic tradition. The capitalists, especially the leaders of heavy industry, were for a time willing to tolerate the Republic provided that their position remained unaffected. Only sheer helplessness on the part of the state, especially during the period of inflation, made the increased power of big business possible. The restoration of the old tariff union between agrarians and heavy industry cemented the coalition between the most embittered foes of the Republic. This development alone permitted the partly bankrupt heavy industry to gain the powerful position, which, during the great depression, became incompatible with democratic forms of harmonizing antagonisms. Their attack on the Republic was facilitated by the failure to create a democratic army.

The policies of the other European powers contributed greatly to the weakening of the democratic forces in Germany. A peaceful policy of mutual understanding became impossible, seriously weakening the respect of the German people for their government. At the same time the failure of German foreign policy forced German capitalism to expand in a direction which required the abolition of the Republic and total militarization of the people. In the program of full rearmament and in the ideology of the imperial “Grossraum” the ruling groups and the National Socialist mass movement found still another common ground.

III. Cultural Crisis.

Imperial Germany.

The accelerated imperialist development of the years immediately before the first world war undermined the values still valid during the epoch. The ecclesiastical, militaristic and bureaucratic ties of the Bismarck Reich began to weaken. Religious authority receded behind secular and political authority; the remaining progressive impulses of the middle classes were directed against “clericalism,” no longer in the name of freedom but for the sake of the unlimited national state. The authority of the family was attacked from two sides. From below by the revolt of “youth” seeking to go “beyond” musty family life, from above by the state whose head declared it to be a soldier’s duty to shoot his father and mother if so ordered.

The traditional philosophical systems which both maintain and formalize the primacy of reason (neo-Kantianism for example) were shaken by Nietzsche’s attack on all the prevailing categories. Nietzsche’s formulation of his attack in “psychological” and metaphysical instead of social categories, however, left many loopholes which actually worked to the advantage of the imperialist expansion he hated so bitterly. A series of links developed between Nietzsche and power ideology, the out-of-date irrationalist youth movement, and uncritical irrationalism. In the main, academic philosophy has taken only the reactionary elements of Nietzsche’s philosophy, especially his ambiguous concept of “life.”

Nietzsche’s criticism of obsolete values also influences the political and social sciences. Simmel, e.g., attached himself directly to Nietzsche, whose criticism he rapidly transformed into a universal relativism in the name of a “culture” in whose temple there is room for all contradictions (Troeltsch’s “cultural synthesis”). Sociology sought to escape evaluation and thereby lost its connection with the basic social forces. The idea of the Rechtsstaat, the product of the formalistic conception of law, was shattered by the revival of the ideology of the Power State.

In literature, the desideratum of aesthetic harmony vanished together with the idea of a harmonious and stable world. This is especially true of expressionism. Expressionistic discord crystallized the increasing chaos of man’s existence.

All these ideological changes were reflected in the labor movement. On the one hand, the revisionist sections attacked traditional Marxism in favor of a gradual improvement of the lot of the working class during the period of capitalist expansion. Reformism, on the other hand, was opposed by the doctrine of direct mass action.

Reverberations extended even into ordinary family life and traditions and disturbed the internal consistency of the lower middle class world, especially during the World War when the security of private life had to give way to the political and strategic needs of the state. All this experience entered into the consciousness of the masses and was of fundamental importance for both the reality and the ideology of the following period. The “betrayal of tradition” by the ruling powers at the end of the world war removed all “support from above” from the abandoned masses. They found themselves unprotected against the forces which they neither controlled nor understood. The fictitious community of the “front line” soldiers disintegrated as existing authority decayed. The road back could not be traversed without friction. The deterioration of the old front line soldier and his inability to readapt himself became primary conditions of the “chaos” of the inflation period and above all of the formation of the “free-corps” mentality which was eventually adapted by Fascism.

Weimar Republic.

The discrepancy between the socio-economic basis and the political forms increased the feeling of insecurity, of dissociation, of the provisional in every sphere of life. This feeling was so strong that it persisted during the brief period of stabilization (for many people it was a period of crisis anyway). The final destruction of security during the great depression therefore found a society which, to quote a famous play of the crisis years, “no longer possesses anything to which one can cling.”

The dissociative tendencies revealed themselves in every sphere of the intellectual production. Neo-Kantian (already relativistically colored) Rechtsstaat theories like that of Kelsen were giving way to power state theories (Erich Kaufmann), the last remnants of the legal norm (Stammler) to pluralism (Radbruch) and finally to decisionism (Carl Schmitt).

In Philosophy, side by side with the revival of a positivism aiming at the reproduction and formalization of the simply factual, the road led towards the “unmediated” intuition of essence which, in tendency, replaces critical thought by passive acceptance and sovereign intuition and which, in the writings of Heidegger and Scheler, provided a useful instrument for the newly rising “elites.” The philosophy of wholeness (O. Spann), vitalism (Bergson), and the art theory of Stefan George attacked individual elements of rationalism and disintegrated it.

In Literature, esoteric expressionism, never widely received, was slowly transformed, especially during the period of stabilization, into a new functionalism following the trend of architecture (Neue Sachlichkeit).

Without questioning the structure of society itself, this functionalism derived from machine techniques paid homage to the ideal of a non-ornamental practical usefulness in specific spheres of life. This mechanistic inhumanity and pseudo-collectivistic forms prevailed in literature no less than in music, architecture and in the new media, the film and radio. The conditions of art production in the period of mass production increased the trend towards mechanization and standardization. Though meant to conceal the growing atomization of society, it actually accentuated the process all the more strongly by depicting a community of people who obeyed without resisting.

The cultural crisis became one of daily life. Before the war, culture had seized hold of the masses, though partly in perverted slogans like “Knowledge is Power.” Now knowledge and education were frankly held in contempt as the swindle which they had actually become for many of the uprooted. Contempt for ideal factors as such, fear and increasing universal hostility drove them towards the irrational forces of the coming authoritarian order.

The authority of the family becomes a thing of the past. The unemployment of the father destroyed its economic basis at the same time that the older generation appeared to be the monopolistic owner of positions, jobs, and offices. The sexual freedom by the loss of authority was nothing but a fiction; unaccompanied by happiness it led to contempt for the sexual partner. Witness the resentment of the unemployed against the employment of women. This promiscuity bore within itself the seeds of moral reaction.

The general hostility to intellect deprived leading institutions of their ability to integrate, long after that of the church had begun to disappear. The school system of the Republic lacked consistent motivation and constructive ideas, feeding mainly upon its nationalist tradition. It wavered between traditionalism, reformism, and partial attempts towards freedom which were usually tinged with irrationalism.

National Socialism.

The door was open for the totalitarian monopolistic organization of government. The psychological need for a totalitarian organization of society existed earlier than the power which created it. Its ideological messengers were substitute religions, sects, homeopathic groups, schools of wisdom, theosophic clubs and the like. They all felt the need for adopting one substitute for religion which was to become the true one—one sect as the “order,” one health ritual, that of the “pure race.” All hatred was concentrated on one enemy,—the “system”, the Jews. The new community, which is both inclusive and very exclusive, maintains the thesis of selectness and of a pseudo-messianic mission of the community.

The uprooted individual sought and found a support which permits him not only to dispense with his own initiative and decision but also to regard his resignation as something good and valuable. Once this new authority is established, one is again permitted to believe, to confide in it, to extinguish oneself in it. The victims of the prevailing structure of society who oppose it, are finally “seized” by the “transformation” and arrive at an “attitude” which makes them the followers of the very forces whose victims they are. These followers constitute the forerunners of the new order.

When Fascism took power, the type of man it needed in order to rule and to maintain itself was already in existence. This fact helps to explain its persistent political success. The notion of freedom, never materially realized in the Weimar Republic, lost its appeal during the economic and cultural crisis. The longing for freedom gradually gave way to the desire for security and hence to a general atmosphere of submission to any power strong enough to guarantee security. The promise of full employment became decisive. The individual’s psychology was caught by this pervasive atmosphere, especially in the actual or potential unemployed and the declining middle class. Man is ready to “fit into” any situation that seems promising. Both his lack of resistance and his versatility make him the ideal subject for organization from above. The man with a “knack” for every type of technical function but with a complete lack of personal responsibility and spontaneity becomes the man of the hour. He represents a rapidly advancing depersonalization of man. He becomes an agglomeration of disconnected “behaviors,” varying with changing situations and easy to be governed, rather than a unity centered around a persistent ego of autonomous will and thought. The links within personality itself are weakened to no less a degree than those which bind the old order. The new type is no longer decisively bound up with the father image. The organization of his personality by paternal authority ceases to exist as the family itself decays. This does not mean, however, that he becomes psychologically “free.” He substitutes for the father image an image of his own collective ego, the “Führer” is a projection of himself. This leads to an entirely new mentality, submissive yet rebellious, which demands that the agencies it obeys be really powerful, ruthless and imposing, as against the obvious weakness of the “system.” It may best be characterized as a collective egoism that makes possible any sacrifice without altering the individual’s fundamentally egotistic, competitive mentality. The more he must deny himself happiness, the greater the gratification he obtains from a masochistic identification with power. Tremendous chained energies are set free, or rather, are transformed by entirely new social agencies of an entirely new socio-psychological structure. It is these energies and this “integration” that largely account for the Fascist mentality.

IV. The New Ideology.

The ideology of National Socialism is more than an ideology in the traditional sense of the word. It is a powerful weapon for the destruction of democracy. In a democratic society the competing ideologies lack two elements: a totalitarian character and a fusion with a terroristic apparatus. National Socialist ideology is, of course, merely a veil for the attainment of power and aggrandizement at home and abroad. It is essentially nihilistic. As it cynically admits, it does not recognize any ultimate truth. To stress merely this negation of Western tradition, however, will not explain the really terrifying aspect of National Socialist ideology.

Pseudo-Marxist elements.

Its criticism and negation of traditional Western values are derived from Marxism. Why then did the socialist critique ultimately prove inefficient and the National Socialist victorious? The answer lies in the failure of the policies of the Social Democratic and Communist parties. After their inglorious downfall, the denunciation of Western democratic systems remained an integral part of the German worker’s mental structure but the truth of the Marxist theory seemed no longer acceptable. Many workers were ready to swim with the new stream, National Socialism promised them all that Marxism did, and still more. It claimed to show them a way of attaining their goal by going along with all that was powerful in the world and not by fighting against it. The popular appeal of National Socialist ideology thus rested largely on the fact that it used the Marxist critique of the prevailing system in support of a movement which preserved the foundations of that system. The ideology thus promises fulfillment without requiring the masses to sacrifice impulses and desires which bound them to the existing way of life. It promised and achieved the release of desires for revenge, envy, cruelty, property, etc. The reward was to be obtained not through the struggle against the ruling powers, but by going along with them, by sharing in their power and glory, in short, by becoming part and parcel of a powerful German people.

The preparation for National Socialism within the republican ideology.

In the last years of the Weimar Republic, National Socialism assumed the appearance of an instrument for the improvement, and even for the salvation, of democracy. It declared that the democratic system could be preserved in the face of aggravated internal conflicts and crises, only by increasing the power of the executive at the expense of parliament (Tat-Kreis, Carl Schmitt’s first phase, Otto Keollreuter). National Socialism was then distinctly legalistic. Hitler’s Mein Kampf was hardly taken seriously. The National Socialist party had come to the conclusion that putschist tactics against the army and the bureaucracy were of no avail at that time. The legalistic and pseudo-democratic ideology served the cause of National Socialism because the executive power (President Hindenburg) furnished nearly all the guarantees necessary for the support of the movement.

The doctrine of the totalitarian state.

After the seizure of power, political theorists adopted the concept of the totalitarian state (Carl Schmitt, Ernst Rudolf Huber, Ernst Forsthoff). This concept encountered violent opposition from the party ideologists (Alfred Rosenberg and Hitler) who rejected it as non-Germanic and entirely Romanistic. The totalitarian doctrine which emphasized the supremacy of the state threatened to establish the ideological supremacy of the traditional forces (army, bureaucracy, judiciary) over the Party. Whereas the elevation of the state to the highest value by Italian Fascism was determined by the inefficiency of the pre-fascist and early-fascist state machinery, the depreciation of the state in National Socialist ideology was in part due to the threat of superiority from a highly efficient bureaucratic and military machine. Moreover, and perhaps still more decisive, is the fact that in the German tradition the very concept “state” is incompatible with arbitrary rule.

In the philosophy of German idealism, the state represents the common interests of the people. However much this concept may have been misused for the furtherance of egoistic group interests, the universality of the state’s protection could never be eliminated. For National Socialism to have accepted the supremacy of the state would thus have meant not merely its ideological subjection to the forces of tradition but also the acceptance of the traditional values which are usually associated with the state as the guardian of universal interests.

The outcome of the discussion was the doctrine of the supremacy of the Party over the state. The latter was considered to be merely the mechanistic side of the life of the people, something static. The people were regarded as the unpolitical element living in the shadow of the political decisions which emanate solely from the movement (the Party), which, in turn, was represented by the Leader alone.³⁴

V. New Methods of Mass Domination.

Any stable system of mass domination in an antagonistic society maintains itself by combining integration and subjection. The latter has to rely upon threats and the ultimate use of coercion (up to the terror). Coercion alone, however, cannot preserve social stability. Integration flows from voluntary consent based upon a prevalent set of values (“ideology”, “view of life”) and the satisfaction of interests. The ideology is established and maintained by an “elite” or groups of “elites”, vested with various degrees of authority. Satisfaction of interests may be reached by material means (Realbefriedigung) or by elements leading to spiritual satisfaction (e.g., social esteem; “Phantasiebefreidigung”). This well-known simple schema will allow us to differentiate between the new system of mass domination and the methods used in Imperial Germany and the Weimar Republic.³⁵

VI. The New Imperialism.

The fundamental difference between the pre-World-War German Imperialism and the New Imperialism of the Nazi regime may be characterized by quotations from two patriotic songs. The “Deutschland über alles” of Imperial Germany was an echo of liberal dreams for a united free Germany living as a respected equal among powerful nations. It could become the national anthem of the Weimar Republic. One of the most popular Nazi songs says: “today Germany belongs to us, tomorrow the whole world.” In principle, the old Imperialism would have been satisfied after having attained its goals. The New Imperialism is insatiable by inherent causes and will not stop short at world domination. In principle, agreements under the Kaiserreich would have been possible. The outbreak of the first world war was not inevitable. A compromise between the interests of English, French and German big business and the Russian autocracy was in the realm of possibilities. Only the inadequateness of government in the main countries, historically explainable as it is, prevented the accomplishment of a peaceful reorganization. For a totalitarian state, however, all agreements have “nur vorübergehenden Wert.” Sein Führer “denkt gar nicht daran,” sich “ernstlich zu verständigen”; er hat es “nicht nötig, mit irgendeiner Macht zu teilen.”³⁶

The importance of a critical analysis of these differences is evident. It is one condition of the conditions to escape tragic mistakes which others have committed. It is true that the second world war may be looked upon as a continuation of the first world war and that some of the goals of the New Imperialism are identical with goals of the old one but basically the New Imperialism is characterized by different aims and different means.³⁷

Section Two: Single Studies and Documentation.

A. Economic Structure 1910-1939.

The cross section on the New Imperialism will reveal the driving forces of Germany’s political and economic expansion. It remains to this volume to furnish the evidence for our hypotheses.

Concentration of capital dominates the whole [of] economic life.

The specific form of German industrial concentration is the cartel, an allegedly “democratic” form of concentration in that it coordinates factually and legally independent producers (or dealers) of the same industry (horizontal concentration). This form was, however, a mere veil of the trustification process: the concentration of economic power in a few hands. In the coal, the lignite, the potash, and the steel industries, it was the cartel form which led to the formation of concerns and trusts (vertical concentration), a development [sped] up during the inflation. The process of cartelization and trustification was furthered by the State either directly, in that it participated in the cartels with its industrial undertakings, or indirectly, by tariff legislation and non-intervention of the judiciary into the monopolistic structure. The Cartel Decree of 1932, giving the government wide powers to sue cartels before a special cartel-tribunal, was never utilized.

The economic function of this concentration was self-contradictory. While the industrial combines used their power for rationalization, and while their ever-increasing depreciation reserves made them almost independent from the capital market, they became at the same time organs of capital waste on a large scale. Bad investments, cartelization, domination of the markets and the destruction of competition made the price structure inflexible and created structural unemployment.

Within industry, a clear distinction seems to exist between the heavy and the light industries. The former, overcapitalized and hampered in their expansion, sabotaged the democratic process from the very beginning. The latter, in some sectors still expanding, were more willing to cooperate within the democratic framework.

From 1924 on, the supremacy of bank capital, if it ever really existed, ceases. Industry occupies the leading position in the five big banks. It is noteworthy that at a time when bank capital had ceased to play the decisive role, National Socialism directed its anti-capitalist attack exclusively against money capital. After 1924, foreign loans furnished German banks with new short-term capital which served to satisfy the industries’ tremendous demand for working capital, resulting in a substantial and dangerous amount of frozen assets in the German banks. The industrial system is extraordinarily sensitive to ups and downs, the antagonisms become unbridgeable.

Against all odds, foreign trade had considerably expanded. In 1925, it had already reached more than 2/3rds of the volume of 1913. From 1928 on, Germany could boast of establishing [an] excess of exports over imports. A careful analysis of the trade-balance will reveal that capital export had again begun to play a considerable role.

The position of small business got worse. Only some branches, such as repair shops, where mechanization and individualization must be combined, showed a certain progress.

The significance of trade in the economic system as a whole did not keep pace with the increase in the number of wholesalers and retailers. The function of the wholesale-trade was to a large extent taken over by the distributive apparatus of the cartels and trusts. In the retail-trade the huge number of independent retailers lived on the margin of subsistence, whereas chainstores, department-stores and cooperatives increased their volume. Both wholesalers and retailers were no longer free businessmen, they were bound by the rigid price-structure which the monopolistic industrial organization imposed upon them.

Agriculture did not share the economic improvement during that period. While industrial prices rose, agricultural income fell. The so-called “price-scissors” between agricultural and industrial prices and the high interest rates hindered the rationalization of agriculture. Agricultural subventions and high protective tariffs fostered the development of large-scale grain and potato production and thus stabilized the position of the big estates, on the other hand, they endangered the economic progress of the small-scale agricultural units by increasing the costs of production (fodder) for cattle and dairy products. The policy of inner colonization (re-settlement policy) did but little to turn the latifundias over to cultivation by farmers.

The position of the working class in the changing economic system will be analyzed in the volume “Social Structure.”

Social legislation and reparation payments placed a heavy burden on public finance. Before the World War the income of the Reich was derived from contribution of the states, from custom receipts and fees. Under the Republic, the taxation system was reversed. The Reich appropriated all income taxes and, in turn, financed the states whose taxing power was severely curtailed. When, after the inflation, the total public debt was as low as 5-6 billion marks, the Reich, the states, and the municipalities financed part of the increased public expenses by foreign loans. But already before the depression, Schacht, then President of the Reichsbank, succeeded in curtailing the credit facilities of the cities, being opposed to the extension of the social services, to public ownership of utilities, and to publicly financed construction of residential buildings.

Public ownership considerably expanded. Besides running the postal and telegraph systems and the railroads, the Reich owned coalfields, a large amount of hydro-electric power and nearly the whole of the aluminum industry. States, municipalities and provinces owned the majority of the gas and electricity plants, while public transportation was almost fully in the hands of public authorities. The building industry, financed by cheap public mortgages, experienced an enormous boom.

The collapse of the traditional economic system.

The world economic crisis fell heavily upon the German economic system. The collapse of the credit structure was a technicality which heightened the crisis. Only the most comprehensive governmental intervention with the acquisition of some banks by the Reich saved the banking system from bankruptcy. The unemployment insurance board which, at its inception in 1927 provided for 800,000 unemployed, was confronted by 6 million in December 1932.

The depression places heavy industry in the most precarious position (enormous overhead costs, shortage of working capital). The Bruening Cabinet, although yielding to popular pressure and interfering with the price structure of cartels, nevertheless saved heavy industry by maintaining its monopolistic structure and by acquiring a considerable block of the steel trust shares at above market prices. A ruthless deflationist policy did not succeed in balancing the budget while, at the same time, it worsened the position of the consumption goods industry. The vicious circle could not be cut. In spite of this help, heavy industry was faced in 1932 with the dilemma: either to dissolve the monopolistic combines and let the unprofitable establishments go bankrupt, or to take over control of the Reich.

The agricultural situation became desperate. The Junkers faced bankruptcy and pressed for more subsidies. Peasants revolted.

Towards State-capitalism.

The first stage of the N.S. economy is characterized by its drive for full employment, after a short period during which the regime merely honored its obligations towards heavy industry by strengthening the monopolistic organizations (decrees of July 15th, 1933). The use of the cartel boycott against “unreliable” competitors and compulsory cartelization enlarged the scope and the power of the leading industrial combines.

1) Primarily, full employment was attempted by a system of public works and by enforcing private entrepreneurial activities. Although full employment was attained as early as 1937, industrial expansion did not keep pace with the needs for rearmament. The outcome of the second stage:

2) Preparedness economy, as laid down in the 4-Years-Plan (October 1936), consists in the increasing subordination of the whole economic system under the needs of rearmament and self-sufficiency programs.

3) This, however, required not merely potential power over business but actual control and even participation in its conduct, first haphazardly, whereas later elements of some kind of planning became discernible. The regime enters the road towards state-capitalism.

The first task of the economic policy consisted in transforming the cartel organizations from organs of restricting production into such furthering it. For this purpose, the organs of self-government of industry were transformed into State organizations with full authority over the whole industry. At the same time, a Price Commissar received power to prevent the rise of internal prices to the level of the world market. A price stop decree (Nov 11th, 1936) aims at the prohibition of price rises above the level of October 1936. The new organization of the controlling bodies is extraordinarily complicated. It rests on two pillars. On a functional division (economic groups) and on a local one (Chambers of Industry, commerce, and Handicraft). Theoretically, the [supervisory]³⁸ organization of industry shall determine the business policy of the economic organizations, especially of the cartels. But due to the identity of the leading personnel in the [supervisory] and economic bodies, it is the [cartel] which in fact determines the trend of the [supervisory organization]. The leadership principle, however, is operative in all organizations. The central control of industry now lies with the Reich Ministry of Economics which, in Jan. 1938, was merged with the 4-Years-Plan office. This reorganization enhanced the influence of the military advisers and later led to the establishment of special boards, entrusted with direct planning in several industries. This system is a combination of the various methods previously used to control business policy: the power to regulate and prohibit plant establishment and plant expansion; the authority to direct the flow of investments; the allocation of foreign currencies, of raw-material and even of labor. The result is the complete bureaucratization of foreign trade which becomes one of the major means of imperialist expansion (barter agreements, export of plant equipment, a.s.o.).

The needs for full industrial capacity lead to the active encouragement of trustification with the consequence that the economic position of the small businessman, of handicraft and of retail is completely undermined. the decrees of Feb. 22nd, 1939 (handicraft) and of March 16th, 1939 (retail) give the public authorities the power to compulsorily liquidate one-man shops. At the same time, N.S. has also forgotten its fight against department- and chainstores.

The banks, in spite of the re-privatization of the Dresdner Bank, become in fact merely agents of the Reichsbank, which itself has lost all independence. Banking policy is solely determined by the commands of the regime.

The most fully controlled economic sector is agriculture. The aim of the Reich Food Estate, which brings, in conjunction with the marketing boards, agriculture, and the whole food production and distribution under central control, is the complete self-sufficiency in agricultural products. Cultivation and distribution are centrally organized, prices are stabilized. From 1937 on produce after produce is subject to compulsory sale. The progress of rationalization of agriculture is, however, not satisfactory, partly due to sabotage, partly to the flight from rural regions and the consequent lack of workers. The inner-colonization of the regime is still less important than under the Republic. Re-settlement policy has practically ceased.

Public finance becomes inscrutable. Budgets are no longer published. The cost of the rearmament program and of the war can only be guessed. Outstanding, however, is the extraordinary reduction of foreign debts. By 1939, the Reich already controls 2/3rds of the national income.

We shall lay special stress on the analysis of the limits of the state-capitalistic system. They are not to be found in the money or capital markets, nor in the difficulties of planning, but solely in the raw-material basis and the availability of labor. Its political limitations will be discussed in the cross-section New Imperialism.

B. Social Structure.

This volume is primarily concerned with two problems:

1) The presentation of the Social Structure of the Weimar Democracy, its comparison with similar social systems (American New Deal, French Popular Front Policy, the Scandinavian Middle Way) and the reason for its disintegration.

2) The presentation and analysis of the N.S. social structure and its similarities and dissimilarities with the preceding one.

It is thus directly connected with the volume Economics and supplements the Introductory Survey and the two cross-sections: [Friends and Enemies of the Republic]³⁹ and Mass Domination.

The New Deal of Weimar.

The fundamental principle of the Weimar Social System has already been mentioned: pluralistic collectivism. The social organizations were all-comprehensive. The underlying ideology, justifying the predominance of the organizations over the individual, was borrowed from the traditional democratic doctrine. The member transfers his individual rights to a collective body and receives them back as collective rights. Collectivism in a functioning democracy is a boon for millions, yet contains the germs of authoritarianism: the annihilation of individuality and the reliance upon the action of others.

We shall present the history and the role of the major organizations except the industrial combines.

1) Industry: the industrial pressure groups (Reichsverband der Deutschen Industrie). Organizations for the regulation of the Labor Market (Reichsverband der Deutschen Arbeitgeberverbaende).

2) Agrarian organizations.

3) Middle classes: the retail, wholesale and handicraft organizations; the free professions.

4) Labor organizations: the typology of the Trade Union Movement shall be developed together with their auxiliary organizations.

5) Political organizations: a survey of the party system will be attempted. Special stress will be laid upon an analysis of the social composition of the parties concerned and their distribution over the various parts of Germany.

In the collective organizations, the individual member shares a similar fate as in the State. His being an active part of the organization is mostly fictitious, he becomes an object of the rule of its bureaucracy. The growth of State capitalism furthers the process of private bureaucratization. As counterpart of the trained civil servant an efficient functionary is necessary. But whereas the industrial bureaucracy quickly adapted itself to the needs of twentieth-century State capitalism, the functionaries of the socialist party and the trade unions still live in the 19th century.

The analysis of the process of bureaucratization must, as far as the labor organizations are concerned, lay bare the ideological background. The relative influence of Lassalle, of Marx, of Bakunin and Sorel must be traced. The psychological effect upon the members must be carefully analyzed.

The pluralistic-collectivistic element is apparent in the whole socio-economic structure: in collective bargaining, arbitration boards, Labor Law Courts, social insurance organs, coal- and potash-regulative agencies, the Reich Economic Council. Wherever the State intervenes, its organs are composed of civil servants and an equal number of employers and trade union delegates.

The system operated in a monopolistic economy where concentration of capital, cartelization and trustification rapidly progressed while at the same time parliamentary institutions slowly and steadily decayed. Is there an interconnection between this social system on the one hand and the growth of capital concentration and the decay of parliamentary democracy on the other?

The bureaucratization of the industrial apparatus means a considerable increase in the number of office workers and the sales personnel. It produces the new middle classes which, although economically proletarians, are on the whole hostile to the proletarian ideology.

Rationalization and trustification steadily replace skilled labor by semi-skilled and unskilled ones, especially by women, while at the same time the role of the supervisory employees (engineers and foremen) considerably rises.

The rationalization of German industry after 1924 produces structural unemployment which throws out older workers and employees and prevents the finding of jobs for millions of young workers of school age.

Increasing social protectionism tends to facilitate the process of concentration of capital, the larger enterprises being capable of digesting the burdens of social reform much easier than the small businessman.

Increasing social protectionism deepens the abyss between labor and the small independent middle-class man for whom his dependence upon monopoly capitalism is not visible whereas the, although precarious, security of the worker becomes an object of resentment.

Increasing social protectionism tends to weaken the appeal of the trade union which historically has always based its strength on skilled labor.

The thorough collectivization and the increasing social protectionism transform large sections of the free professions (doctors and lawyers) into factual civil servants. The process of “Verbeamtung” seizes just those strata which, by their very nature, are destined to be free and independent.

The growing social antagonism, especially since 1930, increasingly prevents the understanding between the collective partners. Compulsory arbitration, e.g., tends to replace the free understanding between the social partners. The role of the State bureaucracy grows at the expense of the private organization.

But the State slowly turns into a dictatorship so that the pluralistic system develops and strengthens elements of authoritarianism.

The bureaucratization, above all in the labor organizations, has exercised a fatal effect upon individual initiative while the close intertwining of the State and the labor bureaucracies has fettered the latter which is afraid of losing its position. It has become psychologically corrupted.

On the basis of this material, it will be one of the most promising tasks (already started) to develop the psychological types of the pre-fascist period. We shall be able to utilize questionnaires and other materials collected by the Institute.

The New Society.

The structural principles of the New Society have already been developed in the cross-section Mass Domination. They are the atomization and differentiation of society and its integration by the New Ideology, material benefits, and terror. The following pages should be read in the light of this cross-section.

Every N.S. organization stands under the leadership principle. That means negatively: the members have no right to self-determination. Positively: the leadership principle operates from top to bottom. In the last resort, it is the Party Leader or the Reich Ministry, or both jointly, who determine the policy of every organization. The germs developed in the system of collectivist pluralism are thus carried into the extreme.

From Worker to Follower.

The German Labor Front is so huge (approximately 25 million members) that the individual is completely submerged. It contains everybody employed in the productive processes with the exception of farmers and civil servants. Within the organization no distinctions are made between employers and employees.

The new labor legislation establishes the leadership principle in the factory: the employer is endowed with the charismatic quality of the leader. The institution of the Councils of Confidence, elected by the workers (“followers”), intended to replace the Work’s Councils of the Weimar Democracy. But due to the opposition among the working classes, no elections have been held since 1935. The members are now appointees of the N.S. Party.

The Werkscharem (organizations of mostly young party members within each plant) are organs of terror and persuasion, within each plant. They replace the N.S. Workers’ Cell Organization (NSBO), dissolved because it developed dangerous social-revolutionary tendencies.

Since the beginning of the 4-Year-Plan and still more since the outbreak of the war, workers have been placed under martial law.

The wage policy of the regime tends to differentiate among the various strata and to reverse the trade union policy which had aimed at the leveling of wage differentials. Millions of workers separated from their families are treated as slaves and are sent from one place to another. An elite of highly trained workers receives adequate wages and preferred treatment.

The leisure organization (Strength Through Joy) abolishes the distinction between leisure and freedom. Leisure becomes the means of ensuring control over the workers.

Our major problem will be the analysis of the wage-policy of the regime in connection with the living standard. Although very difficult, due to scant material, it is nevertheless possible.

Capitalists.

The split between ownership and control, inherent in any monopolistic system, is fully developed. The high industrial bureaucracy definitely assumes leadership. The owner is transformed into the “rentier.” An ever smaller section of the high industrial bureaucracy shares power and the material benefits of the regime, while the middle and small businessman becomes a victim of the regime.

The Middle-Classes.

The old middle-classes become the first victims of the system. Due to the need to increase the productivity of the industrial system and thus strengthening the process of concentration of capital, the independent but small retailer, wholesaler and handicraftsman is eliminated as unproductive (“Auskämmung”). This process throws hundreds of thousands of middle-class men into the ranks of labor.

The new middle-classes become mostly identical to the party bureaucracy. The transformation of the N.S. Party from a fighting organization into a body for the distribution of spoils, its inner organization and its legal and constitutional position must be carefully analyzed.

The peasants are bound to the soil by the new law for the creation of hereditary estates. Agriculture, food production and food-distribution are concentrated in the Reich Food Estate, a powerful, all-comprehensive and super-bureaucratic body, ensuring complete control.

The process of the “Verbeamtung” of the free professions progresses rapidly.

The New Bureaucracy.

It is not merely the enormous numerical increase, it is far more the complete merger between State, military, industrial, and Party bureaucracies which characterizes the new development. This composite bureaucracy is the New Elite. The leading positions in industry, in the State, in the powerful social organizations are filled by representatives from these three groups whose interests become more and more identical.

The judge, formerly the guardian of the “Rechtsstaat,” is transformed into a bailiff and policeman who carries out specific orders of the political leadership.

We shall carefully analyze the annihilation of the old middle-classes. Figures are partly available

The composition of the New Elite is of the highest sociological significance. Indices are the composition of the Supervisory Boards of Joint Stock Corporations, of the Economic Groups and of the Chambers of Industry, Commerce and Handicraft.

Women and Family Life.

The reactionary policy of eliminating women from production and distribution has become obsolete due to the heavy demands of the 4-Years-Plan and the War Economy. It is however still operative in the Civil Service and the free professions. The complete atomization of society is clearly reflected in family-life. The family becomes, so to speak, an administrative organ of the New Society. We shall analyze the structural composition of the Youth Organizations while the training of the youth will be dealt with in the volume Culture II.

Among many other tasks we attempt to analyze the “fascist character” as it develops under the impact of the changing social order.

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Victor Brauner. Sans titre (Hindenburg). 1935/36.

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Appendix: Letters on the concept of the Germany-project (1940).

Adorno—Letter to Shotwell: Remembering what Germany Forgot.

[Theodor W. Adorno to James T. Shotwell, 7/30/1940.]⁴⁰

Dr. Horkheimer has had to go on a journey which will probably keep him away from New York for the next two months. He has therefore asked me to thank you for your letter of July,⁴¹ and for your very kind interest. Your comments on our project will be extremely helpful to us.

I should like, in Dr. Horkheimer's name, to take up some of the suggestions you made. I entirely agree with you that the investigations outlined should not give rise merely to one volume of collected studies. If, in our project, we have brought together all the separate studies under one heading, it is only because we wish to emphasize, from the outset, that one of our aims is to elucidate the unity which we presume to exist between such divergent fields. This unity would either have to be expressed in a general introduction, or be implicit in the separate studies. So far as publication is concerned, our ideas are not very definite at present.

We do not pretend that our project will result in an encyclopaedic survey of German history from 1900 to 1933.⁴² In the first place, we are limited by the material available to us, and secondly, we have to take into account the special interests of our members and research associates. But the broad outline of our project has been so drawn up as to allow an enlargement of the scope of the plan while the work is actually being undertaken. The end result might, therefore, be much more comprehensive than the project suggests.

In this connection it may interest you to hear that one of the most outstanding educational experts of the Weimar Republic, Dr. Fritz Karsen, a research associate of our Institute, is at present drafting a project for research into the history of German educational movements from 1900 to 1933. We are also planning a project on architecture and the arts, and one on German universities. But at present we do not wish to overreach the limits of the general plan we have drafted.

As regards your book, What Germany Forgot, we have been particularly impressed by your analysis of German military economy during the first world war. There are undoubtedly strong links between that economy and the Wehrwirtschaft of the Hitler régime. It will be important to show how far the present Wehrwirtschaft is a continuation of the Hindenburg program of the world war, and how far there are essential differences.⁴³ We expect to find such differences especially concerning the private entrepreneur, to whose interests the Hindenburg program made a strong appeal, but who is being increasingly eliminated in the interest of State capitalism. The question of how far war debts are paid by the “future,” whether past war debts in Germany have ever actually been paid, and to what extent the failure to meet these debts was significant in causing the German crisis which led to National Socialism will also play a large part in our discussion. We fully share your view that the role of the Versailles Treaty was very much overstressed in Germany and we should even go further than you do in this matter. We think it doubtful if the Versailles Treaty and the reparation question loomed particularly large in the public consciousness of the German people before the large-scale Hitler campaign was initiated during the financial crisis—that is, after the reparations had already been canceled.

Your suggestion regarding the German military economy is especially appreciated in our Institute, since, as you know, we have already devoted considerable attention to its theory and history.

These are merely my rough ideas. Dr. Horkheimer will be very happy to discuss your suggestions in detail as soon as he returns to New York.

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Adorno—Letter to Merriam: From the studies on State Capitalism to the Germany-project and research on anti-Semitism.

[Adorno to Charles E. Merriam, 7/30/1940.]⁴⁴

My dear Dr. Merriam: Dr. Horkheimer wishes to thank you for your kind letter of July 1st, and for your permission to print your name on our letter heads together with the names of the other members of our Advisory Committee. We consider this a great honor and have gladly made us of your permission. Dr. Horkheimer has had to leave for a journey to the West. He has, therefore, asked me to answer the various questions raised in your letter.⁴⁵

First of all I should like to say a few words about our program. As you may perhaps remember, our Institute is the direct continuation of the Institut für Sozialforschung at Frankfurt University, which was closed by the German government in 1933. The aim of this Institute was to integrate the different branches of social science from the viewpoint of a consistent theory, as derived from the tradition of the European enlightenment on the one hand, and from the social-theoretical aims of classic German philosophy on the other. From our point of view social philosophy is the continuous interplay of theoretical and empirical work. The problems and hypotheses are derived from our theoretical consideration whilst on the other hand the empirical results of our research lead to substantial modifications of our theoretical formulations. This implies a critical attitude towards two directions: first, we attempt to compare the ideological, speculative character of the German socio-philosophical tradition with concrete social reality, and secondly, we criticize mere fact collecting.

Dr. Horkheimer has formulated the underlying principles of this attitude in various studies. One of them is a discussion of logical positivism (“The [latest] attack on metaphysics”); another one is a programmatic study “Traditionelle und Kritische Theorie.” These studies have already been published in German in our periodical. They have also been translated into English and we hope to be able to publish them in the next few years.

The enclosed excerpt from a report on our activities in 1939 will perhaps give you a more concrete idea of our work. But this report needs to be supplemented on a number of essential points. First, European events have made it necessary for us to apply our general viewpoints to the specific problems which derive from the advance of the totalitarian states. This has been done in a series of partly completed, and partly projected studies on state capitalism, and these studies have found their first formulation in a larger study of Dr. Horkheimer,⁴⁶ which is to be published next year. The work of the economists on our staff has been directed at the same field. Within the sphere of the German state capitalism we are especially concerned with the military economy, and have been studying it tor some time.

In connection with the European situation we have made detailed outlines of several research projects. We hope to be able to undertake these within the next two years.

One of these projects is concerned with the fact that the most essential progressive tendencies of German culture since 1900 have been suppressed by National Socialism.⁴⁷ The task of this project would be to “save,” through documentation and theoretical interpretation, what we consider fertile in this period. On the other hand we also aim at exploring the social bases of the Germany of the 20th century which made the Hitler régime possible. The project is not intended to result in an encyclopaedia, but has much more the object of throwing light on the tendencies in the specific sections of German culture. The general social bases are dealt with in sections on the German economy, German political history and the German labor movement of the period. They are then applied in research into German philosophy, German literature and German music of the same period. Further sections have also been planned.

The second project is concerned with the problem of Anti-Semitism,⁴⁸ especially with such questions as the historic origin of Anti-Semitism and the influence of economic developments on anti-semitic psychology and with the different types of present day anti-semitism. We intend to include an extensive experimental psychological section. At present we are trying to supplement this project with research into antisemitic theory and practice in National Socialist Germany, as well as its international repercussions. This, we hope, will add to the usefulness of our enquiries.

As you can see from these indications, the history and personnel of our Institute have, up to the present, led us to concern ourselves largely with German material. However, this fact is not incidental but also due to the aim we had when we came to the United States—namely, to preserve those elements of German culture which are really essential to democracy and which no longer have a home in Germany. The reserve which we have so far maintained with regard to specific American questions is nothing but the expression of the responsibility which we, as immigrant scholars, feel towards these questions. We have, however, a strong urge to go beyond this self-imposed restriction and to make our contribution to the immediate tasks of American sociology. Naturally, this is the point where we shall be most grateful for your advice. We should be happy if this letter, together with the enclosed report, offers you an opportunity for criticism and suggestions with regard to the integration of our Institute into American intellectual life.

Within a few days the first issue of our English periodical will be published and we shall send it to you as soon as possible. This number deals with questions concerning the interrelationship of philosophy and social science. The next number, to be issued in collaboration with the office of Radio Research of Columbia University, will be devoted exclusively to American problems.

I hope I have not taken up too much of your time. Dr. Horkheimer hopes that he will soon have an opportunity of discussing the various questions with you. In the meantime, he has asked me to convey to you his sincere regards.

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Victor Brauner. Conspiration. 1934.

1. Under the title: “The Collapse of German Democracy and the Expansion of National Socialism.” In: MHA Na [695], S. [231]-[310]; [323]-[352].

2. For one of the earliest mentions of the parallel development of the Germany-project and the anti-Semitism project, see Horkheimer to Katharina von Hirsch, 7/14/1939: “I am also sending you one of the proposals for institute projects for which we hope to get outside funding. About nine projects like this are planned. They deal with historical, economic, psychological, and legal issues. I invested more libido in the one on anti-Semitism, which is being sent to you, than in others. I think it would be really worthwhile for it to be carried out, and at the moment its chances aren't bad. Of course, the decisive negotiations won't take place until fall and winter. The projects will naturally be accompanied by cover letters written with the specific foundation or private donor in mind, and they're much more exoteric and direct than the proposals themselves. They also contain the explanation that we, of course, will not allow anyone to have a voice in our scholarly work but that we want to discuss with relevant patrons the possible publication of the work. We're more interested in the research per se than in its dissemination. Jewish committees are not primarily at issue as donors but rather large private research institutions and interested individuals. As you know, scholarship in this country is not supported by the state, as in Europe, but by private resources. Here an institute director, even a university president, is a mixture of traveling salesman and diplomat.” In: A Life in Letters: Selected Correspondence, Max Horkheimer. Translated by Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson (University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 155-156.

3. “German Economy, Politics, and Culture, 1900-1933,” drafts a-d in: MHA Na [693], S. [1]-[370]; drafts e-g in: MHA Na [694], S. [49]-[295].

The project “German Economy, Politics, and Culture, 1900-1933,” another iteration of the Germany-project seemingly written in seven drafts in early 1940 and subsequently repurposed for the ISR’s effort later that same fall to finalize “Collapse,” both throughout “Section One: Synthesis” and “Section Two: Single Studies and Documentation.”

4. In: Ibid., S. [324].

5. See: Horkheimer to William and Charlotte Dieterle, 3/6/1941. In: MHGS, Bd. 17. (1996), 23. Author’s translation.

6. Cf. Horkheimer to Adorno, 9/11/1938. In: Max Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften. Band 16 Edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr (Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1995), 478-480.

7. On the reduction of the ISR ranks due to their failure to secure external funding in the early 1940s, see “Introducing Racket Theory: On the History and Themes of the Frankfurt School’s Racket Theory,” by J.E. Morain and the author, on the CTWG blog, 6/24/2025. [Link: https://ctwgwebsite.github.io/blog/2025/RacketIntro/]

8. For more on the shift from the ZfS to the SPSS, see:

Introduction: Horkheimer's Essais Matérialistes

9. Ziege: “In the second phase, from 1940 through 1948, however, empirical research became the focus of the ISR’s work. The perception of the Frankfurt School as a theory-immanent undertaking [theorie-immanentes Unternehmen] is the result of a strong perspectival distortion [einer starken Perspektivverzerrung] which unjustly neglects their empirical research. However, the source material [Quellenlage] has improved considerably since the works of [Martin] Jay, [Helmut] Dubiel, [Wolfgang] Bonß, and [Rolf] Wiggershaus. This also holds for the the state of research on the history of empirical social research and the scientific history of exile today.” In: Eva-Maria Ziege. Antisemitismus und Gesellschaftstheorie. Die Frankfurter Schule im amerikanischen Exil. (Suhrkamp, 2009), 156-157. Author’s translation.

10. Cf. Max Horkheimer, “The Present Situation of Social Philosophy and the Tasks of an Institute for Social Research” [1932]: “Rather—and in this opinion I am certainly not alone—the question today is to organize investigations stimulated by contemporary philosophical problems in which philosophers, sociologists, economists, historians, and psychologists are brought together in permanent collaboration to undertake in common that which can be carried out individually in the laboratory in other fields. In short, the task is to do what all true researchers have always done: namely, to pursue their larger philosophical questions on the basis of the most precise scientific methods, to revise and refine their questions in the course of their substantive work, and to develop new methods without losing sight of the larger context. With this approach, no yes-or-no answers arise to the philosophical questions. Instead, these questions themselves become integrated into the empirical research process; their answers lie in the advance of objective knowledge, which itself affects the form of the questions. In the study of society, no one individual is capable of adopting such an approach, both because of the volume of material and because of the variety of indispensable auxiliary sciences. Even Max Scheler, despite his gigantic efforts, came up short in this respect.” In: In: Between Philosophy and Social Science: Selected Early Writings, Max Horkheimer. Translated by G. Frederick Hunter, Matthew S. Kramer, and John Torpey (MIT Press, 1993), 9-10.

11. Roderick Stackelberg: “[Eugene] Anderson’s chief substantive criticism was that the proposal overstressed the continuity between Weimar culture and National Socialism. Perhaps he anticipated the objections the Foundation might have to the premise that mass culture in a liberal system was “one of the forces that nursed fascism in the very lap of democracy.” “Avoid giving the idea that the Weimar Republic was only a prelude to National Socialism,” Anderson wrote, and, to undercut the assumption that fascism was a natural outgrowth of liberal capitalism, “Don't consider the problem a constitutional one, but think of alternatives which could have happened.”” In: “‘CULTURAL ASPECTS OF NATIONAL SOCIALISM’: An Unfinished Project of the Frankfurt School.” Dialectical Anthropology 12, no. 2 (1987), 254.

As I wrote in a previous post about Stackelberg’s article:

Stackelberg’s article has the distinction of being both groundbreaking scholarship for its time—since it is one of the few studies in any language that reconstructs the composition, revision, and rejection of CANS—and outdated by the time it was published, since Stackelberg assumes a Habermasian narrative of the “long farewell” that Stackelberg’s own research makes [such] a significant contribution to undermining. If Stackelberg had continued to read the ISR’s social research proposals and reports of the 1940s beyond April 1941 with the care he had CANS, Anglophone critical theory reception might have been spared another quarter century of the same error as the quarter century prior.

12. Stackelberg: “The result of the ensuing revisions was a proposal reoriented to an empirical and descriptive method and shorn of many of its more radical theses. Yet neither this metamorphosis not the recommendations of such recognized scholars as Sidney B. Fay, Carl J. Friedrich, Paul Tillich, or Reinhold Niebuhr led to a positive response from the Rockefeller Foundation, to whom the Institute had turned because the Foundation was known to have an interest in studies of Nazi Germany. According to the report of the political scientist Harold Lasswell, an official of the Library of Congress whose sponsorship the Institute had also sought, John D. Rockefeller, Jr. himself, although recently retired as Chairman of the Board of the Foundation, took an active hand in opposing the project. Lasswell reported that “Rockefeller is absolutely hostile to our research project and is not willing to finance it even if the Library of Congress should request it.” Ironically, Rockefeller seems to have objected to the Institute’s “adaptability” in changing their proposal. (Whether Rockefeller ever actually saw a copy of the original draft is not clear.) Lasswell also mentioned Rockefeller’s specific dislike of the sections on “Mass Culture” and on “Literature, Art, and Music.” […] If Rockefeller objected to the conclusion, easily inferred from the proposal, that the cultural trends leading to fascism in Weimar Germany were also present in America, he had correctly apprehended a concern that runs through the original draft and is still clearly discernible in the final version. The project is informed by a tension between analyzing pre-fascist tendencies in Weimar culture with an obvious eye to their relevance to American conditions and providing information to increase American preparedness against Nazi Germany as a potential military threat. Although on the advice of both Anderson and Lasswell the final proposal emphasized the need to understand Nazism specifically rather than German culture and society in general (a reorientation reflected in the change in title), the massive changes undertaken from the original draft could not entirely disguise the sense that the major purpose of the project was to analyze the roots of fascism in liberal democracy. That the partial redirection of emphasis from diagnosing the fascist proclivities of late-capitalist industrial society to countering the external Nazi threat did not necessarily make the proposal more attractive to the Foundation is clear from the reservations of Joseph H. Willits, Director of Social Sciences Programs, who apparently feared the adverse effects that a study based so greatly on the reactions of refugees from Nazism might have on relations with Germany.” In: Ibid., 254-255.

13. [MHGS Ed. Fn.:] Carl Joachim Friedrich (1901-1984), living in the USA since 1922, at the time a professor of Government in Cambridge, Massachusets and chairman of the ‘Council of Democracy’ in New York.

14. Franz Neumann to Max Horkheimer, 8/13/1941. In: MHGS, Bd. 17 (1996), 130-131. Author’s translation.

15. As Thomas Wheatland (2009) notes in his reconstruction of the ISR’s fraught relationship to the Columbia Sociology Department, at one point Marcuse reported to Horkheimer that Columbia sociologist Robert Lynd “said he had the greatest respect for your [Horkheimer’s] theoretical undertakings […], but since you were always apprehensive about being viewed as a Marxist [you] therefore had always presented your thoughts in an incomprehensible, garbled manner.” In: The Frankfurt School in Exile (University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 85.

16. See the sub-section “I. The Heritage of the Past”: “The development gave large groups of people the idea that the complete rule of the social democratic apparatus was identical with the triumph of socialism, and that it could be achieved without a change in the fundamental labor and property relations. Accordingly, the impetus of the movement was no longer directed against these relations but against certain groups and conditions which most obviously hinder the functioning of the apparatus. The more this apparatus was officially recognized and incorporated into the legal and political system, the more it cooperated with, and later represented, the state itself, the more the members felt themselves to be parts of a whole which must be maintained and defended. Its enemy became their enemy as in 1914. The coordinated bureaucracy was suspicious of “destructive elements”; hatred of intellectuals was widespread. The revolutionary tendencies became an opposition within the “official” labor movement and remained its foe until the ascent of National Socialism.”

17. See sub-section “II. Friends and Enemies of the Republic”: “The social system of the Weimar Republic, as it developed out of the military defeat of 1918 and the breakdown of the Imperial structure, was in every way a product of compromise, based primarily on the fact that only the reformist labor movement actively supported the Republic. But even they, because they never abandoned their Socialist program, considered the Republic a temporary resting place and not their own home. The view of a “state that also belongs to us,” which one can at least use as an instrument for the realization of more far-reaching aims and which one must therefore defend with every means, collapsed as the state proved unable to satisfy the daily needs of labor. This ambivalent attitude of the working classes can be explained by the constellation of historical forces at the end of the war and by the early history, organizational principles and ideological development of the German labor movement.”

18. In the same sub-section (II.): “Labor never ruled the Republic. Although the working class received political equality, it remained largely theoretical because the administrative monopoly of bureaucracy, in which they were hardly represented, was retained and the judicial monopoly of irremovable judges was actually strengthened. The causes are to be found in the fact that the democratic and socialist forces hardly penetrated the schools, that the army was reluctant to accept public control and to have its position taken over by democratic elements, and that the labor movement entered a phase which destroyed its political nature and eventually paralyzed its will to power, never too strong at any time.”

19. In the same sub-section (II.): “In a period in which the technological basis of capitalism created differentiations within the working classes and the exercise of economic power by the workers could be achieved only by the occupation of certain key positions, the various branches of the labor movement were still operating with conceptions developed in the period from 1880 to 1910. The “organization”, considered their decisive weapon, was no longer the expression of a living movement. It had become institutionalized. The socialist idea, the quasi-religious devotion, and the active solidarity were replaced by specific devices for mass domination, petty considerations and passive discipline. Moreover, the labor movement was split and thus lost its claim to exclusive leadership of the masses. Conservative and immovable in its structure, the labor movement was incapable of lending the workers to a radical, active, creative participation in the state.”

20. Quote from the author’s translation of the Horkheimer fragment “Rackets and Spirit (1942/44),” which you can read over on the CTWG blog: “Fragments and Texts on Racket Theory: Texts by Max Horkheimer,” 6/23/2025. [link: https://ctwgwebsite.github.io/blog/2025/RacketTexts/]

21. Adorno to his Parents, 9/26/1943. In: Theodor W. Adorno, Letters to His Parents: 1939-1951, Edited by Christoph Gödde and Henri Lonitz, Translated by Wieland Hoban (Polity, 2006), 149.

22. Max Horkheimer to Salka Viertel, 6/29/1940. In: MHGS, Bd. 16 (1995), 725-727. Author’s translation.

23. Alternate in 1b): “For long periods, millions were willing to fight for democracy. But the opportunities to give the democratic form a democratic will and spirit were never once utilized, and the democratic spirit finally broke.”

24. Alternate in 1b): “We intend to use the Weimar Republic like a corpse, dissecting it in the hope to find an answer to the question: why did it happen?”

25. Extant in 1b), cut from 1a).

26. Variant 1b) has only five subsections, lacking ‘The Cultural Crisis’ in the first group of three sections.

27. 1b) lacks a separate category for “Political and Legal Structure.”

28. Extant in 1b), cut from 1a).

29. Alternate sentence in 1b): “In combining a group of experts in all fields of social science who are bound together by a common theoretical approach and who, for many years, have already worked as a group, we expect to overcome the handicaps and to produce an integrated collective study.” [typescript p. 3]

30. Found in 1b), cut from 1a): “Thus, the constitution makers hoped to ensure the active participation of the citizens in the formation and operation of the general will.” [typescript p. 2]

31. Extant in 1b), cut from 1a).

32. Alternate conclusion to the ¶ with option #3: “The democratic political system, not using the inherent potentialities of the high productive capacity of German industry, became a hollow shell. Democracy in 1932 could only continue to exist if it abolished unemployment and secured a better life for the huge masses of the people. But the Social Democratic Party had long ceased to be a socialist one. The Communist Party was completely unable to translate into action the cravings of the German masses for freedom, peace and security.” [typescript p. 2]

33. Alternate formulation in 1b): “It is therefore decisive to undertake a careful analysis of all those crucial events in the history of Germany during the past 25 years where the counter-revolutionary forces showed their ugly meaning and the democratic forces their inability to cope with them.” [typescript p. 3]

34. The 1a) typescript ends p. 26., cutting off before ‘[V.] New Methods of Mass Domination.’ and ‘[VI.] The New Imperialism.’ The following to abstracts are drawn from the rough drafts for each section in 1b). Furthermore, 1b) also has rough drafts, written in a mixture of German and English of the following four subsections: [A.] Economic Structure. [Engl]; [B.] Social Structure. [Engl]; [C.] Culture I. [German]; [D.] Culture II. [German].

35. English abstract.

36. [In-text citation:] Hermann Rauschning, Gespräche mit Hitler, p. 113.

37. English abstract.

38. Written in by hand. All subsequent brackets indicate handwritten inserts replacing earlier, less specific formulations.

39. In “1b),” the title of this section is the rougher English translation of the same: “Foes and Defenders of the Republic.”

40. Theodor W. Adorno to James T. Shotwell, 7/30/1940. In: MHGS, Bd. 16 (1995) 738-741. English in original.

41. [MHGS Ed. Fn.:] Horkheimer had asked Shotwell to comment critically on the draft of the research project on “Cultural Aspects of National Socialism.” Shotwell had done so in the letter of 7/1/1940. (The project could not be carried out due to a lack of funding.)

42. [MHGS Ed. Fn.:] Shotwell had written in his letter of 7/1/1940: “I wonder, however, if so vast a canvass can be drawn within the limits of a single volume. It seems to me more like a series of volumes or almost like an encyclopedia. [...] I doubt if there are many in America who would be interested in the details of German economics and finance and would at the same time have an interest in either philosophy on the one hand or music on the other. I should suppose that a series of smaller volumes would appeal more to the American reader.” (MHA: 1 22.394)

43. [MHGS Ed. Fn.:] Shotwell had remarked: “Then again there is not, I think, anything like enough material in this volume on Wehrwirtschaft. The impact of military considerations upon the economic life of Germany is of far greater importance in the history of the world than the detail of German political or labor organization.” (MHA: 1 22.394)

44. Adorno to Charles E. Merriam, 7/30/1940. In: Ibid., 741-746.

45. [MHGS Ed. Fn.:] Merriam had written in a letter from 7/1/1940, “that I should like to know more about the program of the Institute and what kind of advice is expected of me” (MHA: I 18.343).

46. [MHGS Ed. Fn.:] Horkheimer’s “Autoritärer Staat” [“Authoritarian State”]; the essay originally bore the title “Staatskapitalismus” [“State Capitalism.”] (vgl. MHA: IX 13).

47. Viz.: “German Economy, Politics, and Culture, 1900-1933.”

48. [MHGS Ed. Fn.:] For further details, see: Horkheimer, ‘Notes on Institute Activities, Research Project on Anti-Semitism’; these would eventually result in the five-volume Studies in Prejudice (1949/50). […] [In another letter (MHGS 7/14/1939),] Horkheimer’s “The Jews and Europe” [1939] was referred to as the theoretical basis of the anti-Semitism project.