Hitler and His Enemies

ONE CAN APPROACH the phenomenon of fascism from various angles. The first analyses, mostly by Communist writers, explained it simply as the dictatorship of monopoly capital (a thesis that still lingers in Franz Neumann’s Behemoth, 1941, and Ignazio Silone’s School for Dictators, 1937). One could look at it as a European disease of the twentieth century (see Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism and Ernst Nolte’s Three Faces of Fascism), or as a special form of populism, a potential degeneration inherent in all democracies (J. L. Talmon in Totalitarian Democracy). One could treat it as a breakdown of reason under the conditions of monopolism (as in Georg Lukacs’s Destruction of Reason, unfortunately not available in English) or as a breakdown of nerve (as does Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom). Finally, one could treat it as a specifically German aberration, as George Mosse does in The Crisis of the German Ideology (and William Shirer in a bestseller only to be mentioned at a certain distance from this distinguished company).

Karl Dietrich Bracher, of Bonn University, whose earlier works deal with the Weimar Republic, has written a profound study that rejects and combines all these partial views and sees Fascism and Nazism as revolutionary movements directed against the liberal state. “This ideological anti-front was forged [out ofj four tendencies—a conservative-authoritarian glorification of the state; an imperialistic nationalism; a nationalistic-statist aberration of socialism seeking to combine social romanticism and state socialism; a racial community ideology.” Nationalism was transformed into “radical imperialism,” populism into an antidemocratic leader cult. As a historian, Bracher neglects neither the European failure of nerve nor the German and Austrian traditions which prepared Hitler’s advent; but he devotes over a hundred pages to the specific problems and events that assured his success. He does not seek the one overriding cause—be it economic, political, biological, psychological, or ideological—but describes a sequence of crises through the unhappy life of the Weimar Republic. These crises might have brought to power a simply reactionary clique, perhaps a military dictatorship (as Stalin expected), or a restoration of the Hohenzollern (which Chancellor Bruning frankly admits in his memoirs was his aim in office). Why did it end with a grotesque maniac with a Chaplin moustache?