Abstract
The emergence of the Nazi version of fascism, which we shall examine in this chapter, raises an issue that is still with us: to what lengths will capital’s agents go in order to preserve their economic base? In terms of the foundations of the ‘short twentieth century’, the emergence of Fascism and Nazism after the general crisis of the First World War revealed a profound level of social capital’s nature, namely that although the base for bourgeois thought and politics lay in the ideas and forms established by the Enlightenment and French Revolution, in order to deal with a crisis that appeared to them to threaten revolution, capital’s agents at its centre were prepared to break with that base and turn to forces that looked to an alternative tradition. In this chapter and the next I shall examine the dynamics of the most important case, Germany, and will address the more theoretical level in Chapter 7.
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Notes and References
Quoted in Flechtheim, 1966, p. 94. Gregor was Otto’s brother and remained prominent in the left wing of the party. He was murdered in June 1934 as part of the purge that consolidated control of the NSDAP right. Otto escaped abroad and survived.
This quotations and other information in this paragraph are from Stern, 1965, pp. 279–85, 289–91, 320, 323.
Quoted in Wehler, 1985, p. 219. For a theorisation of necessary elements in a developed discourse, as listed here, see Post, 1996, pp. 270–8.
The more recent key studies on electoral support for the NSDAP are Childers, 1983, 1986, and Hamilton, 1982. The special appeal of the NSDAP to Protestants is a complex matter that I have not been able to investigate. The link seems almost certainly to be via nationalism and its roots in the writings of Lutheran theologians in the eighteenth century. On the shift of peasant support, see Zofka, 1986.
Mühlberger, 1980, Table 3; the average is my calculation. It is worth noting that from 1925–9 9.2 per cent and from 1930–2 an average of 8 per cent were skilled (loc. cit.).
Mühlberger (1980, pp. 503, 510) reports this research with what seems to be justified scepticism about the very high rate (63.4 per cent) claimed for the SA. The point about unemployment is my gloss.
Bracher, 1978, pp. 189, 210–13; see also Stachura, 1983b.
Data from Bracher, 1978, p. 117; Kater, 1983, p. 209; Bessel, 1986, p. 144; Childers, 1983, p. 260. Presumably, Catholic women were more receptive to church instructions to vote for the centre party.
The key works here are Bussemer, 1985, and Meyer-Renschhausen, 1989. Important more general works are Evans, 1976, and Koonz, 1987, and see Mason, 1976. A useful survey is in Rosenhaft, 1992, although this devotes most space to women’s position after 1933. A balanced assessment of the pre-1933 situation is provided in Stephenson, 1983. For further references see Kay, 1992.
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© 1997 K. W. J. Post
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Post, K. (1997). The Fascist Gambit. In: Communists and National Socialists. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-14514-0_5
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