Becoming a Nazi Town: Culture and Politics in Göttingen Between the Wars (original) (raw)
Nazism and German Society, 1933-1945
German Studies Review, 1995
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Central European History, 2011
This updated translation of Dirk Schumann's Politische Gewalt in der Weimarer Republik, 1918-1933 (Klartext, 2001) represents an estimable contribution to the scholarly literature on the Weimar Republic. Well researched and rich in detail, the work attempts to open a new perspective on a perennial topic in the scholarship: the role of political violence, in this case, in the important Prussian province of Saxony. Schumann aims to disprove a) that political violence in interwar Germany was an inevitable product of the Bolshevik revolution, and b) that it was primarily the result of the infusion of wartime violence into postwar civilian life. The former contention, a right-wing canard, hardly seems to need disproving given the well-known centrality of violence to the right-wing nationalist and fascist projects. The latter line of interpretation, similarly, is made to bear too much weight; to be sure, as Schumann points out, there was in most cases no direct line of continuity (in terms of personnel) from the violence of the trenches to the street battles of Weimar, but as many scholars (e.g., Richard Bessel) have shown, the war experience was continually recapitulated and recast so as to retain its destructive and habituating power. There would, moreover, have been no Wehrverbände without the war, no matter how much organizations such as the Stahlhelm cast back to the public militarism of the Kaiserreich. Schumann's contention that political violence did not threaten the political order-because it was "controllable," if only authorities had had the will to control it (p. xiii)-likewise seems questionable, unless we consider Schumann's deeper, important point: that the importance of violence lay not in its "military" efficacy, but in its discursive effect; that is, that violence-both rhetorical and actual-helped to stoke "fear[s] of civil war" that were successfully instrumentalized by the radical right to the detriment of the republic. This emphasis on the meaning ascribed to violence (both actual and rhetorical, as opposed to the concrete effects of violence, is one of the work's two main strengths. The other is the nuance and detail with which Schumann considers well-known episodes of political violence. The study is organized chronologically, with sections covering the "circumscribed civil war" of 1919-1921 (which included the Communist "March Actions" of 1921); the political murders of 1921-23; the founding of the right-and left-wing "combat leagues" in the period 1924-1929; and the period of escalating violence from 1929 through the end of the republic. This organization generally works, although the aphorisistic chapter titles and BOOK REVIEWS