Abstract
Reviewed by: Erik Jensen, Miami University, Oxford, OH, USA
In this densely researched book, Anthony McElligott argues that the central tension within the Weimar Republic stemmed from competing visions over how much authority the German government needed, when it should use it, and which branch should exercise it. This tension had already assumed centre stage with the 1916 Hindenburg-Ludendorff duopoly and, McElligott argues, found its resolution only after the 1936 vote on Rhineland remilitarization had solidified Hitler’s plebiscitary dictatorship, although this latter event receives just a passing mention near the end of the book. In topical chapters that address an array of issues, from foreign policy to the economy to culture, McElligott shows that nearly all political thinkers in Germany at the time, of whatever stripe, envisioned some type of dictatorial authority that could navigate the nation through crises, although they disagreed heatedly over the source, scope and permanence of such authority. McElligott presents his evidence with such convincing detail that the reader, by the end, largely accepts the book’s provocative thesis that the 1933 Enabling Law represented less a surrender of Weimar democracy than its logical conclusion, although, here again, it was that law’s permanence that marked the real departure from most earlier visions of executive authority.
McElligott leaves no doubt, however, that strong central control struck many Germans as essential to managing the chaos of interwar society. Already in the last years of World War I, political thinkers across the spectrum perceived an inherent tension between democracy and effective rule, and they grappled with the question of how to balance the two, from Hugo Preuß’s initial insistence on the primacy of the parliament to Max Weber’s notion of strong leadership vested in an elite caste to Carl Schmitt’s theoretical groundwork for modern dictatorship. In an odd organizational choice, McElligott does not examine these critical intellectual debates until Chapter 8, even though they had fundamentally informed the drafting of the 1919 constitution. Nevertheless, he skilfully charts how Preuß shifted from basing authority in the Reichstag to basing it in the figure of a plebiscitary president, as well as how Weber and, especially, Schmitt evolved over the course of the 1920s towards a belief in the need for a ‘sovereign dictator’ with power that was lasting and less constrained. In those instances when the government invoked Article 48 of the Constitution, allowing for executive rule by decree, as it did at the height of hyperinflation in 1923, the apparent success of unencumbered authority in manoeuvring the nation through the crisis only reinforced calls by many Germans, foremost Schmitt, to make that authority enduring.
At the same time, McElligott remains sensitive to the periodic ebb of authoritarian impulses in the Weimar Republic. Judicial sentences during the mid-to-late 1920s, for instance, erred on the side of lenience rather than discipline. At the same time, he argues that Weimar’s Landräte, overall, ‘stood closer to the republic than has been hitherto assumed’, even as he calls attention in Chapter 7 to one particularly refractory local administration in East Elbia (164). These moments in the Weimar Republic when the authoritarian impulse waned show that an outcome other than Hitler’s dictatorship was possible. Moreover, many Germans situated the events in the months following January 1933 within their earlier experiences of an executive power that other institutions, especially the constitution, had managed to hold in check, as illustrated by the (temporary) Enabling Laws of October 1923 and December 1924. The Reichstag’s vote for the March 1933 Enabling Act, then, ‘represented less an approval for a Hitler dictatorship’, McElligott insists, ‘than an affirmation of government by constitutional dictatorship as framed by more than ten years of Weimar state theory discourse’ (216).
In the event, of course, Germany got something much more permanent and authoritarian than many had bargained for. It also got a regime that enjoyed tremendous and growing popular support throughout the mid-1930s – as indicated by the results of a number of plebiscites, including that on remilitarizing the Rhineland. As McElligott persuasively illustrates, the regime therefore manifested, more or less, the type of consensual dictatorship for which many theorists in the previous decades had laid the groundwork – McElligott again singles out Carl Schmitt – even if not in the markedly violent form that Nazism ultimately took. McElligott’s comprehensive and challenging work will reward every reader who specializes in interwar European or twentieth-century German history, as well as those who do comparative work on authoritarianism. It includes some absolutely top-notch maps and a treasure trove of endnotes, although future editions would be well served by including page-number headings to facilitate their use. Most importantly, Rethinking the Weimar Republic lives up to its name in prompting a reconsideration of the deeper strains and yearnings that had bedevilled German politics since the Kaiserreich began to teeter.