Theorectical Political
The Weimar Republic(1919-1933) did not usher in a period of ecstatic rejoicing in the realisation of bourgeois democracy, but rather saw the emergence of the Vernunftrepublikaner, or rational republicans. Men like the politician Gustav Stresemann or the historian Friedrich Meinecke believed Germany's only option, if she was to survive the demands of Versailles, was to “follow, with firm step, the demands of reason.” Observer, Robert Koehl, views the National Socialist take-over in Germany
as a point where the bourgeois and aristocratic classes were once again reunited through the aristocratic “idealization of the feudal past” and the bourgeois “idealization of Germandom”. This apparent trait of the German character, which evolved over many centuries, has been offered as just one of many explanations for the rise of German National Socialism during the 1920s and 1930s.
Of the numerous theories on German fascism one worth mentioning is the Sonderweg (Special Way) thesis. Simply stated, it is a country’s/people’s path to modernity. The process of modernisation and industrialisation creates conflict between social groups, producing a threat to the social status of those groups. Unlike Britain and France Germany followed a slightly different path to the modern world. The defining moment was the failed revolution of 1848. This permitted the continued rule of the German aristocracy until 1918, while in Britain and France, the “middle-class” revolution had occurred many years earlier, in 1649 and 1789 respectively.
The “moral disease” theory suggested by Gerhard Ritter and Friedrich Meinecke proposes that fascism was an outgrowth of the late nineteenth century breakdown in religion, morality, and spirituality, the collapse of bourgeois culture. Ritter regards this moral crisis as being a need of the masses to embrace “a surrogate religion.” Moreover, Augusto del Noce asserts that in an “age of secularisation” National Socialism manifested itself as an irrational antagonist towards Stalinism.
Ludovico Garruccio believes that fascism is the “central-European variant of a common experience of crisis” arising from the process of modernisation coupled with the trauma of the First World War.
Marxist interpretation was the first serious attempt to understand the fascist phenomenon. Interpretations like that of Karl Radek, suggests that fascism was the “socialism of the petit bourgeois masses”, while Arthur Rosenberg called it the “counter-revolutionary capitalist… a modern, popularly mashed form of the bourgeois-capitalist counter-revolution.”
Related in someway to Marxist interpretation is the Frankfurt school with its psychosocial interpretation, focusing upon the psyche of both the leader and society. Theodor Adorno suggests that the inter-war, central-European, middle-classes possessed personality traits which were inclined towards rigidity, restraint, and dictatorship. Wilhelm Reich regards fascism as a combination of the sexual repression of bourgeois society, a “sadomasochistic compensatory”, with aggressive impulses.Reich believes that authoritarian German society needed to “regard and defend the authoritarian family”, which is in itself the basis of the “state, culture, and civilization.”
Finally, one other explanation for fascism is that of totalitarianism. Hannah Arendt distinguishes totalitarian regimes from earlier tyrannies, despotism, and dictatorships, by the permanent use of terror combined with a rigid ideology. For C.J. Friedrich, totalitarianism is a modern form of autocratic domination, consisting of six points. These can be listed as: an elaborate ideology, a single mass party led by one man, the use of terror and a secret police, control of the mass media, a monopoly on weapons, and a centralised economy. Interestingly, Herbert Marcuse sees fascism and liberalism as sharing much in common. Both ideologies support the ownership of private property; while fascism uses terror and brutality, liberalism restrains man through consumerism. Therefore, the apparent freedom of liberalism can be suggested to be erroneous.
All theories for the emergence of fascism are open to conjecture none offer a complete or satisfactory answer. However, those that come close, draw into their argument the notion of culture, and its role in the formation of a national character.
