posted on 21 Aug 2019

The Coming of the Third Reich by Richard J. Evans

I don’t personally subscribe to the view that history repeats itself but I certainly do think that studying history can help us understand the times we are living through. George Santayana’s now famous aphorism - "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" – is one to live by but it presupposes we all interpret the past in the same way. This is evidently not the case and the choices you make about whose interpretation of history you choose to read becomes crucial. What has become clear to me as I’ve grown older is that I was raised on a version of history that was, to be kind, unreliable at best and straightforward colonial propaganda and lies at its worst. It’s pretty clear that history isn’t a pure and uncontested ‘thing’ that sits out there in the public domain and can be studied objectively but a series of interpretations usually filtered through an ideological set of assumptions that the author brings to the subject.

What I am convinced about is that now, perhaps more than at any other time in my life, we need interpretations of history that help us to understand the domestic and global political and social turmoil we’re living through. The feeling that old assumptions about social order are passing and that alternative ways of seeing the world are taking their place is something I can’t escape. I increasingly feel that what I grew up believing was ‘normal’ – living in a liberal and more or less democratic welfare state – was in fact a bubble of time that will turn out to be atypical and that we will revert to a society in which the rich and powerful will offer everyone else authoritarian rule as a bastion against uncertainty and chaos.

I was born into a generation for who the trauma of two World Wars was still casting its shadow over the shape of politics but far enough away for me not to look back but to look forward. The wars were sold to me as events to be proud of – a glorious struggle against European forces of darkness – and I don’t remember ever being confronted at school by the conundrum of how all this upheaval came about. The story we were presented with seemed so simple – it was all the result of uniquely evil individuals whose motives were somewhere between deranged and diabolic. It wasn’t until much later and I started reading something other than comics that I began to understand that the whole story might just be a bit more complex. In particular I became increasingly fascinated by trying to understand how it was that whole populations of otherwise cultured and decent people could acquiesce to leadership by psychopaths.

Richard J. Evans’ enormous study of what happened in Germany in the early to middle years of the 20th century directly tries to ask these very questions. How was it possible for Hitler and the Nazi Party to have emerged in a country famous for its music, literature, philosophy and art? Evans’ study which is usually known as The Third Reich Trilogy comes in three individual volumes – The Coming of the Third Reich, The Third Reich in Power and The Third Reich at War – and was prompted by his view that despite the humungous number of books that offer a study of the Nazis or wartime campaigns, there were very few that tried to write about the fabric of German social order, politics and thought in which Nazism found a space to grow. He also wanted to write a history that would be readable for the lay reader like me and would, in as far as it was possible, forego filling the book with moral or value judgements and focus as much as possible on clear explanation. I have just read volume one of this endeavour – The Coming of the Third Reich – and it’s quite a journey.

Evans rejects the idea often perpetrated by other historians that there was (is) something in the German character that is fundamentally inclined to authoritarianism and emphasises that it was events – domestic and international – that set the path to Hitler. This was not, he maintains, an inevitable journey. Other outcomes were always possible but fateful decisions and political ineptitude were really to blame.

His analysis takes us back to the very foundation of Germany as a nation in 1871 when fundamental flaws were built into the body politic:

“German society did not enter nationhood in 1871 in a wholly stable condition. It was riven by rapidly deepening internal conflicts which were increasingly exported into the unresolved tensions of the political system that Bismarck had created. These tensions found release in an increasingly vociferous nationalism, mixed in with alarmingly strident doses of racism and anti-Semitism, which were to leave a legacy for the future.”

Words that seem to have chillingly familiar echo to me from today’s perspective.

Evans also talks at some length about the impact of the punitive post World War One peace settlement on the wider German population and the impact of poverty, hyper-inflation and the great Depression – all of which blended together to create social circumstances that seemed custom made for the emergence of a party selling solutions.

“More ominous by far, however, was the fact that the health and welfare agencies, determined to create rational and scientifically informed ways of dealing with social deprivation, deviance and crime, with the ultimate aim of eliminating them from German society in generations to come, encouraged new policies that began to eat away at the civil liberties of the poor and handicapped.”

Sound familiar?

The establishment of the Weimar Republic seemed to add fuel to the fire and as a national government it was under pressure from the very beginning. It represented a coalition of the centre Left and centre Right that excluded both Far Right and Communists from influence despite their evident popularity and appeal to the voters. But while the Left squabbled with itself, Hitler as leader of the Nazis saw the opportunity:

“The Nazi Party had established itself with startling suddenness in September 1930 as a catch-all party of social protest, appealing to a greater or lesser degree to virtually every social group in the land. Even more than the Centre Party, it succeeded in transcending social boundaries and uniting highly disparate groups on the basis of a common ideology….as no party had ever done before.”

But the truth is that the Nazis never won an electoral majority and ironically were invited into coalition government as their electoral fortunes appeared to have peaked. The decision to offer them limited posts in government was a decision made on two mistaken assumptions – that they were a lesser threat than the Communists and that once given limited formal power they would start to behave like other political parties.

The truth was very different and when Hitler was offered what was seen by the other parties as the nominal role of Chancellor, he seized the chance and began to assert Nazi values and practice almost unfettered by others looking elsewhere for problems.

The door was open for book burnings, a fanatical programme of anti-communist pogroms and a growing national dialogue that linked Jews with Communism, world finance and responsibility for the ills of German history.

By 1933 the Nazis had effectively come to power – the topic of volume two of Evans’ undertaking.

The notion of a readable 400 page history of the conditions that created Nazism might seem fanciful to a lot of people but, believe me, it really is superbly accessible and reads at times almost like a historical thriller. The messages in it are chilling and there’s always a temptation to lift the historical story and set it on top of what is happening today to see if you can find parallels – which you will do. Whether we are following precisely the same path I personally doubt but what I do think is that if we make bad choices again we will find our own unique way to arrive at very similar outcomes.

 

Terry Potter

August 2019