"The pauperisation of the petty bourgeoisie, barely
concealed by their ties and socks of artificial silk, eroded all official
creeds and, above all, the doctrine of democratic parliamentarism... In the
highly fevered atmosphere brought about by war, defeat, reparations, inflation,
occupation of the Ruhr, crisis, need, and despair, the petty bourgeoisie rose
against all the old parties that had cheated it."
Leon Trotsky- What is National Socialism? (1933)
"The class struggle is a law of social development. For
ages, that struggle has been between the poor and the rich, the exploited and
the exploiters."
Jack London: The Iron Heel
“The 'ordinary German' who populates Daniel Goldhagen’s book
is a vacuous generalisation from which all internal social antagonisms and
conflicts have been extracted.”
David North
"They can only maintain their position while they
honestly believe that civilisation depends on themselves alone..."
Jack London On Oligarchy
To understand Katja Hoyer's contributions to recent
historiography, we need to consider the broader academic landscape in which
they fit. The 'Ordinary Germans' historiography is central to her latest book’s
introduction. Since the postwar era, this field has been shaped by ongoing
tensions between Marxist class analysis and various idealist, culturalist, and
nationalist perspectives. The question of 'ordinary Germans' extends beyond
mere academic debate; it is key to understanding fascism and influences the
working class's readiness or inability to oppose it. Since the 1990s,
discussions about 'ordinary Germans' have been dominated by three main
positions, none of which fully align with a Marxist view. Hoyer’s work
synthesises and, in some respects, integrates elements from all three.
The primary perspective linked to Daniel Goldhagen's 1996
bestseller, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust,
is that the Holocaust was carried out by "ordinary Germans" driven by
deeply rooted, centuries-old "eliminationist antisemitism" unique to
German culture. Goldhagen argued this belief was so ingrained that it could be
activated without coercion or specific circumstances; Germans killed Jews
simply because they were Germans. David North's 1997 critique, The Myth of
"Ordinary Germans", points out a key methodological flaw: the idea of
"ordinary Germans" is an overly broad, abstract category with no
internal differentiation, which makes it scientifically meaningless.
As North observes, questioning whether "ordinary
Germans" refers to a factory worker, shopkeeper, lumpenproletarian, Junker
landowner, or industrialist reveals that this category ignores class
differences within German society, unintentionally reinforcing the Nazi myth of
a unified Volk in a distorted way. Goldhagen's notion of ewige Deutsche
(eternal Germans) as enemies of Jews parallels the Nazi ewige Jude (eternal
Jew) as enemies of Germans. Both are racial-nationalist abstractions that erase
nuanced history and social class distinctions.
Furthermore, as North emphasises, the Goldhagen thesis
relies on making the German socialist movement essentially invisible. In a
622-page book about Germans and the Holocaust, there's not a single mention of
Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, August Bebel, or the Social Democratic Party,
which by 1912 was the largest party in the Reichstag, drawing most of its
support from the German working class. This omission is intentional; it's
structurally necessary because recognising a large socialist workers' movement
with millions of Germans directly contradicts the idea that all Germans shared
a uniform antisemitic worldview.
The second perspective is offered by Götz Aly's 'Hitler's
Beneficiaries' (2005), which suggests that ordinary Germans mainly supported
Hitler for economic reasons they gained from the confiscation of Jewish
property, a Nazi welfare system funded through expropriation and war spoils.
While this outlook is somewhat more materialist than Goldhagen's, it remains
problematic: it portrays the working class as passive recipients of stolen
wealth, dismisses acts of resistance, and continues to use the broad category
of "Germans" as beneficiaries, oversimplifying the significant class
differences in who benefited from the Nazi economy.
The third major perspective most pertinent to Hoyer is the
Volksgemeinschaft historiography. Since around the 2000s, this view has been
dominant in German academic history and is linked with scholars like Michael
Wildt, Frank Bajohr, and the broader 'Nazi society' social history movement.
This approach examines how the Nazi idea of the national community was actively
built, enacted, and accepted by significant segments of German society, rather
than merely being imposed from above. It highlights the roles of participation,
consent, social pleasures of belonging, and the integration of the Mittelstand
(middle classes) and parts of the working class into a racially defined
national identity.
Hoyer and the Volksgemeinschaft Turn
Hoyer's 'Weimar intentionally challenges the so-called
"Weimar syndrome' the common tendency to interpret the republic solely as
a precursor to Nazism. She aims to analyse the republic on its own terms and
emphasise the daily lives of ordinary people who did not anticipate the
impending catastrophe. She highlights Weimar's cultural vitality, genuine
social reforms, the expansion of women's rights and sexual freedoms, and the
democratic activism of the working class through unions and political parties.
A crucial point underlying this is that vulgar retrospective determinism, which
views fascism as the inevitable outcome of all developments in Weimar, is
indeed poor history. However, Hoyer's correction veers too far in the opposite
direction, a mistake tied directly to the Volksgemeinschaft historiography.
The core issue goes beyond mere emphasis and highlights what
is fundamentally missing. When Hoyer and other Volksgemeinschaft historians
analyse the daily lives of "ordinary people" during the Weimar
Republic or Nazism, they often blur the distinctions among class, the nation,
and the people. The German working class, which nearly achieved socialist power
during the November Revolution of 1918, consistently supported the SPD and KPD
throughout Weimar and maintained underground resistance networks in Berlin,
Hamburg, and the Ruhr well after Hitler's ascent to power.
These workers are frequently portrayed as simply part of the
indistinct mass of "Germans" experiencing the republic, depression,
and Nazi rise in largely uniform ways. Hoyer’s historiographical approach,
though it varies in details from Goldhagen's, reaches a similar conclusion
through a different method: it minimises "the relationship between
capitalism and fascism" and depicts "all workers, the petty
bourgeoisie, industrialists, and bankers as 'the Germans.'"
The evidence opposing the dominant narrative is strong but
often overlooked in this historiography. Hans-Rainer Sandvoss's detailed
archival research into Berlin workers' resistance to the Nazi regime, utilising
Gestapo files that only became accessible after 1989, revealed that the working
class in Berlin and other labour hubs largely remained resistant to Nazi
propaganda for several years following Hitler's rise to power.
A Gestapo report from March 1936 noted that in Berlin one
could go days without hearing the Führer salute, except from officials,
uniformed personnel, or provincial visitors. The Nazi party regularly
encountered challenges in industrial areas such as mining regions, Hamburg's
docks, and factory zones. This is not romanticisation but a reflection of the
historical record. Yet, this resistance vanishes completely in a historiography
that depicts all Germans as uniformly "ordinary."
Why does this historiography remain so influential? Its
foundation lies in the political and intellectual climate established after the
fall of the Soviet Union and the so-called "triumph of capitalism."
Since the 1990s, numerous historians have justified abandoning honest and
objective analysis by pointing to the collapse of the Soviet Union and East
Germany, as well as the apparent victory of capitalism. In doing so, they have
replaced genuine scientific methods with subjective, postmodern ideologies.
Abandoning class as the primary analytical focus is a
politically motivated choice, not a neutral one. As David North notes in his
critique of Goldhagen, during the postwar period, framing fascism's class
aspects through psychological, cultural, or national-identity lenses was linked
to the Cold War objective of undermining Marxism. This also served to hide that
fascism was essentially the capitalist ruling class's response to revolutionary
threats from the organised working class. Goldhagen attributes this entirely to
German national psychology, while Volksgemeinschaft historians approach it more
subtly by highlighting consent, participation, and everyday social integration.
This indicates that "the Germans" collectively created fascism,
instead of acknowledging that a particular class imposed it on a divided
society—one in which millions were coerced, terrorised, and ultimately wiped
out.
Focusing on Hoyer, there's an additional point to consider.
Her earlier book, Beyond the Wall (2023), depicts the GDR as a society with
significant social achievements and broad support. This mirrors the strategy
used for Stalinism: emphasising the daily lives of "ordinary people"
to soften, contextualise, and ultimately justify a regime largely defined by
bureaucratic dictatorship over the working class. In both Weimar/Nazi Germany
and East Germany, highlighting "ordinary experience" aims to diminish
political and class divisions and foster sociological empathy.
Leon Trotsky examined Weimar Germany and German fascism not
from the standpoint of current social historians, but through his own
contemporaneous writings, which remain unmatched in their analytical insight.
He saw fascism not as stemming from German national character or broad social
trends, but as a tactic used by the capitalist elite to unite the impoverished
petty bourgeoisie—including shopkeepers, artisans, clerks, and disillusioned
farmers—against the organised working class, especially when bourgeois
democracy proved unable to resolve the social crisis.
This perspective is elaborated in his 1933 book, 'What is
National Socialism?'. He describes how the impoverishment of the petty
bourgeoisie, barely hidden by their artificial silk ties and socks, undermined
all official beliefs, especially democratic parliamentary doctrine. Amid the
tense environment created by war, defeat, reparations, inflation, the Ruhr
occupation, crisis, need, and despair, the petty bourgeoisie turned against all
the old parties that had deceived them.
This analysis focused not on the cultural attitudes of
"ordinary Germans" but on the class struggles within a society facing
a severe capitalist crisis. Central to the discussion was the question of
revolutionary leadership: whether the organised working class would seize power
or whether the petty bourgeoisie, with no viable working-class alternative,
would be pushed into the arms of a movement supported and financed by large
capital interests. The outcome depended on the betrayals by the SPD and the
Comintern, rather than on any intrinsic psychological traits of a uniform
"German people."
This framework is consistently rejected by "ordinary
Germans' historiography, from Goldhagen to Götz Aly, the Volksgemeinschaft
school, and Katja Hoyer. This rejection is deliberate, as it precisely
identifies the actual determinants of the outcome: class struggle, the crisis
of revolutionary leadership, and the counterrevolutionary roles of Social
Democracy and Stalinism. These lessons remain highly relevant today, with the
rise of the AfD in Germany and the pseudo-left channelling working-class opposition
into bourgeois safe havens. Rediscovering these truths requires not a softer or
more empathetic history.
Katja Hoyer is a historian of German and British background,
author of "Blood and Iron: The Rise and Fall of the German Empire"
(2021) and, more recently, "Weimar Germany: Democracy on the Brink"
(2024). She also wrote "Beyond the Wall" (2023), an alternative
perspective on the GDR. Her Weimar book seeks to portray the republic not just
as a precursor to Nazi disaster, a "Weimar syndrome" she explicitly
aims to go beyond, but as a lively, authentic democratic experiment with
notable achievements in culture, social policy, and politics. From a Marxist
standpoint, there are serious methodological and political problems with this
kind of liberal rehabilitation project.
Like many liberal histories, Hoyer emphasises Weimar's
lively cultural scene—covering the Bauhaus, Expressionism, Brecht, Grosz,
cabaret, and sexual liberalism. Although these are important and genuine,
highlighting them as the city's main achievement shifts focus away from the
crucial relationship between culture and politics. The innovative cultural
output of Weimar arose from a revolutionary crisis in a drastically changed
world. Many key figures, including Brecht, understood that this culture was closely
linked to the revolutionary struggle. To focus too much on aesthetics risks
neglecting Weimar's political significance.
The Weimar Republic emerged from the German Revolution of
November 1918 but was quickly thwarted by Social Democracy. Led by Ebert and
Noske, the SPD violently suppressed the revolutionary movement, killed Rosa
Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, and kept the capitalist institutions and the
Junker military hierarchy unchanged. Any explanation of Weimar that ignores
this foundational betrayal—the counterrevolutionary actions of Social
Democracy—fails to truly account for subsequent events.
The so-called cultural boom of Weimar's Goldene Zwanziger
era was funded through repeated betrayals of the working class. Under pressure
from the Comintern, the KPD called off a planned insurrection at a critical
moment—an action that led to a catastrophic failure, enabling German capitalism
to stabilise temporarily. These "golden" Weimar years were merely a
brief, circumstantial pause rather than a genuine democratic achievement.
The collapse of the Weimar Republic was not mainly caused by
weak democracy or mass irrationality. Instead, it resulted directly from the
Stalinist "social fascism" theory, which falsely labelled the SPD as
equivalent to the Nazis and prevented a united working-class front against
Hitler. This was compounded by the SPD's own policies of supporting Hindenburg
and collaborating with emergency measures under Brüning and von Papen.
Trotsky's writings from that era, such as What Next? Vital Questions for the
German Proletariat and The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany are essential
resources, offering profound analysis that forecasted the catastrophe.
Nevertheless, there was still time to avert it.
The Social Democratic Party (SPD) stepped in not to lead the
revolution, but to suppress and then drown it in blood. Led by Friedrich Ebert
and Gustav Noske, the SPD allied with the old imperial military officers to
crush the revolutionary movement. They organised the Freikorps, early
fascist-style paramilitary groups, to eliminate the revolution's key leaders.
Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, founders of the Communist Party of Germany
(KPD), were pursued and killed in January 1919 under the orders of the SPD
government. The traditional Junker military aristocracy, judiciary, civil
service, major banks, and industrialists — all reactionary forces — remained
untouched behind a newly formed democratic facade. This was the original sin.
As the Historical and International Foundations of the Socialist Equality Party
(Germany) states plainly: "In 1918, the SPD had strangled the proletarian
revolution to save the bourgeois order. The result was the Weimar Republic, in
which the old forces of reaction continued to live behind a democratic
facade."
The republic experienced continual crises during its short
fourteen-year span. In 1923, it faced two major setbacks: the French occupation
of the Ruhr and a severe hyperinflation that destroyed the savings of the
middle and working classes, causing widespread despair. That year, the KPD,
guided by the Comintern, planned a revolutionary uprising but cancelled it at
the last moment, which Trotsky later called "a classic demonstration of
how it is possible to miss a perfectly exceptional revolutionary situation of
world-historic importance." German capitalism temporarily stabilised
thanks to American loans under the Dawes Plan, and the mid-1920s are often seen
as the "golden years" of Weimar—brilliant in culture, fragile
politically, and economically reliant on foreign capital.
Then came 1929. The Wall Street Crash cut off American
credit, the German economy collapsed, and unemployment exploded to over six
million, roughly a third of the workforce. The social crisis was catastrophic.
The middle classes — small shopkeepers, artisans, farmers, white-collar
employees — who had already been ruined by inflation and were now devastated by
the depression, were thrown into a desperate search for a way out. Into this
vacuum stepped Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist German Workers' Party
(NSDAP), offering an intoxicating brew of nationalist demagogy, antisemitism,
and violent scapegoating aimed at the most desperate and disoriented
petty-bourgeois layers.
As the crisis deepened, the SPD's response was to retreat,
capitulate, and appeal to the very institutions of the bourgeois state to save
it. In 1930, when President Hindenburg appointed the Catholic conservative
Heinrich Brüning as chancellor and began governing by emergency decree,
bypassing parliament altogether, the SPD tolerated this, refusing to bring down
the government. It feared revolution from below more than dictatorship from
above. In 1932, the SPD supported the re-election of the arch-reactionary field
marshal Paul von Hindenburg as president. This man would eventually appoint
Hitler as the supposed "lesser evil" against the Nazis. When von
Papen illegally deposed the SPD-led government of Prussia in a July 1932 coup,
the SPD lodged a complaint with the Supreme Court rather than mobilising its
millions of members to fight back. As the SGP historical document summarises,
drawing directly on Trotsky's analysis, the SPD's attitude was that the fate of
Germany depended "not on the fighting strength of the German
proletariat... but on whether the pure spirit of the Weimar Constitution...
shall be installed in the presidential palace."
Even more grotesque was the behaviour of the trade unions.
The ADGB (the main trade union federation) actually dissociated itself from the
SPD three and a half months before Hitler seized power, hoping to demonstrate
its "reliability" to the new order. They marched under the swastika
on May 1, 1933. The Nazis rewarded this servility on May 2 by storming union
offices, arresting and murdering union leaders, and dissolving the ADGB
entirely.
The Communist Party of Germany was founded in direct
response to the SPD's betrayal. It had millions of members and supporters, its
own armed Red Front defence organisations, and a working class willing to
fight. But under Stalin's domination of the Communist International, the KPD
pursued a line of suicidal ultra-leftism, the theory of "social
fascism." This theory held that Social Democracy and fascism were not
opposites but "twins" — that the SPD was itself "social fascist,"
and that the main enemy was not Hitler but the SPD. On this basis, the KPD
refused any united action with SPD workers against the Nazis. It even made
common cause with the Nazis on occasion, supporting a Nazi-initiated referendum
in 1931 to bring down the SPD-led Prussian state government. All the while, it
consoled its demoralised members with the slogan: "Nach Hitler, kommen
wir" "After Hitler, it's our
turn" the grotesque fantasy that
Hitler's regime would quickly collapse and the Communist revolution would
follow.
The Weimar Republic and the pseudo-lefts: Then and Now
To understand the pseudo-left's stance towards the Weimar
Republic, we first need to identify what truly led to its downfall. The Weimar
Republic didn't perish due to internal contradictions or the overwhelming rise
of fascism. Instead, it was dismantled by the organised workers' movement,
specifically by its leadership. This is the key lesson that the pseudo-left
today tries hard to conceal.
The SPD, representing the German working class, showed its
true colours with its betrayal in November 1918. Instead of leading the
revolutionary effort—which aimed to seize state power and expropriate
capital—it chose to defend the existing bourgeois order. The party was
responsible for the murders of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, suppressed
workers' councils, and upheld the Junker officer caste and state structure
that, fifteen years later, helped facilitate Hitler's rise. As noted, "the
Social Democratic Party... sided with the bourgeois order in 1914 and became
the main supporter of the bourgeois state in the Weimar Republic." In the
final years of the Weimar Republic, the SPD backed Brüning's emergency decrees,
which gradually dismantled democratic rights and undermined the working class,
thereby paving the way for Hitler rather than resisting him.
The devastating role of Stalinism followed. The KPD,
controlled by Stalin through the Comintern, dismissed Trotsky's urgent plea for
a united front of Communist and Social Democratic workers against the Nazis.
Instead, it adopted the destructive "social fascism" thesis, claiming
that the SPD was equivalent to fascism and that there was no real difference
between bourgeois democracy and fascist dictatorship. This was not just a
tactical error but a politically damaging disorientation that froze the German
working class, separated Communist workers from Social Democratic workers, and
at times even led the KPD to collaborate with the Nazis against the SPD, such
as in the 1931 Prussian referendum. Hitler’s rise to power in January 1933
occurred without organised resistance from the German working class, despite
the SPD and KPD each having millions of members and their own armed units. This
catastrophe proved Trotsky's view that the Communist International was no
longer a revolutionary force and that the Fourth International needed to be
established.
The Frankfurt School
This reveals the connection to the modern pseudo-left. The
Frankfurt School—comprising Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, and
Benjamin—originated directly from the confusion following Germany's defeat.
Notably, "Horkheimer and Adorno do not mention [the role of Social
Democracy and Stalinism] once and avoid discussing Stalinism in all their other
works." This silence was intentional. The Frankfurt School crafted a
comprehensive theoretical framework—covering Critical Theory, the Dialectic of
Enlightenment, and the theory of the "authoritarian
personality"—which attributed fascism to mass psychology, the
irrationality of the masses, and the failures of the "Enlightenment,"
largely ignoring the political betrayals by the SPD and the Comintern.
Why is this important? By framing the crisis of
revolutionary leadership as the main explanation, the Frankfurt School adopted
a different political stance: moving away from building a revolutionary Marxist
party rooted in the working class, and instead emphasising cultural criticism,
identity politics, and pressure on bourgeois institutions. This shift lies at
the heart of the modern pseudo-left, as David North details in 'The Frankfurt
School, Postmodernism, and the Politics of the Pseudo-Left.' The Frankfurt
School's move away from viewing the working class as the revolutionary agent—to
focusing on the "critical intellectual" and later prioritising
racial, gender, and cultural issues—set the stage for all that now claims to be
'left,' but fails to challenge capitalism.
The Contemporary Pseudo-Left
The contrast between the 1930s and today is more than
superficial; it’s structural. With the neo-fascist Alternative for Germany
(AfD) now Germany’s second-largest party, pseudo-left groups like Marx 21, the
SAV, and RIO are, in a modified form, repeating the political crimes that
facilitated Hitler’s rise. Marx 21, influenced by Tony Cliff's International
Socialist Tendency, cynically invokes Trotsky's "revolver-poison"
analogy to justify demanding that the bourgeois state ban the AfD, directly
contradicting Trotsky's actual stance. Trotsky opposed the SPD's reliance on
the Weimar state and police to fight fascism, understanding that the state was
not neutral but filled with reactionary elements. History confirmed this: it
was Hindenburg, the Reichswehr, big business, and the judiciary—all
institutions the SPD appealed to for protection—that implemented Hitler's
appointment. Germany's domestic intelligence agency (the Office for the
Protection of the Constitution) was, until recently, led by fascist Hans-Georg
Maassen, who secretly met with AfD representatives. Calling on this agency to
defend democracy from fascism is the twenty-first-century equivalent of the SPD
crying "Help! Intervene!" to the Weimar state.
The SAV, descended from the British Militant Tendency, tends
to praise the trade union bureaucracy as a defender against the right and
envisions a Left Party–SPD–Green coalition as a "democratic
alternative" to the AfD. Yet, as Germany's ruling coalition, the SPD and
Greens have carried out the AfD's refugee deportation policies, approved the
largest war budget since WWII, and frequently collaborated with the AfD to
normalise its presence in parliament. At the same time, trade unions have agreed
to austerity measures with the government and corporations. The SAV's approach
isn't aimed at "pushing them left" but at aligning working-class
frustration with the very forces responsible for it.
RIO, associated with the Morenoite Trotskyist
Fraction-Fourth International, claims to support a "united front" and
"anti-capitalism from below." In reality, it partners with the SPD,
Greens, trade unions, and Fridays for Future. This strategy conflicts with
Trotsky's original concept of the united front, which was meant to awaken
workers from Social Democratic stagnation and rally them around a revolutionary
program. Conversely, RIO's "front" seems designed to align workers
with bourgeois parties, often employing radical rhetoric.
What unites these trends, both historically and socially, is
their class origin. The Frankfurt School consisted of segments of the bourgeois
intelligentsia that had forsaken the working class. Currently, the pseudo-left
champions privileged middle-class groups—such as academics, NGO workers, and
trade union bureaucrats—who benefit from the current system enough to be wary
of a genuine socialist revolution. Their emphasis on identity politics, state
intervention, and parliamentary tactics reflects their social standing. Just as
the KPD's "social fascism" idea was driven more by the needs of
Moscow's bureaucracy than the interests of German workers, today's pseudo-left
ideology mirrors the interests of a social class with a very different
relationship to capital than that of the working class.
Why Does a Marxist historiography Matter Today
The fall of the Weimar Republic was not due to democracy
being fragile, mass irrationality, or fascism being an inevitable historical
force. Instead, it collapsed because the organised workers' movement was led by
parties — one reformist, one Stalinist — that, for their own class-based
reasons, refused to unite the working class in a revolutionary fight against
capitalism. The key takeaway is not "defend liberal democracy" or
"vote for the lesser evil," but that capitalism's crises lead to
fascism.
Only revolutionary working-class mobilisation under genuine
Marxist leadership can prevent this. This is the core task of the Fourth
International — both then and now. In short, Hoyer's attempt to portray Weimar
as a democratic success is ultimately a liberal ideological exercise. It aims
to extract lessons about defending "liberal democracy" against modern
populism, rather than the true historical lesson that, without a revolutionary
Marxist party leading the working class to power, capitalism's crises breed
fascism. Trotsky's lesson remains highly relevant today.
