"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 grasp Katja Hoyer's role in recent historiography, it's
important to place her work within the larger academic context. Her latest
book's introduction highlights the significance of the 'Ordinary Germans'
historiography, a field shaped since the postwar period by tensions between
Marxist class analysis and idealist, culturalist, and nationalist viewpoints.
The issue of 'ordinary Germans' goes beyond academic debate, as it is crucial
for understanding fascism and the working class's capacity to oppose it. Since
the 1990s, debates about 'ordinary Germans' have been led by three main
perspectives, none of which fully embrace Marxism. Hoyer’s work synthesises
and, in some ways, combines elements from all three positions.
The main view associated with Daniel Goldhagen's 1996
bestseller, 'Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the
Holocaust,' suggests that the Holocaust was perpetrated by "ordinary
Germans" influenced by deeply rooted, centuries-old "eliminationist
antisemitism" unique to German culture. Goldhagen claimed this belief was
so deeply embedded that it could be activated without coercion or specific
circumstances; Germans killed Jews simply because they were Germans. However, David
North's 1997 critique, "The Myth of 'Ordinary Germans'," highlights a
significant methodological flaw: the concept of "ordinary Germans" is
an overly broad, abstract category lacking internal differentiation, rendering
it scientifically meaningless.
North points out that questioning whether "ordinary
Germans" refers to a factory worker, shopkeeper, lumpenproletarian, Junker
landowner, or industrialist shows how this broad category overlooks class
differences within German society. This oversight unintentionally strengthens
the Nazi idea of a unified Volk in a distorted manner. Goldhagen's concept of
ewige Deutsche (eternal Germans) as enemies of Jews mirrors the Nazi idea of
ewige Jude as enemies of Germans. Both are racial-nationalist constructs that
ignore the complexities of history and social class distinctions.
Moreover, as North highlights, the Goldhagen thesis
effectively overlooks the German socialist movement. In a 622-page book on
Germans and the Holocaust, there is not a single reference to Karl Marx,
Friedrich Engels, August Bebel, or the Social Democratic Party, which by 1912
was the most populous party in the Reichstag, mainly supported by the German
working class. This omission is deliberate and structurally necessary because
acknowledging a large socialist workers' movement with millions of Germans would
directly challenge the premise that all Germans shared a uniform antisemitic
worldview.
Götz Aly's 'Hitler's Beneficiaries' (2005) presents a view
that ordinary Germans supported Hitler mainly for economic reasons,
specifically from the profits gained through the confiscation of Jewish
property, a Nazi welfare system financed by expropriation and war spoils.
Although this perspective is more materialistic than Goldhagen's, it remains
problematic: it depicts the working class as passive recipients of stolen
wealth, overlooks acts of resistance, and broadly categorises
"Germans" as beneficiaries, oversimplifying the clear class
differences in who benefited from the Nazi economy.
The third key perspective to Hoyer is Volksgemeinschaft
historiography. Since the 2000s, it has been the dominant view in German
academic history, associated with scholars like Michael Wildt, Frank Bajohr,
and the 'Nazi society' social history movement. This approach examines how the
Nazi concept of the national community was actively constructed, practised, and
embraced by major segments of German society, rather than imposed from above.
It emphasises participation, consent, the social joys of belonging, and how the
Mittelstand (middle classes) and parts of the working class were integrated
into a racially defined national identity.
Hoyer and the Volksgemeinschaft Turn
Hoyer's 'Weimar' intentionally challenges the so-called
"Weimar syndrome"—the common view that interprets the republic as
only a stepping stone to Nazism. She assesses the republic on its own terms,
focusing on the everyday lives of ordinary people who did not foresee the
impending disaster. She underscores Weimar's cultural vibrancy, authentic
social reforms, the extension of women's rights and sexual freedoms, and the
democratic activism of the working class through unions and political parties.
A key point is that dismissive retrospective determinism, which claims fascism
was an unavoidable result of Weimar's developments, is poor history. Yet,
Hoyer's corrective swings too far in the opposite direction—an error linked
directly to the Volksgemeinschaft historiography.
The main issue goes beyond emphasis and points to what is
essentially missing. When Hoyer and other Volksgemeinschaft historians examine
the daily lives of "ordinary people" during the Weimar Republic or
Nazism, they often conflate class, national identity, and the populace. The
German working class, which nearly seized socialist power during the November
Revolution of 1918, consistently backed the SPD and KPD throughout Weimar and
maintained underground resistance networks in Berlin, Hamburg, and the Ruhr
even after Hitler's rise to power.
Workers are often depicted as a homogeneous group of
"Germans" experiencing the republic, depression, and Nazi ascent in
largely the same way. Hoyer’s historiographical approach, despite differing in
some details from Goldhagen's, arrives at a similar conclusion but through a
different method: it downplays "the relationship between capitalism and
fascism" and portrays "all workers, the petty bourgeoisie,
industrialists, and bankers as 'the Germans.'"
The contradicting evidence to the main narrative is
substantial but frequently ignored in this historiography. Hans-Rainer
Sandvoss's thorough archival investigation into Berlin workers' opposition to
the Nazi regime, using Gestapo files that only became available after 1989,
showed that the working class in Berlin and other labour centres mostly stayed
resistant to Nazi propaganda for years after Hitler's rise to power.
A Gestapo report from March 1936 observed that in Berlin,
the Führer salute was rarely heard outside officials, uniformed personnel, or
visitors from provincial areas. The Nazi Party often faced difficulties in
industrial regions like mining areas, Hamburg's docks, and factories. This
isn't romanticising; it reflects the historical record. However, this
resistance disappears entirely in histories that portray all Germans as
uniformly "ordinary."
Why does this historiography continue to hold influence? Its
roots are in the political and intellectual climate formed after the Soviet
Union's fall and the so-called "triumph of capitalism." Since the
1990s, many historians have justified moving away from objective analysis,
citing the collapse of the Soviet Union and East Germany and capitalism's
apparent victory. They have substituted authentic scientific methods with
subjective, postmodern ideologies.
Abandoning class as the main focus of analysis reflects a
politically motivated decision rather than neutrality. As David North points
out in his critique of Goldhagen, during the postwar era, examining fascism's
class aspects through psychological, cultural, or national-identity
perspectives was tied to the Cold War agenda of discrediting Marxism. This also
obscured the fact that fascism was fundamentally the capitalist ruling class's
response to revolutionary threats from organised workers. Goldhagen treats this
as a matter of German national psychology, whereas Volksgemeinschaft scholars
approach it more subtly by emphasising consent, participation, and social
integration in daily life. This suggests that "the Germans"
collectively created fascism, instead of recognising that a specific class
imposed it upon a divided society—one in which millions were coerced,
terrorised, and ultimately exterminated.
Regarding Hoyer, another aspect is worth noting. Her earlier
publication, Beyond the Wall (2023), portrays the GDR as a society with notable
social achievements and widespread support. This aligns with the approach
typically used for Stalinism: emphasising the daily lives of "ordinary
people" to soften, contextualise, and justify a regime defined mainly by
bureaucratic dictatorship over the working class. In both Weimar/Nazi Germany
and East Germany, focusing on "ordinary experience" seeks to reduce
political and class divisions and encourage sociological empathy.
Leon Trotsky analysed Weimar Germany and German fascism in
his own contemporary writings, which remain unmatched in their insight. He
viewed fascism not as a product of German national character or broad social
trends, but as a strategy used by the capitalist elite to rally the
impoverished petty bourgeoisie—such as shopkeepers, artisans, clerks, and
disillusioned farmers—against the organised working class. This tactic became
especially prominent when bourgeois democracy failed to address the social
crisis.
In his 1933 book, 'What is National Socialism?', he expands
on this view by explaining how the impoverishment of the petty
bourgeoisie—barely concealed behind their synthetic silk ties and
socks—undermined all official beliefs, particularly democratic parliamentary
principles. During the tense period marked by war, defeat, reparations,
inflation, the Ruhr occupation, crises, and despair, the petty bourgeoisie
turned away from the old parties that had betrayed them. This analysis centres
not on the cultural attitudes of "ordinary Germans" but on class
struggles amid a deep capitalist crisis. A key question was revolutionary
leadership: would the organised working class seize power, or would the petty
bourgeoisie, lacking a viable working-class alternative, be drawn into a
movement backed by large capital interests? The outcome was influenced more by
betrayals from the SPD and the Comintern than by any inherent psychological
traits of a monolithic "German people."
Mainstream German historiography consistently dismisses this
framework, from Goldhagen to Götz Aly, the Volksgemeinschaft school, and Katja
Hoyer. This rejection is intentional, as it directly highlights the real
factors influencing the outcome: class struggle, the crisis of revolutionary
leadership, and the counterrevolutionary roles played by Social Democracy and
Stalinism. These insights remain highly pertinent today, given the rise of the
AfD and the pseudo-left, which divert working-class opposition into bourgeois
safe zones. Recognising these truths does not require a gentler or more
sympathetic history.
Katja Hoyer, a historian with German and British roots,
authored "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), offering an alternative
view of the GDR. Her book on Weimar aims to depict the republic not merely as a
precursor to Nazi catastrophe—a "Weimar syndrome" she explicitly
seeks to move beyond—but as a vibrant, genuine democratic experiment with
significant cultural, social, and political achievements. From a Marxist
perspective, this type of liberal rehabilitation faces serious methodological
and political challenges.
Like many liberal histories, Hoyer highlights Weimar's
vibrant cultural scene—covering the Bauhaus, Expressionism, Brecht, Grosz,
cabaret, and sexual liberalism. While these are important, emphasising them as
the city's main achievement shifts attention away from the vital connection
between culture and politics. Weimar's cultural advancements emerged from a
revolutionary crisis in a world undergoing drastic change. Many influential
figures, including Brecht, recognised that this culture was deeply intertwined
with the revolutionary struggle. Overemphasising aesthetics risks overlooking
Weimar's political importance.
The Weimar Republic arose from the German Revolution of
November 1918, but Social Democracy rapidly undermined it. Under Ebert and Noske,
the SPD violently suppressed the revolutionary movement, murdered Rosa
Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, and maintained the capitalist systems and Junker
military hierarchy. Any account of Weimar overlooking this fundamental
betrayal—the counterrevolutionary role of Social Democracy—misses the true
causes of later events.
The so-called cultural boom during Weimar's Goldene
Zwanziger era was financed by repeated betrayals of the working class. Under
pressure from the Comintern, the KPD canceled a planned insurrection at a
crucial time—resulting in a disastrous failure that temporarily stabilized
German capitalism. These "golden" Weimar years were just a fleeting,
circumstantial pause rather than true democratic success.
The Weimar Republic's fall was mainly due to the Stalinist
"social fascism" theory, which wrongly equated the SPD with the Nazis
and hindered a united working-class front against Hitler. This was worsened by
the SPD's support for Hindenburg and its cooperation with emergency measures
under Brüning and von Papen. Trotsky's writings from that period, including
'What Next? Vital Questions for the German Proletariat' and 'The Struggle
Against Fascism in Germany,' provide crucial analysis, predicting the disaster.
Yet, there was still an opportunity to prevent it.
The Social Democratic Party (SPD) entered not to lead the
revolution but to suppress and ultimately quash it violently. Under Friedrich
Ebert and Gustav Noske, the SPD partnered with former imperial military
officers to crush the revolutionary movement. They formed the Freikorps,
paramilitary groups with fascist characteristics, to target and eliminate the
revolution's leaders. Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, founders of the
Communist Party of Germany (KPD), were hunted down and murdered in January 1919
by orders from the SPD government. The reactionary forces—the Junker military
aristocracy, judiciary, civil service, major banks, and industrialists—remained
untouched amid the appearance of a new democratic system. This was the initial
sin. As the Historical and International Foundations of the Socialist Equality
Party (Germany) clearly states: "In 1918, the SPD had strangled the
proletarian revolution to save the bourgeois order. The result was the Weimar
Republic, in which the old reactionary forces continued to exist behind a
democratic façade."
The republic faced ongoing crises during its brief
fourteen-year existence. In 1923, it encountered two major challenges: the
French occupation of the Ruhr and severe hyperinflation that wiped out the
savings of the middle and working classes, leading to widespread despair. That
same year, the KPD, under the guidance of the Comintern, planned a
revolutionary uprising but ultimately cancelled it, which Trotsky later
described as "a classic demonstration of how it is possible to miss a
perfectly exceptional revolutionary situation of world-historic
importance." German capitalism was temporarily stabilized by American
loans through the Dawes Plan, and the mid-1920s are often called the
"golden years" of Weimar—remarkable in culture, fragile politically,
and economically dependent on foreign capital.
In 1929, the Wall Street Crash ended American credit,
leading to a collapse of the German economy and a surge in unemployment, which
rose to over six million—about a third of the workforce. This caused a severe
social crisis. The middle classes—small shopkeepers, artisans, farmers, and
white-collar workers—already weakened by inflation and further devastated by
the depression, desperately searched for solutions. During this period, Adolf
Hitler and the NSDAP emerged, offering an alluring mix of nationalist rhetoric,
antisemitism, and violent scapegoating targeted at the most vulnerable and
confused petty-bourgeois groups.
As the crisis intensified, the SPD responded by withdrawing,
surrendering, and appealing to the bourgeois state's institutions for help. In
1930, President Hindenburg appointed Catholic conservative Heinrich Brüning as
chancellor and began ruling via emergency decrees, bypassing parliament. The
SPD tolerated this, fearing revolution from below more than dictatorship from
above. In 1932, they supported the re-election of the reactionary Field Marshal
Paul von Hindenburg as president. Hindenburg would soon appoint Hitler as the
"lesser evil" against the Nazis. When von Papen illegally removed the
SPD-led Prussian government in July 1932, the SPD filed a court complaint
rather than mobilize its millions to resist. According to the SGP historical document,
citing Trotsky, the SPD believed that Germany's fate 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."
The trade unions' conduct was even more disturbing. The
ADGB, the primary trade union federation, publicly distanced itself from the
SPD three and a half months before Hitler came to power, aiming to show its
loyalty to the new regime. They participated in a May 1, 1933 march under the
swastika. In response, the Nazis punished this act of compliance on May 2 by
raiding union offices, arresting and killing union leaders, and completely
dissolving the ADGB.
The Communist Party of Germany was formed as a direct
reaction to the SPD's betrayal. It boasted millions of members, supporters, its
own armed Red Front defense groups, and a willing working class. However, under
Stalin's influence over the Communist International, the KPD adopted a suicidal
ultra-left stance, promoting the theory of "social fascism." This
theory claimed that Social Democracy and fascism were essentially the same,
labeling the SPD as "social fascist" and arguing that the true enemy
was not Hitler but the SPD. Consequently, the KPD refused to unite with SPD
workers against the Nazis, sometimes even supporting them, such as in 1931 when
they backed a Nazi-led referendum to overthrow the SPD-controlled Prussian
government. Meanwhile, the party reassured its disheartened members with the
slogan: "Nach Hitler, kommen wir" — "After Hitler, it's our
turn," a misguided belief that Hitler's rule would soon end, allowing the
Communist revolution to erupt.
The Weimar Republic and the pseudo-lefts: Then and Now
To understand the pseudo-left's view of the Weimar Republic,
we must first recognize what actually caused its collapse. The Weimar Republic
didn't fall because of internal contradictions or the rise of fascism alone.
Instead, it was dismantled by the organized workers' movement, especially its
leadership. This is the key lesson the pseudo-left today often tries to hide.
The SPD, representing the German working class, revealed its true nature in
November 1918 by betraying the revolutionary effort aimed at taking state power
and expropriating capital. Instead, it chose to defend the bourgeois order. The
party was responsible for the murders of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht,
suppressed workers' councils, and upheld the Junker officers and state structures
that, fifteen years later, helped enable 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, the SPD supported Brüning's emergency decrees, which gradually
eroded democratic rights and weakened the working class, paving the way for
Hitler instead of fighting against 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 rose to power in January 1933 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: Hindenburg,
the Reichswehr, big business, and the judiciary—all institutions the SPD
appealed to for protection—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.
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.
