Ordinary Germans in Extraordinary Times: The Nazi Revolution in Hildesheim

5. Coordination

131 5 Coordination AN EXTENSIVE LITERATURE in modern German history focuses on the process of coordination through which the Nazi regime dissolved the vibrant diversity of formal institutions of civil society (newspapers, political parties , schools, and associations) that had been part and parcel of the different socio-political milieux of pre-Nazi German society. They sought to transform these multiple organizations into solitary units of the totalitarian party-state, subordinated to the will of the Führer. Meanwhile, coordination presumed social aryanization. The unity and homogeneity of Aryan organizations depended on the exclusion of Jews. As the political scientist Raul Hilberg asserts: “the isolation of the Jews in Germany was accomplished relatively early. Before the compulsory middle names Israel and Sara were decreed, and long before the mandatory star was instituted, Jews were already stigmatized and sometimes shunned” (1992: 196; see also Kaplan 1998). Though critical of its racial elements, the classic accounts of this process suggest that, unintentionally, coordination helped modernize Germany and prepare the way for a democratic society. It wiped away the artificial restraints on upward mobility and self-cultivation that had kept most Germans in their place. The opportunities afforded by the Third Reich were often more a matter of status and consciousness than actual power and wealth (Dahrendorf 1965; Schoenbaum 1966; see also Arendt 1951; Berman 1997; Feldman 1986; Kaeble 1978; Lederer 1967; Matzerath and Volkmann 1977: 86–117; Parsons 1954; H. A. Turner 1975: 117–40; Wehler 1975). Coordination was also more limited than initially presumed, especially for the working classes and women (Mason 1972, 1976; Stevenson 1975), and it involved the local elite acting with relative independence of their political leaders as much as obeying orders descending from the political center of the Nazi dictatorship (Fritzsche 1990; Koshar 1986; Wagner 1998; see also Kershaw 1989). Still, the presumption remains that Germany was coordinated to fit Nazi principles, and thereby modernized, from the top down. From the perspective of everyday life, Detlev Peukert questioned whether these changes were as radical as had been presumed. Viewed from the top 132 Ordinary Germans in Extraordinary Times down, he hypothesized that historians exploring “perceptible, if not statistically provable, shifts in values and changes in social behavior” would be forced to conclude “that national socialism greatly loosened the previously firm hold of traditional social environments and systems of values.” Viewed from the bottom up, however, national socialist policies of coordination adapted to long-term trends in socio-economic modernization rather than providing for a particularly powerful new thrust toward those outcomes (1982b: 181–82; see also 1985, 1987; Broszat 1985). The Nazi revolution did in fact provide a powerful new thrust towards modernization by politicizing , and thereby undermining, the previously firm hold of traditional customs, particularly in informal social relations. Yet the Nazi revolution also relied centrally on pre-existing dynamics of cultural negotiation. This chapter will focus on Nazi flags, uniforms, and salutations. It will show that over the course of the 1930s, seemingly ordinary Hildesheimers coordinated their customs of conviviality to fit the principles of the Nazi movement. Some were motivated in part by Nazi ideology, but all were laying claim to status and power in the new order promised by the Nazis. Akin to David Schoenbaum, I will argue that Hildesheimers participated in this Nazi revolution in the hope that their real status under Hitler might finally correspond to their fantasies of niveau. Sometimes they acted in anticipation of political victory in 1933. Often, as Robert Gellately has argued, they acted independent of direct pressure from the Nazi dictatorship. To be sure, the coordination of conviviality depended on Hitler to seize power and implement policies based on Nazi principles. But equally, Hitler depended on ordinary Hildesheimers to coordinate conviviality to fit Nazi principles: to transform their friends and neighbors into Aryans and Jews. This reinvention of convivial traditions (Hobsbaum and Ranger 1983), seemed to preserve old values but, in fact, created new ones. Because coordination challenged the normative authority of convivial forms of intimacy and reciprocity, it effectively opened the possibility for ordinary Hildesheimers to modernize their informal social relations. They could thus rid themselves of the traditional habits that preserved social hierarchies and, in the process, could open their society to self-cultivation. Also akin to the individual aspiration for niveau, this monstrous project in social engineering was modern in the sense that it was utopian (or rather dystopian, Bauman 1997: 80; Peukert 1982b, 1987). Above all, coordination presumed a typically modern correlation between...