Neighbors and Enemies:The Culture of Radicalism in Berlin, 1929-1933 (review)

Many of our current understandings of how the Nazi regime functioned after 1933 would not have been possible without the perspectives provided by the "history of everyday life" (Alltagsgeschichte). Alltagsgeschichte has shown that ordinary Germans were not passive objects of Nazi rule but historical subjects who actively participated in the construction of the Nazi dictatorship. Alltagsgeschichte has less often been deployed in historians' attempts to understand Hitler's rise to power before 1933. Some historians have concentrated on the reasons why more and more Germans came to vote for Hitler. Others have focused upon the conservative elites who lifted Hitler into power because they wanted to destroy Weimar democracy and replace it with an authoritarian system. Historians interested in the role played by German workers have pointed to the disastrous effects of the divisions between Social Democrats and Communists which prevented a broad front of organized resistance to Nazism. Few have, however, investigated the relationship between the dissolution of the Weimar Republic and the "politics of everyday life" in working-class neighborhoods during the Depression. The achievement of Pamela E. Swett's challenging new book is to show that this question deserves more attention than it has so far received.

Swett argues that the Depression fundamentally transformed the nature of politics in heavily working class districts of Berlin, making local issues, conflicts and actions far more significant than they had been before 1929. As the politics that mattered to working-class Berliners became ever more local, and as politics moved from the institutions, associations and meeting halls to the streets, it became more and more difficult for any of the existing political parties to control their constituencies. Swett insists that "political radicalism was foremost a local response to the erosion of cultural norms and power structures in Berlin's neighborhoods rather than the product of party control and ideology"(p.294). The local politics of Berlin neighborhoods or Kieze were increasingly directed against the intrusions of "outside" authorities and claimants to power such as the police, social workers and even the very political parties (Nazis, Communists and Social Democrats) that wanted to speak for ordinary Berliners.

Swett grounds her analysis in a thick description of the social geography of 1920s Berlin and of the local neighborhood relationships of Berlin workers with a particular focus on the Nostizstrasse Kiez in Kreuzberg. Patterns of housing, transportation networks and leisure time activities all receive detailed attention. Swett then discusses the challenges to local social structures and power relationships and the tensions injected into family and neighborhood life by the onset of the Depression in 1929. Particularly important conflicts developed along the fault-lines of gender and generation. Swett provides an excellent discussion of the ways in which the Depression eroded male work-centered cultures and dissolved the ordering sense of time as well as the meaning and purpose that these cultures provided. Women were kept constantly busy with unpaid domestic work, which only became more demanding as the Depression required new strategies for family economic survival. Men were reduced to "killing time" on street corners. Swett argues that men responded to their disorientation and humiliation by withdrawing into a local culture of radicalism from which women were excluded: "It was through radical politics that many men sought to halt the dissolution of male authority in the home and neighborhood" (p.91). The Depression hit younger men even harder than their fathers and older brothers. Youth unemployment rates were astronomical. Many young men never even entered the labor market. Increasingly targeted by the police and by social workers as potentially delinquent and dangerous, young unemployed males experienced the loss of control over their lives and their neighborhoods even more intensely than older men. It is not surprising, then, that young, unemployed men were among the most active participants in the kinds of violence Swett sees as attempts to re-assert claims to local power and control over local territory.

Swet's...