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

Swett's excellent study shows how confrontation and violence between rival political militias in Berlin contributed to the dissolution of the Weimar Republic. Making extensive use of the methods of both urban history and urban sociology, Swett paints a portrait of an overcrowded working-class area of the Kreuzberg district characterized by five-story tenement buildings, courtyards stocked with livestock, a ubiquitous culture of drinking centered on the local pubs, and patriarchal violence against women in marriage. The social and generational crisis precipitated by World War I made matters worse. Unemployed youths found themselves in the streets for much of the day, facing both poverty and potential loss of dignity and self-respect. There they formed gangs.

The setting for the rise in gang violence was, paradoxically, the more stable neighborhoods. With the stagnation of the economy came a decline in migration to the cities. As people moved to cheaper apartments for economic reasons, neighbors continued to be in contact or to recognize each other. Though violence between Communist and Nazi gangs may have made use of political slogans, the driving issues were personal and "neighborly": who controlled which streets, which pubs, and which women. Like street gangs in the United States, the Berlin militia members had a clearly articulated set of rules about how to interact when violence became an option and about which types of violence were legitimate. In short, the violence that Swett describes was not a chaotic product of anomie but a relatively structured set of actions governing a community in crisis.

As Swett observes, even Communists and Nazis directly involved in street fights often gave local rather than political reasons for their actions. Political ideology did not drive the culture of violence. Swett shows how little local Communists were under direct control of central leadership, for example, and how at times Nazi leaders had to restrain their street fighters. But politics mattered. The Republic whose capital was Berlin was strongly associated with the Social Democrats (spd). Police and social workers associated with the spd appeared to threaten the social order of the neighborhoods. The riots of May 1, 1929, seem to have started as confrontations between taunting youths and overreacting policemen. Soon, however, political meaning was imputed to the events. spd-controlled police were blamed either for their repression of radical gangs or for their inability to maintain the order desired by other community residents. Radical opponents were drawn either to the Communists, for their "allure of the forbidden," or to the Nazis, for their call to "order." Notably, both groups offered financial incentives to attract youth impoverished in the economic hard times.

The one aspect of Swett's book that could be improved upon concerns the connection between violence and politics. Perhaps under the influence of sociological studies of neighborhood gangs in the United States, Swett's study suggests a dearth of political ideology at the local level. But utopian political images, from Nazi representations of order and loyalty to Communist calls for solidarity, are ubiquitous in Swett's study. These, and not just local violence, may help to explain how and why neighborhoods in social and economic crisis, preoccupied with their own problems, nonetheless turned out in large numbers in 1932—to vote for the opponents of the Republic.