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  • Michael Horlacher: Ein Agrarfunktionär in der Weimarer Republik by Johann Kirchinger
  • Jonathan Osmond
Michael Horlacher: Ein Agrarfunktionär in der Weimarer Republik. By Johann Kirchinger. Düsseldorf: Droste, 2011. Pp. 592. Cloth E68.00. ISBN 978-3770053063.

In 1946 a political rival of Michael Horlacher (1888-1957) reminded him unkindly of his alleged behavior upon returning to Munich after casting his vote in the Reichstag for the Ermächtigungsgesetz ("Enabling Act") of March 24, 1933. Attracting the attention of all the other guests in the wine cellar, Horlacher—"a Christian politician," it was pointedly remarked—was drunk, cursing, and weeping. If the story was true, the man had good cause for his distress. Only forty-five years old at the time, he saw in ruins a career that had established him as an influential figure in the politics and economy of Bavaria, one who also enjoyed access to policy-making at Reich level. He had just been suspended as director of the Bayerische Landesbauernkammer, and had now participated in the Bayerische Volkspartei's (BVP) collective submission to National Socialist power. The following twelve years were spent in "internal exile" in Munich and Bad Tölz, as well as in incarceration in Dachau in the summer of 1944.

This was the low point of a public life that had prospered during World War I and the Weimar Republic—and then revived in the years after 1945. It is recounted in Johann Kirchinger's admirable study, which is primarily a political biography but which raises interesting questions about career paths, bourgeois ideology, social and political structures, as well as the agrarian economy in Bavaria and the Reich. Using a wide range of archival sources and some private papers, Kirchinger gives a meticulous account of the travails of agricultural politics. Through the eyes of one man are viewed the wartime and postwar command economy (Zwangswirtschaft), the 1920s debates about productivity and protection, the economic catastrophe, the founding of the Grüne Front to unify the agricultural interest, and the assault of the National Socialists.

Although he became a prominent representative of the agrarian interest and of political Catholicism, Horlacher did not exactly qualify from birth for these roles. His mother was a Catholic maidservant from an impoverished peasant family, but his father was a well-to-do construction engineer of the Lutheran persuasion. Horlacher was educated at a nonconfessional grammar school in predominantly Protestant Nuremberg, studied law and political science in Munich, and had no agricultural background whatever. This is a major theme of Kirchinger's, namely that Horlacher was a prime representative of a type of bureaucrat who represented a sectoral interest but was not of it. As Kirchinger puts it, Horlacher was an "autoritärer Agrarfunktionär." This role was contested by others who felt strongly that peasants should represent themselves. Horlacher and the other so-called Bauerndoktoren from the Bayerischer Christlicher Bauernverein, such as Georg Heim and Sebastian Schlittenbauer, frequently came under fire from associations led by farmers, particularly the Bayerischer Bauernbund. Perhaps because he was conscious of this lack of [End Page 712] credentials, Horlacher adopted a peasant persona, using an earthy mode of speech and claiming an agricultural background. By 1949 he was described by a journalist as looking like an old peasant, though one exhibiting the higher intelligence provided by academic training.

Kirchinger brings out well the ambiguities of Horlacher's political, economic, and religious affiliations. Though undoubtedly a man of the political right, he did not correspond to expected stereotypes or maintain consistent standpoints. He was a loyal German patriot in World War I and opposed to the revolution, but showed little if any monarchist fervor. He ascribed to the concept of the Ordnungszelle Bayern and supported the formation of the Einwohnerwehren ("citizens' militia"). At various points in his career he expressed cynicism about parliamentary democracy and support for berufsständische Vertretung, that corporate mainstay of the right. In practice, he operated at Bavarian state and Reich levels as a parliamentarian willing to work with most strands of political opinion as needs demanded. In 1923 he had some positive things to say about National Socialism, and contributed anti-Jewish analyses of Germany's...

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