The German Right, 1918–1930: Political Parties, Organized Interests, and Patriotic Associations in the Struggle against Weimar Democracy by Larry Eugene Jones (review)

Larry Eugene Jones's remarkable study of the German Right in the Weimar Republic constitutes an authoritative English-language history of this tremendously important and consequential subject. Based on a vast array of source material compiled over years of research from over thirty different public and private archives, as well as hundreds of other sources, it is hard to imagine another scholar matching the erudition that Jones offers his readers on this subject.

A basic question lies at the book's core: why did a conservative, non-Nazi political party fail to emerge in the Weimar Republic as a viable alternative to the eventual triumph of the Hitler movement? In answering this question, Jones focuses much of his attention on the German National People's Party (or DNVP), the largest and most successful of several conservative political groups in this era. Jones is hardly the first scholar to devote attention to this party. However, his particular contribution explains in detail the larger political universe in which the DNVP operated and shows convincingly why it ultimately failed to assume the mantle of political leadership on the German Right. In studying this broader context, Jones also provides detailed insights into other economic interest groups, radical nationalist and patriotic associations, and a wide range of social and cultural forces that shaped the party's development.

Jones clearly stakes out his argument in the introduction: the disunity of the German Right was an essential political factor in the Weimar Republic's collapse and Hitler's ultimate success. He pursues this argument consistently throughout the book's eighteen main chapters and the epilogue. This thesis takes issue with earlier studies stressing stronger lines of continuity between Germany's established political Right and the upstart Nazi movement. As Jones makes very clear, substantial divisions existed both within the DNVP and among the wide array of groups that orbited within the bizarre galaxy of right-wing politics. This disunity made the formation of a stable and long-term conservative political party, one that might have blunted the popular appeal of Nazism later in the 1920s, very difficult indeed.

This failure had much to do with the DNVP's inability to resolve a fundamental dilemma. Jones details how the party gained increasing popular support in the republic's first years by stridently opposing government policies that allegedly threatened Germany's national pride and honor. However, after the party's electoral success in the 1924 elections, its leaders faced growing pressure to join a national government. This forced a shift from the comfort of angry opposition to the distinctly more challenging task of shaping government policy and working with other political leaders to advance a broader agenda based on political compromise. The DNVP's participation in two national governments in 1925 and 1927 laid bare its basic inability to move successfully from the national opposition to an effective and popular ruling party.

Jones recounts in remarkable detail how key conflicts within the party and between the party and its associated interest groups further undermined the DNVP's development as a unified, popular political force. One of Jones's real strengths is his ability to tease out the often obscure and complex connections between various groups and personalities on the right-wing scene and to explain how their individual actions and views affected the larger political destiny of the German Right. Jones demonstrates that the DNVP's leadership constantly faced various political, economic, cultural, and nationalist factions that sought to push and pull the party in multiple directions to pursue their own agenda. While this is certainly a feature of any modern political party, the range of interests connected to the DNVP made reaching consensus nearly impossible. For example, could the party effectively represent the economic interests of small farmers, industrialists, shopkeepers...