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4 Populism
- University of Nebraska Press
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59 POPULISM ——4—— IN THE YEARS FOLLOWING WORLD WAR I, Munich roiled with political instability and intrigue. The home of lederhosen and Oktoberfest, of Catholic piety and agrarian yeomanry, Munich had variously been the capital of the Bavarian monarchy, an independent communist city-state, and finally part of the unloved Weimar Republic. Fringe political parties held a bedlam of meetings, speeches, and rallies in the city’s celebrated beer halls. There were communist, socialist, Christian, and a gaggle of nationalist and antiSemitic parties. There were parties against anything one cared to be against, and compromise was a rare occurrence. On January 5, 1919, a new party held its first organizational meeting in the upper story of the Hofbräuhaus, which today is still a cheerful mustvisit for tourists. Above the oompah and weisswurst of the main beer hall, a small group of disaffected workers and veterans of World War I met to establish the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (DAP, the German Workers’ Party). The DAP championed the value of honest labor as opposed to the oppression of unearned wealth and profit. But they were not communists; on the contrary, the DAP despised the universalism and internationalism of the communist movement and what it perceived to be its Jewishness. Instead, the DAP offered “socialism with a nationalistic twist,” aimed at wresting the loyalty of workers from the communists by elevating German workers above all others.1 The DAP was just a part of the babble until one of its members began to show a stunning talent for galvanizing a crowd by emotional rhetoric. He was Adolf Hitler, one of those disaffected war veterans, whose deepest 60 ❙ FASCISM: WHY NOT HERE? conviction was that the sophisticates, the urbane city dwellers of the north, the capitalists and industrialists and aristocrats, the centrists, and especially the Jews had betrayed the fatherland in signing the treaty of Versailles. In so doing they had shamed the German military, burdened Germany with debt, and brought about the cowardly, democratic, modernist Weimar Republic. In signing the treaty, these self-interested and unprincipled moguls had, in a phrase Hitler used incessantly, “stabbed Germany in the back,” robbing Germany of its honor and dignity. As this appeal caught on, the DAP gained enough strength to absorb some of the weaker nationalist parties and became in 1920 the Nationalsozialistiche Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP). Its familiar name was Nationalsozialist, Nazi for short. The name was significant. The Nazis were not only a nationalist party but also a socialist party and a workers’ party. Their target demographic, at least early on, was the rural working class, the farmers and petty merchants who had not received the Enlightenment education of their sophisticated urban betters. But their consistent goal, from their inception until their ultimate political victory in 1933, was to unite the socialists of the Left with the nationalists of the far Right under a twenty-five-point platform.2 For the nationalists, they promised the union of all Germans (that is, including Austrians, Alsatians, and Sudeten Czechs), revocation of the Versailles Treaty, territorial expansion, an end to immigration, and revocation of citizenship for Jews. For the socialists, they also included sweeping reforms in public education, pensioners’ benefits, and public health. Most of all, they sought an end to the rigid class boundaries of German tradition and especially the elevation of manual labor to greater prestige.3 This revolutionary new combination of agendas transcended the old Left– Right continuum. Indeed, it had been referred to as the “Third Way” by Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, who later coined the term “Third Reich.”4 Consequently, the National Socialists viewed their party as a revolutionary movement that transcended politics itself.5 In November 1922 the Nazis believed themselves ready to take the reins of government, so, in accordance with what was becoming something of a custom, they staged a coup d’état—a putsch in German—to seize control of Bavaria and, they hoped, the entire country. Meeting them in a beer hall called the Bürgerbräukeller, they tricked the local government officials into a back room, where Hitler threatened them with a pistol unless they agreed to back his seizure of power. He had organized a small army of his own and also coopted some of the regular army generals—most notably [100.26.140.179] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 03:05 GMT) POPULISM ❙ 61 Erich Ludendorff, hero of World War I—and had arranged for key military units to march on...