“The Dying Middle”: Weimar Germany and the Fragmentation of Bourgeois Politics

Abstract

On September 14, 1930, the National Socialist German Workers' Party led by Adolf Hitler scored its first national triumph by polling over six million votes and winning more than a hundred seats in the German Reichstag. Its gains came mainly at the expense of the established bourgeois parties. The success of the National Socialists stemmed primarily from the ability of Hitler and his colleagues to articulate the anxieties and frustrated ambitions of the German middle class. These anxieties grew out of a multitude of factors, of which the world economic crisis was the most spectacular. But the dramatic character of the world economic crisis has generally obscured the extent to which these anxieties were the product of certain long-range factors present in the structure of German society ever since the end of the previous century. In the period before World War I the German economy underwent a series of changes which resulted in a partial rationalization of its productive and distributive processes. This process was accelerated during the course of World War I and reached a climax in the middle of the 1920's before the world economic crisis deprived German management of the capital it needed for the purposes of rationalization.