When David Abraham’s Collapse of the Weimar Republic first appeared in 1981, the weaknesses of the Weimar Republic played a pivotal role in what historians of Germany then referred to as that nation’s ‘special path’ (Sonderweg) or ‘deviation’ from the liberal democracies of the West. Having originated with the failed Revolution of 1848 and Otto von Bismarck’s ‘revolution from above’ which led to the creation of the semi-constitutional and authoritarian Second Empire (Kaiserreich), Germany continued its misdevelopment despite the Revolution of 1918 and the formation of the Weimar Republic.3 The prevailing scholarly interpretation attributed the republic’s weaknesses and Nazism’s rise to power to the durability of long-standing authoritarian traditions, the political weakness and social ‘feudalisation’ of the middle classes, and the continued prominence of ‘pre-modern’ elites drawn from the regional aristocracies and Prussian Junker nobility. In short, Weimar’s tragic end in 1933, defined by the long-term continuities that burdened it, overshadowed its fifteen-year history.
Up to a point, Abraham’s book conformed to the dominant paradigm. He acknowledged continuities that linked the German past with the Weimar Republic, most notably the persistent influence of conservative agrarian and business elites, whom the Revolution of 1918 had been unable to dislodge. Yet as a work of political economy and historical materialism, Collapse dissected the divisions within and among the major economic sectors that emerged with increasingly clarity after 1925 and especially after 1930 that sapped the willingness of the dominant classes to tolerate the republic. In addition to underscoring the anti-republican machinations of large landowners, Abraham zeroed in on the role of German business, especially heavy industry, in Weimar’s demise, which in contrast to the more dynamic, capital intensive, export-oriented sector, incurred high labor costs. As a capitalist liberal democracy, the logic of capital, namely the accumulation of profits, implicitly and explicitly defined the terms of political decision-making. Thus the global economic crisis, which emerged in full force by 1930, resulted in a profits crisis and the disintegration of electoral support for the German National People’s Party (DNVP) and German People’s Party (DVP), the parties that conservative elites normally supported. As a result, agrarians and industrialists abandoned the republic for an authoritarian system and supported the appointment of Adolf Hitler as chancellor. Only that solution, they believed, would eliminate the constraints on profitability that the Weimar Republic allowed organised labour to impose.
Ironically Abraham did not limit his critique to agrarians, industrialists, and the conservative political leaders who spoke for them. Although organised labor was the primary target of the elites’ assault on the Weimar system, he argued that the ‘militant reformism’ of the Social Democratic Party and the trade unions, which depended on financing the Weimar social welfare system by taxing the profits of capital, could mount no effective counter strategy once the Depression set in. Even as industrialists and agrarians ruthlessly attacked the Weimar social welfare state as the economic crisis deepened, organised labour remained unable to draw supporters beyond its working-class base, especially salaried employees who suffered disproportionately from the Depression and who might have provided a broader constituency for the Social Democrats had the latter appealed to them. Instead, labour continued to depend upon the Weimar state to protect the wages, social benefits, and collective bargaining rights of its core constituency.
Finally, in addition to tempering the continuity argument with a more precise periodisation, Abraham suggested that Weimar’s corporatism during its relatively stable years (‘bureaucratic administration rather than parliamentary debate’ and ‘class collaboration rather than class conflict’) actually anticipated the neocorporatism that emerged after World War II. This may partially explain why Collapse spawned the most widely publicized academic controversy in recent memory, one in which historians of German business especially led the counterattack. Errors in the first edition of Collapse most certainly contributed, but fundamental disagreements over historical methodology informed the positions of Abraham’s opponents, who generally ascribed a lesser role to business in Hitler’s rise as compared to that of the landed elite and the military. The reemergent capitalism of the Federal Republic and the loss of the eastern Prussian provinces, which had served as one of the main foundations of agrarian elite power, no doubt shaped the discussion as to who was most responsible for ushering in the Third Reich. There was and continues to be no disagreement as to the part that agrarians played in assaulting and undermining Weimar. Yet the elimination of what had once been a potent political constituency allowed space for criticising landed elites. On the other hand, radical critique of the sort that Abraham produced, which assigned a major role to German business, could expect relentless scepticism and even hostility, especially when at the time Collapse was written the Keynesian neocorporatism that dominated during the first two decades after World War II faced sustained attack.
The objections to Collapse consisted of the following:4 aside from a few corporate contributors, German industrialists neither financed nor directly supported the Nazi Party. In general, business leaders were fearful and suspicious of the National Socialist movement due to its populist and putatively socialist appeals to its diverse social bases. Although increasingly inclined to support an authoritarian political system that would eliminate the Weimar Sozialstaat, business was more comfortable with one led by reliable conservatives, such as Franz von Papen. Then too, Abraham’s Marxist methodology was attacked as inherently biased against business and thus unable to provide a more nuanced discussion of the complicated rationales of corporate leaders. In fact, Abraham did not dispute the argument that financial contributions to the Nazi Party from business were few and far between. Nor did he question that tensions existed between conservative elites and the Nazi party, the significance and depth of which continue to be debated in the literature on German conservatism and the Nazi rise to power.5 The vehemently anti-republican media magnate and leader of the right-wing German National People’s Party Alfred Hugenberg, who spearheaded efforts to forge a broad-based ‘national opposition’ to the republic and bind the Nazi Party to it, serves as an illuminating example. Hugenberg came to fear Hitler’s independence and intransigence in the aftermath of the Harzburg Front rally in 1931, which ultimately failed to unify the parties and paramilitary associations of the right because of Hitler’s refusal to subordinate his party to a coalition. Yet Abraham cautioned against overstating the conflicts between the traditional and radical right. Conservatives indeed rallied around Papen as chancellor in the summer of 1932, but Papen’s policies actually paved the way for Nazism rather than erecting a bulwark against it. His government’s coup against the Socialist-dominated Prussian government eliminated a major impediment against authoritarian and fascist repression, as did his removal of the ban on the Nazi paramilitary, the SA. In the end, the eroding mass support for the parties that the bourgeois right normally supported undermined the ability of Papen’s ‘cabinet of barons’ to govern, which in turn made a fascist alternative more likely.
And that brings us back to Abraham’s core argument as to the logic of capitalism as dominant in a capitalist democracy, which was critical to the decision of agrarians and industrialists to opt for a Hitler-led government. Unhappy with Papen’s successor, Kurt von Schleicher, who sought to bring the trade unions into his government with the threat to profitability which that entailed, conservative elites opted for an ‘extra-systemic solution’ that would block the continuation of binding wage arbitration and the Weimar welfare state. A Hitler chancellorship was the ‘only’ way for elites to secure the mass support that they could no longer achieve on their own, solve the problem of declining profits, alleviate the economic crisis, and reconsolidate German capitalism. Despite the impatience with the Nazi regime’s interventionism, business, or at least those corporations most relevant to rearmament and war, profited handsomely during the Third Reich, not least because of the overlap in personnel between corporations and the Nazi party and the willingness of Nazi leaders to incentivise production.6
The passage of time since the early 1980s has not surprisingly brought the emergence of new paradigms and new topics for research. The post-war liberal democracy of West Germany and the unification of the two Germanys in 1990 into a single nation that now regularly confronts the Nazi past has resulted in the declining relevance of long-term German pathologies. Correspondingly, the amount of research and scholarship on the post-1945 period has grown by leaps and bounds, contesting and even overtaking the dominance of the Third Reich in scholarly agendas. The assault on the German Sonderweg was the first to emerge in two key works on the Imperial and Weimar periods. Instead of attending to one of the pinnacles of the ‘deviation’ theory, the presumed weakness of the bourgeoisie, David Blackbourn’s and Geoff Eley’s The Peculiarities of German History (1984), made their case for the ‘bourgeoisification’ of Imperial Germany that challenged the cultural and political hegemony of ‘pre-modern’ elites.7 Three years later, Detlev Peukert’s The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity (1987) emphasised Weimar’s conflict-ridden innovation instead of its continuity with the past and dismissed previous claims as to the prevailing influence of traditional elites.8 What enabled the Nazi takeover in 1933, argued Peukert, was elite weakness, not elite power. More recently even the term ‘crisis’, often applied negatively to the republic, has been reinterpreted. Instead of embodying Weimar’s failures, as Moritz Follmer and Rüdiger Graf argue, the close investigation of contemporary usages of the term reveals the openness to the future and the possibility of change.9 The title of Eric Weitz’s 2007 synthesis, Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy,10 attends to the republic’s innovation and prospects for survival as well as its ultimate, but not foreordained, demise. Subsequently the turn to cultural history has broadened the scope of Weimar history by investigating topics such as mass culture and consumption, gender, the extension of popular social and political rights, immigration, and the rituals and commitments of popular politics, which taken together extend research agendas beyond the realm of ‘high politics’.11
Significant changes in perspective have also occurred in the scholarship on the Third Reich. The renewed attention to Nazi ideology has taken priority over the social and structural history that dominated in the 1960s and 70s, beginning with the characterisation of the regime as a ‘racial state’, which deployed biological criteria to determine citizenship and belonging and radically extended the politics of exclusion. Although the scholarship has recently questioned the coherence and homogeneity of the above rubric by calling attention to the relevance of ethnicity, nation, and geopolitics in Nazi thinking as well as race, ideology and especially anti-semitism remains at the top of the agenda.12 Moreover even if the rise of Nazism and its popular legitimacy after 1933 are not ignored, the ‘vanishing point’ of the history of National Socialism, in Helmut Walser Smith’s words, has shifted markedly to the war years and especially to the Holocaust.13 To be sure, scholarship on the German economy, as well as business and agrarian elites has continued.14 To give one example, the proliferation of studies on corporate behavior during the Third Reich collectively suggest that business retained considerable autonomy and profitability, particularly corporations eager to take advantage of the opportunities provided by the war, imperialism, and the expropriation of Jewish assets.15 Yet over the past three decades, the once urgent focus on Weimar’s long-term ‘mis-development’ and collapse has lost the context that once sustained it.
In light of the above, the obvious question to raise is why reissue The Collapse of the Weimar Republic? The answer lies in contemporary trends which have emerged especially since the ‘Great Recession’ of 2008, first and foremost the global surge of right-wing populism, even in once stable and consensus-oriented liberal democracies. These movements, which converge either into independent political parties, such as the Alternativ für Deutschland in Germany, or emerge as insurgencies in established ones, notably the Republican Party in the United States, are hostile to the borderless neoliberal economy, which became hegemonic with the dissolution of the Soviet Bloc between 1989 and 1991. Angry at transnational trade agreements and blocs that disadvantage domestic industries, fearful of millions of migrants seeking jobs and safety in the developed world, who putatively undermine the cohesion and homogeneity of the nation-state, and bitter at the spiralling concentration of wealth among national and global elites, which have left millions behind to face declining incomes and life chances, these movements have taken on recognisably fascist traits. These include the perception of communal and national decline, the tolerance and indeed advocacy of violence against ‘minorities’ and ‘outsiders’, the demand for cleansing the body politic of multi-culturalism, contempt for parliaments and the yearning for a strong leader, the trafficking in conspiracy theories that account for the decline of white European hegemony, and, as is the case in the United States, the rejection of multi-national and multi-lateral organisations in favor of a militarized unilaterialism.16 Although terming these movements as ‘fascist’ is controversial, their growth to this point raises obvious questions as to the stability and functionality of capitalist democracies that have in turn prompted many to revisit the 1930s.17 Thus Weimar appears as a paradigm of the worst that can happen, no longer because it was the unfortunate outcome of the German Sonderweg but because its dissolution and its consequences seem to apply to a different environment.
Although it is tempting to engage in comparisons that accentuate the worst outcomes for the present, some caution is in order, as Richard J. Evans recently insisted. Relying on historical parallels, he argues, is risky because they can overlook realities distinctive to the present and encourage irrelevant or inappropriate solutions.18 Worse still, according to Daniel Bessner and Udi Greenberg, the comparisons to Nazi Germany that intellectuals have deployed often invoke anti-democratic remedies that exacerbate the very thing that populists despise, the lack of control over governments and unaccountable elites.19 Thus we should begin with acknowledging the differences between the past and the present. Nazism emerged first in the aftermath of a devastating world war and took power in the context of tenacious global economic depression that fuelled violent and bitter ideological battles that not only divided socialists from communists but also pitted left against right. In contrast to inter-war Germany, organised labor has lost countless members and most of its bargaining power, especially in the United States.20 Another major difference between then and now was the relative influence of the Social Democrats and the trade unions within the Weimar system, which had translated into collective bargaining agreements and state-assisted welfare programmes funded by capitalist profits, and the electoral draw of the German Communist Party, particularly among the unskilled and unemployed. The elimination of the trade unions and the Socialists and Communist parties after the Nazi takeover, all of which had been deeply organised, ‘necessitated’ concentration camps and the extension of the police power of the SS, which the foundations of the comprehensive system of terror that followed.21
Nevertheless looking at parallels between now and then can be valuable as long as we identify parallels worthy of comparison. In this case, returning to the hows and whys of the Nazi takeover, the very focus that historians have over the past few decades have moved away from, can give us fresh insights into how a party that never came close to achieving an electoral majority managed to insinuate itself. By doing so, we can appreciate an important fact, that the regime’s horrors emerged unevenly and incrementally, along the way ‘normalising’ its repressive measures among Germans, many of whom had few objections to the destruction of the left and the persecution of the Jews.22 Indeed Janusch Steuver’s recent analysis of 140 diaries testifies to the complicated evolution of Germans’ adjustment over time. On the one hand, his subjects struggled to preserve their autonomy and intellectual independence. On the other, they strove equally hard to find the positives in National Socialism and participate in the new Nazi community unless, having discovered that their ‘undesirable’ backgrounds, made that impossible.23 Also relevant is the degree to which conservative elites were willing to swallow their misgivings and do business with Hitler, a point that Abraham underscored and one which continues to draw historians’ attention. For these reasons, we have grounds to worry about the present signs and potential of fascism and at the very least, the creation of strongmen dominated ‘illiberal democracies’ in Europe and the United States, to use the term of the right-wing Hungarian prime minister, Victor Orbán.
Because the emergence of right radicalism in the largest and most powerful liberal democracy has the most far-reaching consequences, the election in 2016 of Donald Trump as president and his subsequent defeat in 2020 deserve a detailed examination. Unlike Nazism, which emerged as an independent party that siphoned off its electorate from the parties of the bourgeois right, Trumpism took root as an insurgency within the Republican party, which business interests and party regulars normally dominated. Unlike the Nazi Party, Republicans made no ‘socialist’ noises, for unlike Weimar Germany, socialism in the United States has been comparatively weak, and the attack against the New Deal and Great Society welfare state has gone unabated since the early eighties, save for the passage of Obama administration’s Affordable Care Act. Without minimising the enormity of police and carceral power used routinely against immigrants, asylum seekers, and African Americans, the level of violence has not yet matched that of inter-war fascism, which derived its raison d’être from the brutal legacies of World War I, especially the civil wars that pitted revolutionaries against counter-revolutionaries.24
Whether in office or out, Trump and his supporters regularly communicate with like-minded populists across the ocean. Yet the movement’s origins derive from specifically American conditions. Its roots go back to the reaction against the Civil Rights movement and the student protests of the 1960s, which prompted the Republican ‘Southern strategy’ to wrest the South from Democratic control, and continued with the deindustrialisation of the once prosperous industrial regions. With the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, business elites and Republican party leaders assaulted the legacies of the New Deal by pursuing deregulation, tax cuts, privatisation and the undermining of unions. Those agendas have progressed further with the Republicans’ ability to mobilise the resentments of its electorate and dominate state legislatures, which in turn enabled the gerrymandering of congressional districts to their advantage and the suppression of voters likely to support Democrats, particularly African Americans, Latinos, and former convicts. Business and party elites have continued to press for the curtailment of ‘entitlement’ programmes, such as Social Security and Medicare and most recently Obamacare, and they have spent large sums to discredit the evidence of climate change. The Federalist Society spends dollars and energy to pack the federal judiciary and the Supreme Court with reliable pro-business and anti-labour conservatives.
To be sure, since the 2016 election, the once driving forces of the Republican Party have been on the defensive. The numerous ‘establishment’ candidates for the presidency could not compete with Trump, who better exploited the rage of the insurgent Tea Party movement that coalesced in the wake of the ‘Great Recession’ and Barack Obama’s accession to the presidency. After Trump’s inauguration, the direct access of the Republican establishment to the White House has progressively weakened. Yet however uncomfortable Republicans and their think tanks were with a president whose unilateral belligerence and assault on free trade is unsettling, their Faustian bargain yielded results; more massive tax cuts, radical deregulation, particularly of environmental controls, proposed cuts in social programmes, huge increases in military and nuclear expenditures, and the unrestrained freedom of corporate money to buy elections. The consequences of Trump’s trade policy unsettled Wall Street, the Chamber of Commerce, and the Heritage Foundation and threatened the loss of profits in key industries through tariffs on imports from China, Mexico, Canada, and the European Union. Employers were leery of cutbacks in the steady flow of cheap immigrant labour and perhaps squeamish at the extraordinary cruelty meted out to immigrants and asylum seekers. Nevertheless voices of protest from inside the Republican Party continue to be weak and intermittent. As Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt argued already in 2018, the willingness of political elites to ally with authoritarian demagogues to contain the latter and restore the former’s control has been crucial to the undermining of democracy in multiple cases, not just Italy in 1922 and Germany in 1933.25 Yet however important, there is more to the story than political decisions made at the top. The structures of power, the underlying interests that shape the decisions of political elites is crucial. Corporate interests could afford to gamble on a demagogic outsider like Donald Trump in the assurance that the Republican party would continue to accommodate them. In the event that the president acted contrary to corporate interests, or at least some of them as in the case of Trump’s tariffs, there were other options such as shifting production overseas.
Despite Trump’s defeat in the 2020 elections, the emergence of Biden’s presidency and a narrow Democratic majority in Congress, the deep systemic weaknesses of American ‘democracy’ remained formidable, not least because Trump’s claims of election fraud that deprived him of re-election found substantial support from Republican voters. The undemocratic procedures for electing the president, the Republican abuse of gerrymandering to that party’s benefit, the horrendous cost and duration of election campaigns (indeed the huge impact of corporate money in the wake of the Supreme Court’s ‘Citizens United’ decision), the lack of public investment in education, health care, and infrastructure, the declining living standards of the majority of the population and the accumulation of wealth at the top, and finally the bitter divisions within the American public, require immediate attention.26 As of this writing, the Democratic legislative agenda advocates programmes to benefit the middle and working classes that evoke Western European Social Democracy or at least the New Deal, and opinion polls testify to its popularity despite the resistance of corporate America. Yet if the application of ‘fascism’ to the present prompts debate among historians, signs of fascism are growing all too evident. They emerge in the adoration of Trump underwritten by conspiracy theories that ‘explain’ his electoral defeat, the resort to armed violence evident especially in the 6 January assault on the Capitol, the spread of racism and anti-semitism and the insistence on the primacy of whiteness, especially that of white men, the tolerance of corporations, most egregiously in a gun lobby that enables the spread of violence, and the intransigent opposition of Republicans in Congress at the expense of the rules of liberal democracy. The scale of the task involved in addressing the above problems will require nothing less than a progressive coalition built from the ground up to democratise the political system and prioritise the well-being of the citizenry over those of corporations. Yet the long-standing efforts of Republicans to secure their electoral advantage permanently is a formidable challenge. David Abraham’s argument as to the prerogatives of capital in a liberal democracy is as relevant now as it was when applied to inter-war Germany. If the citizenry cannot recover the initiative to improve the lives of Americans, and thus curtail and redefine the place of capital, then demagogues will continue to exploit the frustrations that have arisen from below and leave the door open for corporations to take advantage of authoritarian and even fascist alternatives.
One of the most prominent examples of this argument is Wehler 1983.
Abraham’s most vocal critics were Turner, who having already published his work on Streseman and the Weimar Republic (Turner 1963), was in the process of completing his German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler (Turner 1985), and Gerald D. Feldman, who the time of the controversy had written Feldman 1966 and Feldman 1977.
See for example Eugene Jones (ed.) 2014, which emphasises the divisions within and fragmentation of the right, and Geoff Eley’s critique, ‘The German Right from Weimar to Hitler: Fragmentation and Coalescence’ (Eley 2015, esp. 107–13), which stresses the right’s commonalities.
See Stephen Gross’ assessment, ‘The Nazi Economy’, in Baranowski, Nolzen and Szejnmann (eds.) 2018, pp. 265–79.
Blackbourn and Eley 1984.
Peukert 1987.
Follmer and Graf (eds.) 2005, Die ‘Krise’ der Weimarer Republik: Zur Kritik eines Deutungsmuster, Frankfurt am Main: Campus.
Weitz 2007.
See the anthology Canning et al. (eds.) 2013.
See Burleigh and Wippermann 1991, and a the recent critique of it, in Pendas, Roseman, and Wetzell (eds.) 2017.
Walser Smith 2008, pp. 13–38.
Notably Tooze 2006. On the German nobility, see Malinowski 2004.
For a recent summary of the scholarship, see Kim Christian Priemel, ‘National Socialism and German Business’, in Baranowski, Nolzen, and Szejnmann (eds.) 2018, pp. 281–98.
Much of this description I draw from Paxton 2004, especially the summary, pp. 218–20.
Dylan Matthews, ‘I asked 5 fascism experts whether Donald Trump is a fascist. Here’s what they said’, Vox, March 19, 2016. The responders to the interviewer, Stanley Payne, Robert Paxton, and Roger Griffin argue in the negative. For the ‘yes’ side, see Richard Steigmann-Gall, ‘One Expert Says, Yes, Donald Trump is Fascist. And It’s Not Just Trump’, Tikkun, January 5, 2016. By 2025 under President Trump II the ‘yes’ voices predominated.
See Isaac Chotiner’s interview of Evans, ‘Democracy Dies in a Variety of Ways’, Slate, July 12, 2018.
‘The Weimar Analogy: Comparing Trump’s America to fascist Germany only fuels elites’ antidemocratic fantasies’, Jacobin, December 17, 2016 and holding to this in 2025.
Geoff Eley, ‘Is Trump a Fascist’? Historians for Peace and Democracy: Broadsides for the Trump Era, Issue 5. Posted on ‘The New Fascism Syllabus: Exploring the New Right through Scholarship and Civic and Engagement’ (
For the details of the Nazi terror in the Third Reich’s first year, see Wachsmann 2015, pp. 3–78.
See Waitman Wade Beorn’s insightful column, ‘Perspective: It’s not wrong to compare Trump’s America to the Holocaust. Here’s why’, Washington Post, July 16. 2018.
Steuver 2017.
See Gerwarth 2016. Whether Trump II via the Insurrection Act may turn to violence remains to be seen.
Levitsky and Ziblatt 2018, pp. 11–32. Hett 2018, which is intended for a general audience, pays more attention to the role of business in undermining Weimar and contributing to the negotiations that brought Hitler to power.
See Snyder 2018, 217–79. One can disagree with Snyder’s argument as to the degree of Russian involvement in the 2016 presidential election and the similarities between the Russian and American oligarchies, but his analysis of the myriad signs of America’s decline is spot on.