Embracing Democracy in Modern Germany ii Embracing Democracy in Modern Germany Political Citizenship and Participation, 1871–2000 Michael L. Hughes BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2021 Copyright © Michael L. Hughes, 2021 Michael L. Hughes has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. viii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover image: Demos 1992 Berlin (© Photo by P/F/H/ullstein bild via Getty Images) All rights reserved. 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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Hughes, Michael L., author. Title: Embracing democracy in modern Germany : political citizenship and participation, 1871-2000 / Michael L. Hughes. Description: London ; New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020035925 (print) | LCCN 2020035926 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350153752 (hardback) | ISBN 9781350200111 (paperback) | ISBN 9781350153769 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350153776 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Democracy–Germany–History. | Political participation–Germany–History. | Germany–Politics and government–1871- | Germany (West)–Politics and government. | Germany (East)–Politics and government. Classification: LCC JN3971.A91 H84 2021 (print) | LCC JN3971.A91 (ebook) | DDC 323/.0420943–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020035925 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020035926 ISBN: HB: 978-1-3501-5375-2 ePDF: 978-1-3501-5376-9 eBook: 978-1-3501-5377-6 Typeset by Integra Software Services Private Limited To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters. For Gloria vi Contents Acknowledgments viii Introduction 1 1 Democratic Elements in an Authoritarian Regime: Enabling and Containing Political Participation in Imperial Germany, 1871–1918 9 2 Searching for Authority: Challenges to Parliamentary Democracy in the Weimar Republic, 1918–1933 33 3 Agency in a Total State: Compliance and Non-Compliance in the Third Reich, 1933–1945 57 4 Re-Imagining Democracy: Creating a Federal Republic in Postwar West Germany 79 5 Daring More Democracy: The Rise of Extra-Parliamentary Political Action in West Germany, 1968–1980s 103 6 Political Citizenship in a Dictatorship: Negotiating Agency in East Germany, 1945–1989 131 7 Coming to Fruition? Unification and Democracy in the Berlin Republic 155 Notes 172 Bibliography 236 Index 291 Acknowledgments I have incurred many debts in the long process of writing this book. I must thank the ILL staff at the Z. Smith Reynolds Library of Wake Forest University. The ZSR has impressive collections, but I have relied on James Harper and his colleagues to obtain the numerous books and articles I needed from around the United States and Germany. They have been tireless and efficacious in securing them for me. I began thinking about democracy in Germany in graduate school in the 1970s. I have given innumerable talks at conferences in the United States and Germany and have benefited from feedback from many, many scholars. I would like particularly to thank the participants in the Social Science Research Seminar and the History Department Colloquium at Wake Forest, who have read and responded to many iterations of this material, and the participants in the Making Democratic Subjectivities Seminar at the 2015 German Studies Conference. Various individual scholars have read chapters and commented on them. I would particularly like to thank my colleague in German Politics, Helga Welsh, with whom I have been talking about these issues for decades and who read chapters intensely on my behalf. I would also like to thank Peter Caldwell, Moritz Föllmer, Barry Trachtenberg, and Maria Mitchell for their careful readings of various chapters. I must also thank Allison Brown of Henry Street Editing, as well as the anonymous readers for Bloomsbury Academic. I need especially to thank Dr. Gloria J. Fitzgibbon, who has been challenging me intellectually for four decades and without whom I could not have written this work. I am of course responsible for any errors or inadequacies. Introduction By 2000 a unified Germany was a stable democracy, and Germans seemed to have embraced democracy—quite a change from the authoritarian monarchy founded in 1871, the unstable Weimar Republic, or the dictatorial Third Reich and German Democratic Republic. But embracing “democracy” was always complex and could never be complete. Germans were never a national collective with a single mentality or character. Some Germans in the mid-nineteenth century already embraced democracy; some Germans (especially in the 1920s and early 1930s) used democratic means to undermine democracy, and only a minority voted for parties supporting the democratic Weimar Republic; some Germans, even in the twenty-first century, have never embraced it. Moreover, even Germans who embraced democracy have had widely varying conceptions of what “democracy” might entail—e.g., parliamentary democracy, leader democracy, party democracy, direct democracy, participatory democracy. Meanwhile, Hitler despised democracy but sought, in effect, democratic legitimacy through plebiscites, and East Germany’s Communist dictatorship insisted it alone was the truly democratic German republic. This book seeks to illuminate the complexities and open-endedness of Germans’ encounters with and embrace of “democracy,” from 1871 to 2000—encounters that can illuminate debate on democracy more generally and that have recently taken on new relevance, as liberal democracy has come under increasing challenge, in Germany and elsewhere. Democracy as Institution, Culture, and Practice The rise of democracy in the modern period took on an aura of inevitability in the heady days after the collapse of Communism, as the number of “democracies” across the world grew. However, that rise was not inevitable. Understanding democratization requires looking at the specific circumstances that contributed to, hindered, or eroded democracy. Focusing on Germany, a complex and historically significant example, offers an illuminating case.1 Germany’s democratization is a story of multiple pressures for and against democracy, pressures that played out amid contingent factors. History cannot be reduced to a simple theory or a simple narrative. It is always complicated. And because pressures and contingencies are ongoing, it never comes to a conclusion. Germany has