CHAPTER TWO: THE STRUGGLE BEGUN: FASCISM, COMMUNISM, PARLIAMENTARIANISM, 1914 – 1919

 

1. Kurt F. Reinhardt, Germany 2000 Years, rev. ed., Vol. I, The Rise and Fall of the “Holy Empire” (Frederick Ungar, 1961).

2. “It is usual, in analysing the constitution of 1871, to emphasize its federal character, pointing out that it betrays in every paragraph the conflicts of a thousand years of German history. But the reality is otherwise. The federal rights… were illusory….Prussia had sufficient votes to veto constitutional changes, but more important was the fact that the Chancellor was under no necessity of consulting the council on any question of major political importance….The system contrived in 1871 included a Reichstag elected by universal and equal franchise; but its powers were nugatory…. [I]t had no power of voting or refusing to vote taxes… since imperial revenue was provided partly from permanent fixed duties, partly by pro rata contributions from the individual federal states….Finally, the Reichstag had no control over executive ministers, who were responsible only to the Prussian king who was also German emperor…. The German labour leader, Wilhelm Liebknecht, was therefore not wide of the mark in dubbing the Reichstag ‘the fig-leaf of absolutism‘; the system of government established in 1871 was, in fact, a veiled form of the monarchical absolutism vested in the king of Prussia.” Geoffrey Barraclough, Factors in German History (B. Blackwell, 1946). It is important to note, in the debate as to whether Wilhelmine Germany was a proto-fascist state, that while many parliamentary nation-states allowed for the suspension of constitutional provisions in an emergency, the Kaiserrech and Nazi Germany permitted the chancellor to remain in office and to rule by decree even when he had lost his parliamentary majority.

3. Barraclough, Factors in German History, 116.

4. Fritz Fischer, Germany's Aims in the First World War (Norton, 1967). This is the English translation of his Griff nach der Weltmacht (Droste, 1961); Fritz Fischer, World Power or Decline: The Controversy over Germany's Aims in the First World War, trans. Lancelot Farrar, Robert Kimber, and Rita Kimber (Norton, 1974); Fritz Fischer, War of Illusions: German Policies from 1911 to 1914, trans. Marian Jackson (Norton, 1975); see Krieg der Illusionem (1969).

5. “Analysis of the origins of the First World War has therefore been profoundly influenced by the ‘Fischer revolution.’” Norman Stowe, Europe Transformed, 1878 – 1919 (Harvard University Press, 1984), 196, comments that “Not many historians nowadays dissent from the proposition that the German government, egged on by its generals, deliberately provoked the war of 1914.” John Moses, The Politics of Illusion (George Prior, 1975), 48, says that “Even Fischer's most persistent opponents such as Gerhard Ritter (1888 – 1967) and Golo Mann, for example, were forced to agree with him that Imperial Germany's policies unleashed the war; however, they imputed to Germany's leaders defensive rather than offensive motives.” “As Fischer has forcefully stated, ‘there is not a single document in the world which could weaken the central truth that in July 1914 a will to war existed solely and alone on the German side and that all arrangements on the side of the Entente served the defensive security of their alliance. And that will to war had been crystallising for many years previously.’” Some historians, while not disputing this, emphasize the opportunistic nature of German policy. “James Joll, The Origins of the First World War (Longman, 1984), 235, feels that by December 1912 German rulers had ‘accepted war as inevitable' but were concerned to wage it at the most opportune time.” Ruth Henig, The Origins of the First World War (Routledge, 1989; reprinted 1991), 43.

6. For the current status of the Fischer controversy, compare Bernd-Jurgen Wendt, “Zum Stand der ‘Fischer-Kontroverse' um den Ausbruch des ersten Weltkrieges,” Annales Universitatis Scientarium Budapestinensis de Rolando Eotvos Nominatae: Section Historica 24 (1985): 92 – 132 (concluding that Fischer's theses regarding the Riezler papers, the role of Bethmann Hollweg, and the continuity of German policies leading to both world wars remain unrefuted) with Wayne C. Thompson, “The September Program: Reflections on the Evidence,” Central European History 11 (1978): 348 – 354 (arguing that the Riezler paper was only “a provisional catalog of possible war aims drawn up for negotiating purposes”).

7. See Roger Fletcher, introduction to Fischer, Kaiserreich to Third Reich: Elements of Continuity in German History, 1871 – 1945 (Allen & Unwin, 1986; reprinted Routledge, 1991).

8. Ian Kershaw, “1933: Continuity or Break in German History?” History Today 33 (1983): 13 – 18.

9. Fletcher, Introduction to Fischer, 10.

10. Edward Acton, State and Society under Lenin and Stalin, in Themes in Modern European History, 1890 – 1945, ed. Paul Hayes (London: Routledge, 1992).

11. Ibid., 156 – 157.

12. William G. Rosenberg, “Russian Labor and Bolshevik Power after October,” Slavic Review (1985): 222 – 223.

13. Condoleezza Rice, “The Making of Soviet Strategy,” Makers of Modern Strategy: From Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age, ed. Peter Paret (Princeton University Press, 1986), 648.

14. “A variety of motives lay behind this support: ideological commitment, patriotism… The rhetoric of class warfare in terms of which the [Five-Year] Plan was implemented struck a responsive chord. It promised a return to the heroic tradition of October and the Civil War, an attack on Bourgeois deformities, on NEP-men, kulaks and privileged members of the intelligentsia.” Edward Acton, “State and Society under Lenin and Stalin,” in Themes of Modern European History, 1890 – 1945 (Routledge, 1992), 162-163. Note the similarity between this rhetoric and the Nazi attacks on Weimar society.

15. Rosenberg, 164 – 165.

16. Eugene Genovese, “The Squandered Century,” Current (July – August 1995): 36.

17. Henig, The Origins of the First World War, 14.

18. Vladimir I. Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (International, 1988 [1916]).