Hitler's first attempted coup failed - but German democracy collapsed anyway.
How can the United States avoid the same fate?
The US has made the transition to the new President Joe Biden - but the storm on the Capitol and a radicalization in politics are cause for concern.
Is proud US democracy threatened?
German history may offer important lessons for Biden and Co.
The historian Robert Gerwarth from University College Dublin sees parallels with the situation in the Weimar Republic.
This article is available for the first time in German - it was first published on February 6, 2021 by the magazine "Foreign Policy".
In the last few months, the Weimar Republic has been increasingly used as an analogy to the current political situation in the United States.
Some describe the supporters of former President Donald Trump as fascists;
an editorial in the
New York Times
calls their refusal to accept the legitimacy of Biden's election victory, a modern version of the so-called stab in the back legend.
The said "internal enemies" caused Germany's defeat in World War I.
Trump and the Consequences: The history of the Weimar Republic should serve as a warning
The temptation to make such comparisons is understandable.
What better way to express concern that the American Republic is threatened and that political violence could spread to the streets than by comparing the current situation with the best-known historical example of a failed democracy that surrendered to fascism?
Of course, there is nothing wrong with drawing inspiration from the past, as long as you do not forget that Weimar's downfall was anything but inevitable and that Hitler's rise to power was due to very specific historical circumstances.
(At least until late 1929, when the effects of the worst economic crisis in modern history were exacerbated by strict austerity policies by the German government, the Nazis were no more than a fringe group in German politics.)
The problems facing the United States today are by no means meant to be played down here.
It is important, however, to be aware of the extent to which America's current situation, despite everything, is not comparable to that of Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s.
Some of the differences exonerate the United States, while others should serve as a warning.
For one, democracy has much deeper roots in America in the 21st century than in the Weimar Republic.
Even though Germany was the first highly industrialized country to introduce women's suffrage, many high-ranking officials, judges and military officials were ambivalent, if not entirely negative, towards democracy.
In today's United States, Congress has withstood a violent mob, judges (including those appointed by Trump himself to the Supreme Court) dismissed its presidential challenges and a new president has been sworn in.
The damage Trump has done to American democracy is considerable, but the past four years have demonstrated the resilience of its institutions, laws, and constitution.
American democracy has been damaged, both domestically and internationally.
But she survived.
But of course there is no telling what might happen in the event of a great global recession like the one in 1929.
Would the 70 million people who voted for Trump become even more radical?
Will Americans have to live with this extreme polarization for the foreseeable future?
The US can learn a lot from Weimar history - not play with the fire of right-wing extremism
At least in this respect we can learn a lot from Weimar history.
The first lesson: It is fatal for conservatives to believe that they can play with the fire of right-wing extremism without getting burned.
Trump is not Hitler, but through his deliberate mobilization of the extreme right, the Republican Party is now dependent on voters, including militant nationalists, Holocaust deniers, advocates of “white supremacy” and conspiracy theorists - in short: people who want more than just another government.
The storming of the Capitol by these groups suggested comparisons with the infamous Hitler putsch of November 9, 1923.
At that time Hitler marched with his armed supporters from the Munich Bürgerbräukeller towards the city center.
His plan was to get the Bavarian state government to march into the capital, as Mussolini had successfully done in Italy in 1922 ("March on Rome"), in order to overthrow the Reich government in Berlin.
But the putsch was put down by the Bavarian police;
16 Hitler supporters were killed and a dozen others injured.
Hitler himself was arrested two days later and spent nine months in prison.
Hitler failed because - not unlike the mob that stormed the Capitol on January 6 - he had challenged the existing order without relevant support from the state apparatus or the leadership of the police and military.
It took a fundamental rethink of his strategy, an alliance with the old elites and an unprecedented global economic crisis before Hitler could seize power over Germany ten years later.
USA: Capitol Storm as an analogy to the Hitler putsch?
Republicans and their dealings with Trump fanats in focus
But what if the events of January 6, 2021, analogous to the Hitler coup, only marked the beginning of the rise of the extreme right in the USA?
After all, militant right-wing nationalism as a political force will not disappear in everyday American life.
The question is how will Republicans deal with Trump's legacy and his most fanatical supporters.
Back then, in 1923, the German elites and conservatives were similarly divided over how to position themselves against the Nazis.
While the Bavarian Conservatives (the Bavarian People's Party, BVP) cut all ties to Hitler, the German National People's Party (DNVP) did not.
When Hitler had some successes at the ballot box in the wake of the global economic crisis, many conservatives continued to believe that they could instrumentalize the right-wing extremists for their own purposes - just as Trump tried to do.
This strategy turned out to be a disaster.
In 1933, the aged Reich President Paul von Hindenburg let his conservative friends convince him that they could use Hitler's growing popular support for their own agenda by “framing” him as the puppet chancellor of a coalition government in which the conservatives are in charge would.
They believed that they could "corner" Hitler - only to find within a few weeks that they had miserably underestimated the Nazis, just as the Italian Conservatives had underestimated Mussolini ten years earlier.
US democracy in crisis: your defenders must remain vigilant - and learn from Weimar mistakes
The Republican Party, and Americans in general, must take a much tougher stance against those who threaten their democratic institutions.
In January 1933 the SPD, Germany's largest democratic party, failed to use its strongest weapon against the Nazis: the call for a general strike.
This instrument was used successfully in 1920 when trade unions and civil servants thwarted the Kapp putsch staged by General Erich Ludendorff.
In 1933 the SPD feared - perhaps rightly - that such a step would trigger a terrible civil war that democracy supporters would likely lose without the support of the Wehrmacht.
After the horrors of World War II, the Federal Republic of Germany
reinvented
itself as a
defensive democracy
: a democracy whose constitutional court has repeatedly banned extremist parties and groups and whose Bundeswehr is no longer a state within a state.
In the US, while the armed forces have shown no sign of sideizing with extremists, the shocking scenes at the Capitol show that extremists have the potential to pose a real threat to democratic norms and the rule of law.
In any event, future armed uprisings against the Biden government cannot be ruled out.
But they are doomed to fail if the defenders of democracy only remain vigilant and determined.
Germany as a warning example for Biden's USA?
The Nazis also created "alternative facts"
A second lesson that Weimar taught: The struggle for truth is essential.
Hitler's rise to power and the fall of democracy in Germany were aided by the Nazis' ability to create and disseminate "alternative facts".
From the stab-in-the-back legend to conspiracy theories about so-called World Jewry, which Germany undermines: What we call "fake news" today played a central role in Hitler's propaganda even then, and in vain did the advocates of democracy repeatedly stress that these stories were untrue.
In the early 1930s, the supporters of the Weimar Republic lost the battle for the truth when Hitler successfully persuaded many voters that democracy was an un-German form of government that was imposed on the country by the victors of World War I and with which the economic depression ended cannot be overcome.
One thing is certain: Hitler would have loved social media.
He has always sought to use the latest technology - especially radio and film - to spread his alternate truth.
The reach of social media and its ability to bypass the quality control and fact checking of reputable news sources have made it even easier to spread conspiracy theories unfiltered.
Trump made more than 30,000 factually false or misleading statements during his presidency,
according to a recent
Washington Post
article
.
Against this background, it will be crucial, as Biden said in his inaugural address, "to reject a culture in which facts are manipulated - and even recreated".
Disinformation and conspiracy theories, including those about "rigged voting," pose a major threat to democratic institutions and processes. Regaining confidence in democracy will be the central challenge in the years to come.
This trust could prove to be the decisive factor in determining whether the American republic will fare like the Weimar Republic in the future.
by Robert Gerwarth
Robert Gerwarth
is Lecturer in Modern History at University College Dublin and Director of the Center for War Studies there.
He is the author of
The Vanquished
book
.
The bloody legacy of the First World War
.
This article was first published in English on February 6, 2021 in the magazine “ForeignPolicy.com” - as part of a cooperation, the translation is now also available to
Merkur.de
readers
.
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