TWENTIETH-CENTURY GERMAN POLITICAL THOUGHT

By : Peter M. R. Stirk

Any attempt to survey German political thought in the twentieth century is bound to be influenced by awareness of the turbulence of German political history and especially by the shadow of the Third Reich, the crisis and collapse of the Weimar Republic that preceded it and the division of Germany that followed it for almost half a century. If one considers the historical context of German political thought a
little more widely, that impression of turbulence is enhanced, at least for the first half of the century. At the beginning of the twentieth century, German political theorists inhabited not only the recently formed German Reich to the north but also the multi-national Habsburg Empire to the south. Many of the theorists prominent in the early chapters of this account were born in or influenced by
the peculiar nature of that empire. Its collapse at the end of the First World War left behind a largely homogeneous German Austria that was subsequently incorporated into the Third Reich and then reestablished as an independent state at the end of the Second World War. Not surprisingly, this political discontinuity is reflected in many accounts of the development of German political thought.

According to Wilhelm Hennis, despite what he described as the ‘German misery’ of the preceding centuries, the German lands had not seen anything comparable to the crisis of legitimacy experienced in France and England in the religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries until 1933. Only in the twentieth century did
Germany, the ‘belated nation’, experience an analogous crisis ‘with all that goes with it: exile on a massive scale, ‘‘internal emigration’’, fanaticism, collapse of civil order, finally ethically motivated resistance’. The sense of rupture has been expressed even more starkly by Ju¨ rgen Habermas, who was influenced by the Frankfurt School theorists who formed part of that massive exile. According to
Habermas:

Unfortunately, in the cultural nation of the Germans, a connection to universalist constitutional principles that was anchored in convictions could be formed only after – and through – Auschwitz. Anyone who wants to dispel our shame about this fact with an empty phrase like ‘obsession with guilt’ . . . anyone who wants to recall the Germans to a conventional form of their national identity, is destroying the only reliable basis for our tie to the West.2

Many people do not agree with Habermas’s concern that there could be a plausible threat to Germany’s tie to the west, but there is general agreement that German political thought was distinctive, that there was a specifically German tradition of political thought and that this distinctiveness has either evaporated as part of a wider process of westernisation or has at least diminished. Exactly when and how this
process took place, and exactly how complete it is, is highly disputed. It is notable that those suspected of clinging to elements of the old tradition are often criticised by invoking their supposed proximity to discredited theorists of the past. A prime example of this is the use of Carl Schmitt, a political theorist who was highly critical of the democratic system of the Weimar Republic and was tainted by his association with the Third Reich. To identify someone’s ideas with those of Schmitt is often to imply, and sometimes to explicitly assert, that those ideas are not only misguided but also politically dangerous. Even those who take a more favourable view of Schmitt often take care to mark out their distance from him in key respects. To that extent, the shadow of the failure of Weimar and the Third Reich
extends to contemporary German political thought. Similarly, consideration of the German tradition of political thought prior to the Third Reich, and even prior to the Weimar Republic, is inevitably accompanied by knowledge of what was to follow. Sometimes the same critical strategy is deployed. The description of Carl Schmitt as
the legitimate heir of Max Weber by Habermas was rightly perceived as a damning indictment of Weber. More typically, theorists are accused of an inability to comprehend the true nature of modern parliamentary democracy precisely because of their entrapment within a tradition of political thought hostile to it. The picture is not a wholly monochrome one, though usually those exempt from the general judgement are presented as isolated figures whose exceptional status proves the general rule. One example of this is the interest in Hugo Preuss, who drafted the Weimar constitution but who was relatively neglected until recently.

The prism of Weimar’s failure and the Third Reich is difficult to avoid, not least because of the persistent reference to those traumas by later political theorists. Yet it is also distorting. It is so, in the first place, because theorists at the beginning of the century, and many on the eve of the advent of Third Reich, had no conception of a political system like the Third Reich. This statement is more than a trivial and obvious observation about our inability to predict the future. One of
the difficulties that political theorists had, and still have, in dealing with the Third Reich is its novelty and inconsistency. The difficulty posed by the nature of the regime has been well put by a recent commentator: ‘The quest for a system seems to me a wrong approach to begin with, since no system existed and none was supposed to’. Of course, many did seek to define a system, including those who remained within Germany and more or less enthusiastically supported the regime. As will be shown in Chapter 3, however, their efforts were frustrated and they were far from agreed on what the nature of the regime was. The exiles were also confronted with the elusive quality of the regime. The sheer novelty of the Third Reich and its possible resemblance to Stalinist Russia induced a search for the roots of this
strange phenomenon which some, like Helmuth Plessner, found in the ‘belated nation’ of the Germans while others, like the Frankfurt School members Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, went back to the beginnings of western civilisation in an attempt to explain how something like this regime was possible at all.

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