Demokratie_
Date: Thursday, June 21, 2007

[Ed. Note: the original review can accessed via the H-German discussion logs
at <
http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=h-german&month=0705&we
ek=b&msg=2YaX/rwnlPu4DAypgj8V4w&user=&pw= >]

The price of unambiguity

A response to Eric Kurlander's review of _Nationaler Sozialismus und Soziale
Demokratie_

A critical review of one's book should not be particularly surprising or
disappointing for an academic author. Scholarly work relies first and
foremost on arguments and counter-arguments. A wholesale rejection, however,
such as the one offered by Eric Kurlander in his review of my _Nationaler
Sozialismus und Soziale Demokratie_, is a different story, especially if
this rejection seems to cloud rather than illuminate the basic arguments of
the study under review. My book does not discuss who is responsible for the
collapse of Weimar democracy, but rather investigates the relationship
between liberal and illiberal currents in German ideology. In his own book,
_The Price of Exclusion_, Kurlander deals with the same problem. Although
his study seems to me to be in many ways compatible with mine, his review
reveals a fundamental disagreement: Whereas Kurlander insists on separating
these liberal and illiberal currents, I consider affinities and transitions
between them as a key for understanding the collapse of liberalism and
democracy in 1933.

Intentions and conclusions of _Nationaler Sozialismus und Soziale
Demokratie_

My study's starting point is a strange phenomenon in the history of German
Social Democracy. During the Weimar Republic, a group of socialist
intellectuals and politicians that I call the _Junge Rechte_ endorsed
nationalist and authoritarian ideas and tried to reformulate socialist
ideology on these premises, creating what they called a _nationaler
Sozialismus_.[1] They condoned and even approved of radical nationalist
tendencies, especially among the younger generation, some of whom supported
the Nazis. At the same time, these socialists urged their party to act more
decisively against Nazism.[2] After the NSDAP assumed power, many members of
the Junge Rechte either formed or joined existing resistance organizations.
Many of them paid for this with years of imprisonment in concentration
camps, and some of them even lost their lives.

The aim of my book is to explain how such a strange combination could occur
and what it meant for the relationship between liberal democracy and
fascism. To do so, I examined the ideological and organizational roots of
this group, and I analyzed their political ideology and practice. I argue
that these roots can be traced back to ideological and philosophical debates
both within and outside the social democratic movement from the late
nineteenth century. Influenced by ethical and religious socialism but also
by the radical Right's so-called _Conservative Revolution_, the Junge Rechte
developed a specific ideology. The core of this ideology was a synthesis of
nationalism and socialism by which they responded to what they considered to
be the failure of liberal, materialist and internationalist versions of
socialism. In their view, the most obvious manifestation of this failure was
the rise of Fascism and Nazism.

However, they viewed Nazism as part of an inevitable and even welcome
process--the abandonment of liberalism and rationalism. The Junge Rechte
thought that Nazism raised the right questions but gave the wrong answers.
Only a nationalist form of socialism could provide the appropriate answers.
Such a nationalist socialism would throw off its materialist baggage to open
itself to nationalist and authoritarian tendencies, while refusing to
renounce democracy and socialism altogether.

My study thus finds a fundamental ambiguity within the Junge Rechte that
illustrates the ambiguity of liberal democracy in general. Far from being
Nazis themselves, the Junge Rechte was nonetheless part of the process that
allowed Nazism to assume power. This process was not confined to the
radical, openly anti-democratic forces of the Right and the Left but
penetrated much deeper into German society. The Junge Rechte calls into
question any strict dichotomy between democratic and anti-democratic forces
in the Weimar Republic. As part of the Social Democratic movement that
resolutely defended the Weimar Republic against National Socialism, the
group at the same time contributed to the decline of liberal democracy.
Precisely because the Junge Rechte's ideology was so ambiguous, it was an
element of the intellectual crisis that brought Nazism to power.

Kurlander's critique

For Kurlander, this all amounts to a reprise of the infamous _social
fascism_ thesis. He claims that my book portrays the Junge Rechte as being
"similarly obsessed with völkisch nationalism and eastward expansion" as the
NSDAP.[3] In exploring the ideological roots of the Junge Rechte, he argues,
I carelessly identify the thought of such figures as Eduard Bernstein,
Herman Cohen and Paul Tillich with radical nationalism and irrationalism.
Furthermore, according to Kurlander, my analysis of the group's ideology and
political practice does not prove that it developed a position distinct from
the mainstream SPD and considerably more open to the ideas of the radical
Right. Kurlander concludes: "It seems that the few concessions to national
Socialism made by the Junge Rechte represented a pragmatic turn to the
liberal democratic Center, not an ideological leap to the radical Right."

This conclusion indeed points to the core of our academic disagreement.
While the reader will have to reach his or her own conclusions, I will try
to give a few examples which I think disprove Kurlander's thesis. However,
Kurlander couples this academic debate with a profoundly misleading
characterization of my book, for which he provides little, if any, evidence
in his review. In claiming that the book adds "a new wrinkle to the social
fascist paradigm", he alleges that I would blame Social Democracy for
enabling fascism "not only in its hostility to the communist Left but in its
ideological commitment to the radical Right."

Nowhere in my book can such an accusation be found. While I do not elaborate
at all on the SPD's position towards the communists, I identify its
reluctance to make ideological concessions to the radical Right as a feature
that positively distinguishes it from the Junge Rechte.[4] Furthermore,
Kurlander claims that I consider the Junge Rechte to be "proto-Nazis" and
that I accuse them of "collusion" with the NSDAP. Such terms cannot be found
in the book. Even a superficial reading should reveal that I in fact argue
against such primitive understandings of ideological relations. Rather than
identification or collusion, I am interested in affinities and transitions
between the two sides.

Similarly, Kurlander alleges that the book suggests Eduard Bernstein, Herman
Cohen and Paul Tillich provided the "basis for National Socialism". This,
again, is not the case. Instead, I try to trace the twisted paths along
which aspects of their thought were incorporated into a concept of
nationalist socialism that reflected a highly ambivalent relationship to
Nazism.

Twisted paths of intellectual history

While my book never constructs any direct relationship between Bernstein,
Cohen or even Tillich (who belonged to the Junge Rechte) and Nazism, it
indeed argues that the Junge Rechte's affinity to nationalist and
authoritarian ideas can only be understood by analyzing their position
within the intellectual history of socialism. Some of the foundations of
this affinity can already be found in Bernstein, the Marburg neo-Kantians (I
refer much more to Paul Natorp than to Herman Cohen in this respect) and the
religious and ethical socialists. Bernstein, for example, is analyzed as
part of a development that shaped German socialism's attitude towards the
nation from the 1880s to 1914. Though they were not anti-national, as state
authorities alleged, _orthodox_ socialist leaders like August Bebel or
Wilhelm Liebknecht (or, for that matter, Friedrich Engels) viewed the
national question with regard to its role in social revolution. In the
course of the working class' social and political integration, this purely
instrumental approach towards the nation was gradually replaced by what I
call an _Integrationsnationalismus_ that considered national integration and
identification as logical consequences of this process. Bernstein's
revisionist theory provided the intellectual background for this shift.
_Integrationsnationalismus_ could develop into a moderate nationalism (or
patriotism, if we prefer), as it did in mainstream Social Democracy,
including Bernstein himself. [5] However, it could also develop into a more
radical nationalism. We find this second development in significant factions
of prewar Social Democracy, gathered around Eduard David, who led the SPD
Reichstag faction in 1914, or Paul Lensch and Konrad Haenisch, who set up a
group called _Kriegssozialisten_. Although these two modes of nationalism
need to be distinguished--and I very clearly distinguish them in my study--I
maintain that they are related in rejecting the materialist concept of
socialism and replacing the aim of social revolution with participation in
the nation state. Even if moderate or liberal nationalism, as promoted by
Bernstein, mainstream Social Democracy or the left-liberal bourgeoisie, is
different from radical nationalism, it is not the opposite. It therefore was
not only a matter of economic pragmatism that Eduard Bernstein supported
German colonialism or defended Gustav Noske's infamous speech to the
Reichstag, in which Noske stated "daß es unsere verdammte Pflicht und
Schuldigkeit ist, dafür zu sorgen, daß das deutsche Volk nicht etwa von
irgend einem anderen Volk an die Wand gedrückt wird." [6] I argue that the
Junge Rechte's ideology drew on these currents of radical nationalism within
prewar Social Democracy and owed relevant parts of their theoretical basis
to Eduard Bernstein's revisionism.

A similarly twisted, but nevertheless traceable path leads from the Marburg
school of neo-Kantian philosophy to the Junge Rechte. Bernstein himself
already drew on neo-Kantian thought as a non-materialist basis for his
socialist ideas. Herman Cohen and Paul Natorp developed neo-Kantianism into
a highly sophisticated philosophical system that leaned politically towards
a moderate socialism. This system, however, suffered from the same basic
problem that Hegel had detected in Kant's philosophy: it required a source
of ethical truth that could not be provided by the system itself. Cohen's
solution to this problem was the state, not the existing state of the
Kaiserreich but an ideal and just state yet to be established. This solution
indicated a kind of Hegelian transformation of the neo-Kantian position. It
was Paul Natorp who continued on this path during and after the First World
War, replacing Cohen's ideal state with the German nation.[7] The Junge
Rechte did not draw from Cohen, who died in April 1918, but from Natorp, to
whom they had direct contact through the youth movement. It would be
careless to ignore the ties linking Natorp's nationalism to the neo-Kantian
school.

I could continue with other intellectual sources of the Junge Rechte, all of
which were significantly transformed through the very process of reception,
as is always the case. The fact that these intellectual sources were part of
emancipatory currents in German society does not necessarily mean that they
produced only emancipatory ideas. Paul Tillich, who was both a theoretical
inspiration for and a leading activist within the Junge Rechte, provides a
particularly striking example of this dialectic. One only has to read his
_Die Sozialistische Entscheidung_, published in January 1933. It contains a
sophisticated critique of totalitarian tendencies of its time, and at the
same time sanctions such tendencies. A careful reading of my study will
quickly reveal that I do not intend to denounce these thinkers as
proto-Nazis, as Kurlander implies, but rather try to understand how their
thought could become part of an intellectual and political catastrophe.

The ambivalence of the Junge Rechte

Regarding the Junge Rechte itself, Kurlander claims that their ideology and
politics did not indicate "Nazi proclivities" but were more or less
identical to those of bourgeois and socialist republicans. He seems
resistant to the possibility of positions that were neither liberal or
socialist republican nor Nazi. In my study, I try to locate the Junge Rechte
in relation to the Social Democratic mainstream and the Conservative
Revolution, which were in fact the two ideological frameworks to which the
group referred. In doing so, we indeed encounter significant differences to
the SPD mainstream. For example, their critique of a class-based concept of
socialism did not argue with the changing composition of society and the
political or strategic necessities deriving from such changes. Rather, they
criticized this concept for being rooted in particularistic and materialist
liberal thought. Instead of a class, the _Volk_ was supposed to be the
subject of history. Class struggle should be replaced by the struggle of the
_Volk_ for liberation. This concept of socialism was clearly indebted to
authors of the Conservative Revolution, such as Hans Freyer or Hans Zehrer.
Similarly, the Junge Rechte's interventions in the debate on constitutional
theory were not only about strengthening the executive in order to
ameliorate the exhausting struggles among interest groups that were
paralyzing parliament, as Kurlander asserts. Herman Heller, for instance,
opposed positivists like Hans Kelsen and other proponents of the Weimar
constitution, making affirmative reference to Carl Schmitt and Hans Freyer.
The Junge Rechte agreed with these authors of the radical Right that the
positivist idea of the state belonged to the declining liberal era and that
it had to be replaced by an authoritarian one. Strengthening the executive
was designed not merely to make Weimar democracy work more properly but to
change it into another type of democracy. Similar tendencies can be found in
other aspects of the Junge Rechte's ideology, such as Paul Tillich's
religious socialism. His thinking increasingly incorporated elements of
_Lebensphilosophie_, leading him to openly welcome radical nationalist
groups of the Right. "Klassenlose Gesellschaft," he wrote in _Die
sozialistische Entscheidung_ (1933) "bedeutet also nicht Gesellschaft ohne
Macht des Ursprungs. Auch in der Gesellschaft, die der Sozialismus schaffen
will, wirken der Boden, das Blut, die Gruppe. Auch in ihr gelten Traditionen
und allgemeine, jedem verständliche Symbole. Auch in ihr wirken Glaube und
Hingabe. Eben diese Kräfte sind es, die gegenwärtig der Klassenherrschaft
widerstehen, im Proletariat wie bei den revolutionären Ursprungsgruppen, und
durch die allein die klassenlose Gesellschaft verwirklicht werden kann."[8]

None of this, however, made the Junge Rechte a part of the radical Right,
let alone of Nazism. Kurlander's imputation of such a position to me
misrepresents my argument. Instead, I make it clear that the Junge Rechte
almost always stopped short before following the radical Right on their way
into abandoning democracy altogether. Kurlander notes this, but considers it
only a qualification of an overarching argument for identity between the
Junge Rechte and the radical Right. In fact, I draw attention to precisely
the ambivalence of affinity to nationalist and authoritarian tendencies on
the one side and anchoring in socialist and liberal traditions on the other
that characterized the Junge Rechte. Their commitment to such traditions
prevented the Junge Rechte from leaving Social Democracy and joining the
enemies of the Republic, but their inclination toward ideologies of the
Right prevented them from developing important insights regarding social
conditions and tendencies into a politics that might have helped to stop
Nazism. In the Junge Rechte's support for majority instead of proportional
voting, for instance, we can see with Kurlander a completely harmless
attempt to preserve democracy only if we ignore its illiberal ideological
premises. The same holds true for the Junge Rechte's call to reform the
SPD's organization along the lines of fascist parties. In doing so, they
surely aimed at a more effective defence against the Nazis, but they
advocated abandoning liberal concepts of organization for more principled
reasons as well. "In der Uniformierung der politischen Bewegung, die der
Faschismus erfunden hat," Theodor Haubach claimed to see the "Abkehr von dem
eudämonistisch-rationalen Lebensideal der Vorkriegszeit ..., die wahrhaftig
nicht nur Eigentum der Reaktion ist, sondern für Bourgeois und Prolet
gleichermaßen einen neuen Ausblick auf Leben und Menschenwelt entwickelt."
[9]

Conclusion: The dialectics of liberalism and illiberalism

The position of the Junge Rechte was replete with this kind of ambivalence.
If we relate their political practice to their ideology, and if we place
this ideology into the framework of German intellectual history, socialist
and otherwise, it becomes clear that the group neither represented the
socialist mainstream in Weimar Germany nor defected to Nazism. They did,
however, share several basic assumptions about the destiny of modern
civilization with the radical Right. The Junge Rechte thus provides an
illuminating example of how illiberal and antidemocratic ideas affected even
the stronghold of republicanism in Weimar Germany, namely Social Democracy.
This suggests that the lethal attack on liberalism and democracy did not
come only from the outside but had firm roots on the inside. From this
perspective, drawing a clear borderline between universalist and völkisch
conceptions of national identity, as Kurlander does in both his review and
his book, appears highly questionable. If we insist on such a dichotomy, we
will neither be able to distinguish what Kurlander aptly calls _völkisch
liberalism_ from Nazi ideology, nor will be able to recognize transitions
between völkisch and universalist liberalism (as in the case of Gustav
Stresemann). More importantly, this dichotomous view gives no answer to the
question of how the predominantly universalist liberalism of the nineteenth
century could ever develop such a strong völkisch current. Kurlander's
insistence on this dichotomy not only imposes serious limitations on his
otherwise excellent study, but it also leads him to expect an unambiguity
from my study of the Junge Rechte that history rarely provides. This is
deeply unfortunate, as his own findings underscore the very dialectics of
the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century intellectual constellation
that I highlight in my study.

Stefan Vogt University of Amsterdam

[1]. Hermann Heller, Nationaler Sozialismus, in: Neue Blätter für den
Sozialismus 2 (1931), pp. 154-156.

[2]. I will here use the term Nazism instead of National Socialism, in order
to distinguish it from the Junge Rechte's national socialism. In German, I
use the terms _Nationalsozialismus_ und _Nationaler Sozialismus_. Kurlander
seems not always to be aware of this distinction in my terminology.

[3]. All quotations are, if not otherwise noted, from Kurlander's review of
my book: Eric Kurlander, Social Fascism Revisited: A _Sonderweg_ of the
Left? Published by H-German in May 2007.

[4]. Nationaler Sozialismus und Soziale Demokratie, pp. 258, 320, 355.

[5]. Nationaler Sozialismus und Soziale Demokratie, p. 32.

[6]. Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstages, vol. 228 (1907), p. 1098C. For
Bernstein's defense of Noske cf. Eduard Bernstein, Patriotismus,
Militarismus und Sozialdemokratie, in: Sozialistische Monatshefte 13 (1907),
pp. 434-440.

[7]. Paul Natorp, Deutscher Weltberuf. 2 vols., Jena 1918.

[8]. Paul Tillich, Die sozialistische Entscheidung, Potsdam 1933, p. 161.

[9]. Theodor Haubach, Die militante Partei, in: Neue Blätter für den
Sozialismus 2 (1931), p. 210.

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