The rise of the NSDAP to power is often seen as inexplicable, but placed in the context of interwar Europe as a whole, is the ascension to power of a radical, nationalist and anti-Semitic party more easily understood?
This is a topic I've been thinking a lot about lately, so I thought I'd write about it for this week's assignment as a way of aligning these new sources I've not read before with what I already had learned. To first answer briefly, I believe that it is not the context of interwar Europe as much as the specific circumstances in late Weimar Germany that make the ascension to power of the NSDAP more easily understood. This is not to say that the generally rightward, authoritarian drift of Europe was not a factor -- it certainly was. However, that the NSDAP came to power, rather than a military-style dictatorship à la Hungary, was quite specific to the personalities involved.
One of the most important things to bear in mind, in my opinion, despite it not often being said, is that Germany essentially stopped being a democracy once the government of Chancellor Hermann Müller collapsed in 1931. Thereafter, no chancellor had the support of the government and government by emergency decree, although, Harold James makes excellent points on how Heinrich Brüning maintained power, both because the SPD feared an even more reactionary government should it participate in a no confidence against him and because, by pursuing a policy of revising the reparations agreement, Brüning kept the animus of the population and political rivals outward, toward France, rather than inward: "Revision had become the principal way of uniting German politics in the face of the centrifugal pressures exerted by the unpleasant nature of economic choices during the depression."[1]
The terms in office of Chancellors Papen, Schleicher, and ultimately Hitler were backroom deals, with the mistaken impression on the part of Hindenburg's inner circle of advisers that Hitler could be reined in -- obviously an impression belied by the Reichstag Fire and subsequent events. In this regard, the situation of Hitler's party being propelled into power is unique. Whether the question is why a fascist, anti-Semitic political party could become the largest party in the country by July 1932 is a more difficult question but still one specific to Germany. The center had clearly collapsed, as witnessed by the massive losses suffered by the SPD and DVP, with their votes going largely to the KPD and Nazis, respectively. The drift of voters on the fence toward the right rather than the left was likely based on the relatively recent memory of Soviet-inspired revolution in Berlin and Munich.
All that said, Eric Hobsbawn offers a nicely concise overview of the context in which democracy had been thrown off increasingly over the 1920s and 1930s across Europe, and this context offers the remainder of the explanation for how the NSDAP ended up in power in January 1933 by explaining why both the power brokers in Germany and the electorate abandoned democracy. In detailing the three types of anti-democratic forces that were emergent in Europe between the wars, Hobsbawm writes, "All were against social revolution, and indeed a reaction against the subversion of the old social order in 1917-20 was at the root of all of them. All were authoritarian and hostile to liberal political institutions, though sometimes for pragmatic reasons rather than on principle."[2] While Germany took the third route of fascism, it could easily have gone one of the other two, had the army or monarchists acted decisively after the suspension of democracy following Müller's ouster.
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[1] Harold James, "Economic Reasons for the Collapse of the Weimar Republic," in Weimar: Why Did German Democracy Fail?, ed. Ian Kershaw (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1990), 54.
[2] Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991 (London: Michael Joseph, 1994), 114.
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