Lee McGowan. The Radical Right in Germany: 1870 to the Present. Harlow: Longman, 2002. 240 pp. $28.60 (paper), ISBN 978-0-582-29193-5.
Reviewed by Alastair Thompson (History Department, Durham University)
Published on H-German (March, 2005)
To analyze the history of the German radical right since the late nineteenth century in little more than 200 pages is no easy task. The author does indeed provide a useful survey of radical right politics in the Federal Republic until the summer of 2000. There have, of course, been subsequent developments. The Federal government began an attempt to ban the NPD in November 2000, which the Federal Constitutional Court halted in March 2003. The far right has benefited from Germany's continued low economic growth and high unemployment. The NPD achieved 4 percent in the latest Saarland state elections. In the Saxon state poll of September 19, 2004 the party gained 12 seats and 9.2 percent of the vote, less than 1 percent behind the SPD. In the Brandenburg elections on the same day another radical right party, the DVU, won 6.1 percent of the vote. More significantly, it became the first far-right party to maintain seats in a state parliament in successive elections. These developments confirm McGowan's conclusion that right-wing extremism persists, marginalized in the German political system, but "not completely without resonance among certain groups who feel alienated from today's society and find that by engaging in and with organized right-wing extremism they can vent their frustrations and embarrass the government" (p. 212).
The book is less successful in analyzing the radical right in the five other political systems in the period. Proceeding in reverse chronological order, conditions that the radical right could potentially exploit, such as xenophobia and alcohol-fueled violence in the GDR, are passed over in a couple of sentences. The chapters on the Third Reich are, perhaps inevitably, thin and familiar. But this problem is exacerbated by drawing preponderantly on works published in English during the 1970s and 1980s. An opportunity is missed to bring more recent and specialized literature to a wider audience. McGowan is not always fortunate in his choice of expression. It is not only the Soviets (who wanted him hanged at Nuremberg) who would object to the description of Hjalmar Schacht as "an excellent and highly capable individual" (p. 130). The author questions whether his remarks on "Hitler's abilities and magnetism ... a genius, albeit an evil one" (p. 133) are politically correct. Instead of pondering about political correctness, McGowan would have been better advised to reflect on whether such a simplistic statement adequately analyzes a frequently erratic and indolent head of government. Some were opponents of the Holocaust, but the realization that Hitler was leading the Reich to military disaster was a much more important motive for the 1944 bomb-plotters than supposed horror at "the intensification of the anti-Jewish crusade" (p. 142). If David Irving deserves consideration in a work on the German far-right, then it is as an associate of the DVU and other radical right and Holocaust-denying groups, not as "one of the most well-known revisionist historians." Is McGowan unaware of Irving's failed libel action against Penguin Books and Deborah Lipstadt?[1] How can he suggest looking at the publications and journals of the Institute for Historical Review (p. 91, n. 19) when these are collections of distortion, hatred, and fiction whose only historical value is to researchers of Holocaust denial?
Treatment of the radical right during the Weimar Republic again largely amounts to the much-told narrative of rise of the National Socialists and the collapse of German democracy in the Great Depression. The footnotes do not refer to a single work in German, although several could have been used to good effect.[2] The only notes of surprise come from errors. It is hardly accurate to refer to the DVP as an advocate of the Republican order (p. 56). It was his signing of the Armistice rather than the Versailles Treaty, which further heightened the Right's particular hatred of Matthias Erzberger (p. 49). Much more could have been made of research on the First World War as a period of increased radicalization and willingness to use violence. All too often contentions are made regardless of historiographical debate. The general reader is left oblivious to considerable disagreement amongst historians about matters such as the extent to which Hindenburg and Ludendorff exercised a wartime dictatorship, the degree of cultural pessimism within the Wilhelmine middle classes, or the scope and effectiveness of Sammlungspolitik in the late 1890s.
McGowan is far from alone in failing to grasp the constitutional complexities of the Reich and Prussia in Imperial Germany. However, it is nonsense to assert that "most imperial laws originated from within the Prussian Landtag" (p. 17). The claim that Bethmann-Hollweg persuaded the Reichstag to introduce equal suffrage in Prussia is similarly misconceived. The oddness of such claims is compounded by basic factual errors. Caprivi is the only chancellor whose years in office are given accurately. Many inaccuracies and inconsistencies could have been avoided if this book had been proof-read as effectively for content as for punctuation and, an occasional German misprint apart, spelling. Chapters 4 and 6 have overlaps which should have been avoided. The author might have corrected a reference (on p. 19) to the naval program after 1905 if he had realized it was incompatible with the 1898 and 1900 Naval Laws mentioned a dozen pages later. Bethmann-Hollweg's years in office are wrongly given as 1908 to 1916 a few pages before his removal from the chancellorship in 1917 is discussed on page 38. The DNVP is correctly labeled as the "Deutschnationale Volkspartei" in the list of abbreviations, but thoroughly mangled as the "Deutsche National Vaterland Partei" on page 47. Other examples could be cited. Although chapters 7 to 9 do offer a serviceable sixty-page summary of radical right politics in the Federal Republic of Germany, this book, unfortunately, contains too much simplification and too many errors for it to be recommended unreservedly to students.
Notes
[1]. Irving's condemnation for anti-Semitic distortion of history was widely discussed in the British media in Spring 2000. Justice Grey's High Court judgment of April 11, 2000 can be read at http://www.pixunlimited.co.uk/news/rtf/irvingjudgment.rtf . Cf. D. D. Guttenplan, The Holocaust on Trial (London: Granta, 2001); Richard J. Evans, Lying about Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial (New York: Basic Books, 2001).
[2]. Research on anti-Semitism in the Weimar Republic has advanced significantly recently, but earlier works that could have been incorporated to broaden coverage include Dirk Walter, Antisemitische Kriminalität und Gewalt. Judenfeindschaft in der Weimarer Republik (Bonn: Dietz: 1999); and Uwe Lohalm, Völkischer Radikalismus: die Geschichte des deutschvölkischen Schutz- und Trutz-Bundes; 1919-1923 (Hamburg: Leibniz-Verlag, 1970).
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Citation:
Alastair Thompson. Review of McGowan, Lee, The Radical Right in Germany: 1870 to the Present.
H-German, H-Net Reviews.
March, 2005.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=10309
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