Table Of ContentEmbracing Democracy in Modern
Germany
ii
Embracing Democracy in Modern
Germany
Political Citizenship and Participation,
1871–2000
Michael L. Hughes
BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC
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Copyright © Michael L. Hughes, 2021
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Hughes, Michael L., author.
Title: Embracing democracy in modern Germany :
political citizenship and participation, 1871-2000 / Michael L. Hughes.
Description: London ; New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020035925 (print) | LCCN 2020035926 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781350153752 (hardback) | ISBN 9781350200111 (paperback) |
ISBN 9781350153769 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350153776 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Democracy–Germany–History. |
Political participation–Germany–History. | Germany–Politics and government–1871- |
Germany (West)–Politics and government. | Germany (East)–Politics and government.
Classification: LCC JN3971.A91 H84 2021 (print) |
LCC JN3971.A91 (ebook) | DDC 323/.0420943–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020035925
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020035926
ISBN: HB: 978-1-3501-5375-2
ePDF: 978-1-3501-5376-9
eBook: 978-1-3501-5377-6
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For Gloria
vi
Contents
Acknowledgments viii
Introduction 1
1 Democratic Elements in an Authoritarian Regime: Enabling and
Containing Political Participation in Imperial Germany, 1871–1918 9
2 Searching for Authority: Challenges to Parliamentary Democracy
in the Weimar Republic, 1918–1933 33
3 Agency in a Total State: Compliance and Non-Compliance in the
Third Reich, 1933–1945 57
4 Re-Imagining Democracy: Creating a Federal Republic in
Postwar West Germany 79
5 Daring More Democracy: The Rise of Extra-Parliamentary
Political Action in West Germany, 1968–1980s 103
6 Political Citizenship in a Dictatorship: Negotiating Agency in
East Germany, 1945–1989 131
7 Coming to Fruition? Unification and Democracy in the Berlin Republic 155
Notes 172
Bibliography 236
Index 291
Acknowledgments
I have incurred many debts in the long process of writing this book.
I must thank the ILL staff at the Z. Smith Reynolds Library of Wake Forest University.
The ZSR has impressive collections, but I have relied on James Harper and his colleagues
to obtain the numerous books and articles I needed from around the United States and
Germany. They have been tireless and efficacious in securing them for me.
I began thinking about democracy in Germany in graduate school in the 1970s. I
have given innumerable talks at conferences in the United States and Germany and have
benefited from feedback from many, many scholars. I would like particularly to thank
the participants in the Social Science Research Seminar and the History Department
Colloquium at Wake Forest, who have read and responded to many iterations of this
material, and the participants in the Making Democratic Subjectivities Seminar at
the 2015 German Studies Conference. Various individual scholars have read chapters
and commented on them. I would particularly like to thank my colleague in German
Politics, Helga Welsh, with whom I have been talking about these issues for decades and
who read chapters intensely on my behalf. I would also like to thank Peter Caldwell,
Moritz Föllmer, Barry Trachtenberg, and Maria Mitchell for their careful readings of
various chapters. I must also thank Allison Brown of Henry Street Editing, as well as
the anonymous readers for Bloomsbury Academic.
I need especially to thank Dr. Gloria J. Fitzgibbon, who has been challenging me
intellectually for four decades and without whom I could not have written this work.
I am of course responsible for any errors or inadequacies.
Introduction
By 2000 a unified Germany was a stable democracy, and Germans seemed to have
embraced democracy—quite a change from the authoritarian monarchy founded
in 1871, the unstable Weimar Republic, or the dictatorial Third Reich and German
Democratic Republic. But embracing “democracy” was always complex and could
never be complete. Germans were never a national collective with a single mentality
or character. Some Germans in the mid-nineteenth century already embraced
democracy; some Germans (especially in the 1920s and early 1930s) used democratic
means to undermine democracy, and only a minority voted for parties supporting
the democratic Weimar Republic; some Germans, even in the twenty-first century,
have never embraced it. Moreover, even Germans who embraced democracy have had
widely varying conceptions of what “democracy” might entail—e.g., parliamentary
democracy, leader democracy, party democracy, direct democracy, participatory
democracy. Meanwhile, Hitler despised democracy but sought, in effect, democratic
legitimacy through plebiscites, and East Germany’s Communist dictatorship insisted
it alone was the truly democratic German republic. This book seeks to illuminate
the complexities and open-endedness of Germans’ encounters with and embrace of
“democracy,” from 1871 to 2000—encounters that can illuminate debate on democracy
more generally and that have recently taken on new relevance, as liberal democracy
has come under increasing challenge, in Germany and elsewhere.
Democracy as Institution, Culture, and Practice
The rise of democracy in the modern period took on an aura of inevitability in the
heady days after the collapse of Communism, as the number of “democracies” across
the world grew. However, that rise was not inevitable. Understanding democratization
requires looking at the specific circumstances that contributed to, hindered, or eroded
democracy. Focusing on Germany, a complex and historically significant example,
offers an illuminating case.1
Germany’s democratization is a story of multiple pressures for and against
democracy, pressures that played out amid contingent factors. History cannot be
reduced to a simple theory or a simple narrative. It is always complicated. And because
pressures and contingencies are ongoing, it never comes to a conclusion. Germany has
