Eric Kurlander received his PhD from Harvard University and is now Assistant Professor of Modern European History at Stetson University. He has published articles on liberalism, anti-Semitism and political culture in Imperial and Weimar Germany, and is currently working on a book studying the fate of bourgeois republicans in the Third Reich, Living With Hitler: Liberal Democrats Between Resistance and Collaboration, 1933-1945 (Yale UP, fortcoming).
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1. The Genesis of Völkisch Liberalism in Schleswig-Holstein, 1898-1918
Chapter 2. Decisive Liberalism and the Challenges of Völkisch-Nationalism in Silesia, 1898-1918
Chapter 3. Republican Particularism and the Creation of an Alsatian Liberal Counterculture, 1898-1918
Chapter 4. The Strengths and Weaknesses of Völkisch Liberalism in Schleswig-Holstein, 1918-1933
Chapter 5. The Price of Universalism in Weimar Silesia, 1918-1933
Chapter 6.The Victory of Republican Particularism in Alsace, 1918-1933
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
"The failure of Liberalism" in Germany and its responsibility for the rise of Nazism has been widely discussed among scholars inside and outside Germany. This author argues that German liberalism failed because of the irreconcilable conflict between two competing visions of German identity. In following the German liberal parties from the Empire through the Third Reich Kurlander illustrates convincingly how an exclusionary racist Weltanschauung, conditioned by profound transformations in German political culture at large, gradually displaced the liberal-universalist conception of a democratic Rechtsstaat. Although there were some notable exceptions, this widespread obsession with "racial community [Volksgemeinschaft]" caused the liberal parties to succumb to ideological lassitude and self-contradiction, paving the way for National Socialism.