Rüdiger Graf & Moritz Föllmer. Thesis Eleven. Volume 111, Issue 1. August 2012.
In the spring of 1932 the Berlin tabloid BZ am Montag reported an original business idea. A tour guide would show the tourists not the usual sites but the ‘metropolis in crisis’. The guide would take them to welfare offices, empty buildings, closed factories and political demonstrations. He would even engage young men to play the part of jobless rowdies to create the ‘necessary impression of crisis’. This story attests to how widespread was the feeling of living through some kind of ‘crisis’ in the Weimar Republic. The sense of crisis would escalate into a complex of associations, stereotypes and expectations that shaped perceptions of reality and intensified with time. The clever tour guide was conscious of this constructed character of ‘crisis’ and saw no problem in displaying to the tourist gaze an image of the ‘metropolis in crisis’.
Other observers too were capable of speaking with some distance about the consciousness of crisis. In 1932 another Berlin tabloid reckoned ‘the global economic crisis’ a favourite locution of the day beside ‘grub’s up’, ‘you’re telling me!’ and ‘why are you so nervous?’ In its left-liberal and individualist outlook the BZ am Montag attributed the widespread feeling of crisis to a ‘collectivized pessimism’. Its view was: ‘You’re not pessimistic as Herr Schulz or Herr Lehmann’ but as a ‘member of the collectively downtrodden middle class’ or the ‘collectively young class of enemy debtors’. At the opposite end of the political spectrum stood Carl Schmitt, whose self-image as a no-nonsense jurist required that he look askance at any rhetoric of crisis: ‘Optimistic or pessimistic suppositions or prognoses are of no interest here; talk of “crises”—whether biological, medical or economic or “post-war crisis”, “crises of trust”, “crises of recuperation”, “crises of puberty” or “crises of contraction”—is pointless’, he declared (Schmitt 1998: 7). Like Schmitt, the right-wing revolutionary Hans Zehrer ironized the ‘vogue’ for talking ‘candidly of crises’, mocking the cliché of meetings devoted to the topic already at the outset of 1929. Yet this did not stop Zehrer from evoking a fundamental crisis of state and economy in his own magazine Die Tat—thereby contributing significantly to the paper’s popularity (Zehrer 1928/9).
In the Weimar Republic it was indeed possible to grow weary of the talk of crisis, however much it might have been a subjective reality and objectively evident in the country’s economy and politics. Between 1918 and 1933, 370 book titles appeared with the word ‘crisis’ referring to German politics, society or economy. Though relatively slight in the early years and hovering steadily around 15 per year until 1927, the number would climb to well over 20 by 1928, would double to around 45 in 1931, then soar to 79 by 1932. Judging by these titles, the crisis was total and gripped Germany in all areas of life. Where the German book cataloguing system only classified books in the years 1915-20 in relation to economic crises, it categorized books between 1931 and 1935 under the rubrics of agrarian, financial, industrial, economic global crises, as well as capitalist, religious, political and revolutionary crises, general crises of civilization, and solutions to crises. Moving well beyond the domain of the economy, contemporaries would transfer the rhetoric of crisis in an inflationary manner to analyses of virtually all dimensions of life, from state and law to the natural and human sciences, to culture and religion.
It is these kinds of source material, manifest from any reading of journals and newspapers of the period, together with the role of the Weimar Republic in the making of the ‘German catastrophe’ or National Socialist ‘break with civilization’, that explain the centrality of the concept of crisis for historical studies of the years 1918 to 1933. It is in this way that a discourse of crisis among contemporaries of the age has come to be reproduced in a large part of historiography. Notably Detlef Peukert’s influential comprehensive portrait of the Republic from 1987 would register a scholarly consensus about the period as the ‘crisis years of classical modernity’. In Peukert’s picture, the modern order as we know it today reached its full classical form in these 14 years in social policy, technology, in the natural and social sciences, in art and architecture—and yet at the same time entered a fundamental crisis (Peukert 1987).
Our overview in the following scrutinizes the persuasiveness and utility of the concept of crisis as an interpretive frame. We begin with some general analytical considerations before moving to a critical survey of the relevant historiography.
On the concept of ‘crisis’
The concept of crisis stems from the Greek krisis—a spelling still common in the Weimar Republic—meaning both division and decision (Scheidung and Entscheidung). It thus encompasses simultaneously the ‘today separated meanings of objective crisis and subjective critique’ (Koselleck 1976: 1235; 1982). This etymology hints at a way in which uses of the concept of crisis as a concept are bound up with human perception to a greater extent than other historical categories. Crises do not already exist in the world and await discovery by human beings. They are first constituted in the narrative structures with which both contemporaries and subsequent historians seek to make sense of complex processes. In other words, only in narrative do structural changes and courses of events become crises. The embedding of the concept in narrative, most often with an existential dimension, is already evident in its older historically transmitted usage as a technical term in military affairs or in medicine. In each of these cases, a ‘crisis’ denotes the precise ‘moment of decision before victory or defeat; the decisive phase of an illness that marks the turn either to convalescence or deterioration, to life or to death’ (Schnurr 1990).
From the 17th century onwards, the concept would increasingly be applied metaphorically to politics, society and the economy and thus would become a general historical concept of process. In ‘genuine crises’, declared Jacob Burckhardt, the political and social basis of a country would be shaken to the core. At this point the ‘world process suddenly acquires a terrible acceleration; developments that otherwise take centuries to unfold seem to pass by in months and weeks like fleeting phenomena destined for obsolescence’ (Burckhardt 1985: 162ff.). Precisely these accelerated historical processes would become the focus of the disciplines of economics and the social sciences in the 19th and 20th centuries. Economists in particular would elaborate explicit theories of crises and conjunctures, proposing objective criteria and standards for the definition of crises and the prognosis of critical eventualities. Marxist theories are among the best-known of these (Masur 1968; Haberler and Holesovsky 1969). In political science, efforts would be made to specify political systemic crises through lists of criteria aimed at determining predictability and preconditions of occurrence (Jänicke 1973; Dohse 1971). Despite inadequacies and a continuing strong dependence of definitions of crises on norms and ideals, sociologists and economists have gone on to operate with questions about whether a given state of a system can be called a crisis or not. Yet most definitions of historical crises concerning whole societies in all of their various subsystems remain vague and relatively difficult to operationalize. These operational defects of the concept arise inevitably, we argue, from the concept’s constitutive link to human perception on the one hand and from its subsumption of complex interconnections of historical processes within different subsystems on the other.
It cannot and should not be our goal here to formulate a general theory of historical crises, comparable to theories in economics and political science. Nevertheless, we find it important to point to two elements of the concept of crises that need to be inspected before it can become a productive analytical category. As Reinhard Koselleck demonstrated in his studies on conceptual history, ‘crisis’ denotes an open situation in which an ‘impending decision has yet to be made’ (Koselleck 1989: 134). Entwined in the concept are thus elements of both diagnosis and prognosis. On the one hand, particular unresolved transformations of the present are diagnosed, and on the other hand an approaching moment of decision is forecast and seen as presaging an either bright or bleak future (Koselleck 1989: 105). Frequently today, in both ordinary and historiographical usage, this basic openness of the concept is foreclosed when it is deployed with a solely negative connotation of ‘downfall’ and ‘decline’ or of something being thrown into question or jeopardy. Such uses obscure a way in which a crisis can evoke not only the pessimistic sense of a threat to the old order but also the optimistic scenario of a chance for renewal. This applies particularly to the historiography of the Weimar Republic where the more positive valence of the concept as a productive mode and space of possibility is not often appreciated and is frequently ignored in favour of its purely pessimistic register as prelude to National Socialist ascendancy—an assimilation that seems to impose itself from the thoroughly negative character of Germany’s ‘break with civilization’ of 1933 (Witoszek and Tragardh 2002: 4). This neglect of the positive and productive aspects of crises is astonishing as scholars themselves so often talk of states of crisis in their own research field, while simultaneously proposing solutions through paradigms shifts of various kinds.
A one-sidedly negative understanding of crisis as prelude to calamity, we argue here, is problematic for historical research for two reasons. Firstly, it obscures comprehension of the consciousness of actors in the relevant period who at any particular moment can have had no prior knowledge of the crisis’s outcome. Secondly, it tends to reify the relevant crisis and to occlude its basic character as something narratively constructed in the accounts of both contemporaries and subsequent historiography. As noted, the concept of crisis plays a central role in existential narratives that dramatize life-and-death struggles, particularly in medical and military language. In war, a critical situation usually occurs after a long phase of exertion of all forces: it is the moment at which a great decision turns on a knife-edge between victory or defeat for the collective or, as in the medical case, life or death for the individual. Not until the decision occurs can a condition of reduced tension be restored, whether towards one of suffering, misery and perhaps death or towards one of relief and joy. The illness’s symptoms increase and weaken the body until it reaches the critical state of passage to either life or death. Even these relatively concrete types of crisis situations are constituted only in narratives that articulate essentially more complex processes. They can be thought of as virtually archetypical examples of story-telling, transferable to other areas.
By way of a survey of the current state of research on the Weimar Republic, the next part of this essay argues that any fruitful historiographical procedure needs to take seriously this work of dramatization enacted by the concept of crisis as something with a fundamentally open character.
Crisis concepts in Weimar scholarship
The element of existential narrative in the concept of crisis makes it attractive not only to contemporaries of the historical situation but also to overall synthetic accounts of the Republic by subsequent historians. Particularly in studies of German politics of the period, the Republic’s end-phase has been presented as a critical situation on the eve of catastrophe at the hands of National Socialism. Thus Hans Mommsen speaks of a development from ‘government in crisis’ via presidential dictatorship to fascist dictatorship. Heinrich August Winkler conceptualizes the ‘German crisis of state’ as a situation in which the sole remaining decision lay between either proclamation of the state of emergency or government under Hitler (Mommsen 1989: 361ff; Winkler 1993: 557-94; 1992). In their concentration on political history, Winkler and Mommsen restrict the concept relatively narrowly to situations of political decision-making or to the context of the global economic crisis. By contrast, Hans-Ulrich Wehler’s GermanSocial History awards it a universal analytical status. In Wehler’s picture, the Republic comes to disintegrate as its series of governments cease to be capable of untying the ‘snarled knot of crises’ (Wehler 2003: 229ff, 592ff).
A survey of both comprehensive and specialized studies of the Republic suggests chiefly two different uses of the term crisis. One includes attempts to explain the total crisis of the Republic as a whole or also more specific phenomena and processes of crisis. In this instance the crisis is the explanandum. But another usage encompasses references to the crisis as explanans, where the putative crisis of the system as a whole or of individual sub-systems serves as an explanation of yet further historical developments.
In the first group belong most studies dedicated to the world economic crisis and thus to the central crisis phenomenon of the age. These deal with a clearly delineated historical sub-domain and establish the point at which the economy enters into crises with the help of particular indicators (such as GDP, unemployment and balance of trade). In this way causes of the crisis of the world economy or of individual national economies are then established (Kindleberger 1973; Balderston 2002). The best-known example of this is the debate about Knut Borchardt’s thesis of ‘compulsion versus freedom of action’ from the early 1980s, which cast doubt on the idea of Heinrich Brüning’s deflationary fiscal policy as a cause of the worsening crisis in Germany. Borchardt attributed the crisis’s intensity to the German state having lived beyond its means after the First World War and to overly high wage levels prevailing in the Weimar economy. Moving out of the economic sphere, strictly defined, Gerald D. Feldman in his study of the inflation and the ‘crisis year of 1923’ investigates economic as well as social and political crisis processes and remedial strategies. But as with Wehler’s account, this much more wide-ranging explanatory ambition inflates the concept into a universal term of analysis, sacrificing the heuristic sharpness it has in purely economic history (Feldman 1993).
A second principal cluster of specific investigations has been in the realm of politics. Numerous conferences have been devoted to the ‘democracy in crisis’ and have sought not only to describe but also to explain the dysfunctionality of the Weimar parliamentary system in terms of the general crisis of European parliamentarism in the inter-war period. In particular, the contributors to Heinrich August Winkler’s edited volume on the German ‘crisis of state’ seek to determine the responsibility of power elites, parties, industrialists and landowners in the crisis-stricken end-phase of the Republic (Winkler 1992: xf). Correlatively, Winkler himself in his overall study, focusing on the political elite, depicts in minute detail a critical situation in which few influential personalities were able to exert any ultimate impact on the Republic’s life or death (Winkler 1993).
A third group of studies has been concerned with social, socio-cultural or intellectual formations of the Republic and their origins. Thus Hans Mommsen attributes the ‘hollowing out of bourgeois ways of life’ and the dissolution of educated middle-class ‘self-understandings’ to political and social changes conducive to a specific post-1900 ‘bourgeois consciousness of crisis’ in search of new forms of association (Mommsen 1987; Weisbrod 1996). A similar narrative can be followed in Fritz Ringer’s account of the decline of the German mandarins, as well as in Walter Müller-Seidel’s multi-layered analysis of the crisis of humanism in the Weimar Republic against the background of the First World War (Ringer 1969; Müller-Seidel 1998).
Synthesizing and in part anticipating these studies, Detlef Peukert sought to show how the Weimar experience of ‘classical modernity’—the ‘socio-cultural condition of the age’, as he called it—could slide into a crisis spanning all domains of life that finally became a ‘total crisis’ between 1930 and 1933 (Peukert 1987: 10, 243-65). Peukert’s approach has been seminal particularly for its explicit tying together of crisis processes across the different domains of the economy, politics, society and culture. Yet Peukert attempts not only to determine the causes of these ‘crisis years of classical modernity’ through a focus on economic, political, social, cultural and intellectual aspects: he also uses this crisis or its subsidiary aspects to explain yet further phenomena. The crisis in his work thus forms not only an explanandum but also an explanans. He takes for instance the view that Hitler’s charisma only found a following when the ‘apparent futility of the political, social and economic crises multiplied the numbers of people ready to embrace a charismatic prospect of salvation’ (Peukert 1987: 236). Peukert here presupposes a surprisingly substantialist concept of crisis neglecting the cultural and intellectual traditions that influenced perceptions and constructions of crisis and the various reactions triggered by them (Roseman 1996: 219).
Just as the crisis in Peukert’s work occurs as both a phenomenon to be explained and a phenomenon of explanatory value, so similarly, in many other studies, crises are understood in a more or less substantialist fashion and are no longer considered matters to be explained but are invoked only to explain other phenomena. Frequently no effort is made to specify what exactly is meant by the crisis, let alone what the relevant crisis’s causal effects may have been. For example, it is customary to trace changes in various scholarly disciplines of the time to general conditions of crisis in society at large (Schürgers 1989: 11; Weidling 1989: 393; Cremer 1998; Drehsen and Sparn 1996). Thus the rise of sociology leading up to the work of Karl Mannheim has been widely understood in terms of a reaction to the crisis of modernity (Mannheim 1934; Lichtblau 1996; Acham 1996; Stölting 1986: 92; Nolte 2000: 16, 22, 129). Many authors proffer similar explanations for the promotion of social engineering or social-scientific experts in the period, likewise viewing radical projects of social order as answers to concrete crises and crisis experiences (Peukert 1989: 66ff; Mai 1995; Witoszek and Tragardh 2002: 4). In intellectual history too, the crisis is frequently ascribed considerable explanatory weight. Thus male bonding ideology in the first third of the century has been seen as a specific German reaction to a crisis situation, as too has been the formation of the idea of the Reich (Reulecke 2001: 71; Sontheimer 1962: 220). In studies of individual intellectuals of the 1920s such as Walter Benjamin or Karl Mannheim, references to the crisis or to particular intellectual formations of the age often serve as explanations of specific developments of their thinking (Mosès 1992: 21; Kettler and Meja 1995; Frisby 1992).
Though some of these studies—as with those devoted to sociology and social technology—can base themselves on statements by contemporaries who saw their time in these terms, many of these explanations are not satisfactory. Only in rare cases are distinctions drawn between crises and crisis-perceptions; seldom is separate treatment given to crisis-consciousness with due attention to factors of discursive construction. Lack of clarity on this issue makes it impossible to understand how and why the crisis as an essentially narratively constructed phenomenon with diverse faces had the impact that it did. Even more generalized analyses of crisis-consciousness in Weimar society or of feelings of crisis among German intellectuals do not escape this problem. Either they remain sketchy and impressionistic rather than empirically grounded (Vierhaus 1976; Trommler 1982) or they rely on unilinear analyses in which the crisis is seen as producing a crisis-consciousness whose consequences or meanings are then further investigated (Toury 1988; Drehsen and Sparn 1996).
In research on Weimar Germany, the crisis thus serves frequently as a quasi-magical concept to be deployed when other explanations fail. A case in point are grand theses on the origins of National Socialism. Ian Kershaw, for example, writes of ‘Germany, in contrast to Britain and the USA’ as witness to a ‘total crisis of society and state, a misery so pervasive as to affect even the country’s core cultural values’—a situation that would be an essential cause of the rise of Hitler (Kershaw 2003: 136ff). In similar fashion, Hans-Ulrich Wehler refers to the course of events down to 1933 as a ‘syndrome of crises produced by world war, war aims euphoria, defeat, revolution, “Versailles system”, territorial losses, demilitarization, “reparations bondage” and world economic crisis’. For Wehler this represented the decisive caesura in the development of German nationalism after 1914 and ultimately became responsible for the emergence of National Socialism (Wehler 2000: 51; Hildebrand 2003). While rejecting any simple view of Nazism as a mere function of the economic crash, formulations such as these do not go on to question the explanatory validity of the concept of crisis. Instead they only extend it all the more widely as a universal instrument of explanation.
To sum up, one body of research on Weimar has been concerned with explaining diverse crisis processes in societal subsystems. This research’s explanatory plausibility depends on how far it succeeds in elaborating precise and operationalizable indicators for crises. However, the scope of such work is limited to the extent that it addresses only relatively narrowly circumscribed sub-domains such as economic developments or political deliberations. As a consequence, it tends not to investigate with sufficient rigor the complex nature of interconnections between the systems of politics, economy and society in the period. Further, in many studies that seek to explain crises, including particularly those that assume one total crisis of the Republic, the role of narrative constructions is occluded. Such narrative constructions always operate on two levels that ought to be objects of analytical reflection: firstly among actors of the time who deploy the concept to structure their lifeworld and frequently to dramatize their lifeworld strategically, and secondly in the frameworks of analysis of subsequent historians where crisis narration serves purposes of heuristic and dramatic arrangement of the historical material.
In sum, all these attempts to explain political, socio-cultural or intellectual developments in terms of the causal significance of a more or less substantialistically understood crisis in another social subsystem or in the society as a whole run up against the problem of the narrative constitution of crises. Because crises are not causally effective in and of themselves in the world, merely referring to a crisis does not explain anything. The real explanation must first begin at this point and must ask: why was or is something understood as a crisis and how and when, and what consequences can be ascribed to this crisis with empirical plausibility? The question must be clarified what norms and normative ideals underlay and underlie the construction of the crisis among the historical actors and among historians. There must then follow some reflection on what solutions to crises were projected by the actors, on what positive options beyond the crisis were imagined and on the extent to which these expectations influenced the relevant construction. Precisely because the concept of crisis is essentially bound up with human perception and embedded in narrative structures, consequences of a crisis can only be established if due account is made of the cultural backgrounds against which particular historical situations became and become crises.