Social Life, Local Politics, and Nazism by Rudy J. Koshar

Author:Rudy J. Koshar [Koshar, Rudy J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Europe, Germany
ISBN: 9781469617138
Google: BnR1AwAAQBAJ
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Published: 2014-04-15T02:43:09+00:00

The Limits to Mobilization

Nazi occupation of social networks hardly seemed permanent. A decline at the polls in Reichstag elections from 53.3 percent in July 1932 to 49.2 percent in November 1932 verified the suspicions of Nazi leaders and observers that NSDAP electoral strength had reached a peak. The NSDStB had become the dominant student group in the AMSt, but a drop in voting participation from 71.9 percent in 1931 to 62.7 percent in 1932—still high by the standards of most student elections—reflected waning enthusiasm in student politics. In the theology department, students supported by Professor von Soden had already resisted League attempts in summer 1931 to take control of the department’s student council, as the NSDStB received only 18 of 268 votes.92 These were electoral manifestations of a deeper social reality that limited Nazi mobilization under the conditions prevailing before the party seized power.

The limits of nazism were created partly by the same apolitical conventions that facilitated the sudden expansion of the party. Apoliticism cut in at least two directions. It accommodated Nazi ideology because both opposed parliamentarism and democratic mass parties. However, apoliticism also defined the boundaries of Nazi mobilization of voluntary organizations. Having promoted apoliticism, and having seen many of their followers embrace the Nazi cause, bourgeois organizational leaders now wanted to prevent a fusion of social life with the Nazi movement. Declarations of political neutrality by Verein leaders in Marburg therefore increased after 1930–31 as the Nazis transformed social support into political gains.93 The question of how to resolve the relationship between organizational and political life would take on real significance after Hitler achieved power, but the matter need not occupy us more in the present context. More serious for the NSDAP in the last years of Weimar were direct acts of resistance.

Marburg working-class parties placed significant limits on Nazi mobilization. The Communist party received 7.9 percent of the vote in November 1932, making it the fourth largest vote-getter in the city. The KPD distributed more handbills and posters in the city from June 1931 to August 1932 than did the NSDAP. In that period, the KPD held 101 assemblies in the county, accounting for 16.3 percent of all political gatherings. The Communist party in Marburg was more active in this period than the SPD in holding assemblies and distributing political literature, though the reverse was true in the county. Local police officials identified the KPD with the unemployed, whose cry, “We’re hungry, give us jobs and food!” echoed in a number of large demonstrations in the Marburg market square in 1930–33. The Social Democrats occupied a larger and more stable social space than the Communists, but the SPD was no longer the largest party in the county after the Nazi electoral showing of 1930. Nevertheless, from June 1931 to August 1932 Social Democrats held 14 assemblies in the city and 168 in the county.94

Socialists and Communists were involved in a major incident of collective violence with the Nazi party in February 1931. The incident took place in Ockershausen, a predominantly working-class neighborhood consolidated with the city in 1931.

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