But that was the frightening reverse of the coin, flashes of which appeared only now and then. The other side was marked by the austere regularity of marching columns, by uniforms and sharp cries of command—those military noises so familiar to the nation as symbols of order. Germany, Hitler later commented, thirsted for order during those years of chaos and wanted it restored at any price. More and more often, behind flags and brass bands, the brown columns turned into strangely stilled streets. They paraded with an air of self-assurance, their discipline contrasting in what seemed a significant manner with the dismal gray processions of the Communists. For the latter straggled along in uncertain order behind the provocative nasal sound of a woodwind ensemble, raising clenched fists and intoning the slogan “Hunger!”—a pathetic sight whose effect was to make the poor conscious of their misery but never give them anything to hope for.
Yet these SA rowdies brought a considerable degree of self-sacrifice to their role as guerrilla fighters. This can be seen in a letter to Gregor Strasser from a thirty-four-year-old SA standard leader:
In my work for the NSDAP I have faced a court more than thirty times and have been convicted eight times for assault and battery, resistance to a police officer, and other such misdemeanors that are natural for a Nazi. To this day I am still paying installments on my fines, and in addition have other trials coming up. Furthermore, I have been more or less severely wounded at least twenty times. I have knife scars on the back of my head, on my left shoulder, on my lower lip, on my right cheek, on the left side of my upper lip, and on my right arm. Furthermore, I have never yet claimed or received a penny of party money, but have sacrificed my time to our movement at the expense of the good business I inherited from my father. Today I am facing financial ruin….11
Against this kind of dedication the republic could do little. Moreover, once the Hitler movement had made its breakthrough and become a mass party, the republic no longer had the strength to steer a determined course against the Nazis without risking conditions bordering on civil war. The defenders of the republic clung to the hope that they could stem the assault of irrationalism by the power of argument. They trusted in the educational effect of democratic institutions, in what they believed to be the irreversible trend toward more humane social conditions. Some of the old nineteenth-century faith in progress lingered on in these views. But even then, at the beginning of the thirties, it should have been clear that this theory was erroneous because it assumed rationality and the capacity to discriminate, where in fact there was nothing but a tangled web of anxiety, panic, and aggression. That the Nazi propagandists were by and large ignorant fellows, that their answers to the problems of the Depression were inadequate, that they fell back so tediously on their anti-Semitic slogans, discredited them for only a select group. The experts might dismiss them as a pack of dumbbells, but the Nazis continued their rise. By contrast, when Chancellor Bruning went on a tour of East Prussia and Silesia, where unemployment and misery were rife, he was everywhere greeted coolly, if not with hostility. When he spoke to crowds, banners were strung up bearing the words: “Hunger dictator,” and he was often booed.
In the Reichstag, meanwhile, the Nazis played with growing mastery their double game as destroyers and judges of the “system.” Thanks to the strength of their fraction they were now in a position to paralyze the workings of the legislature and to confirm their reputation as “noisemakers” by putting on displays of undisciplined catcalling. They opposed every serious attempt at stabilization on the grounds that any improvement in conditions would only serve the ends of “compliance politics”—that is, the policy of meeting the terms imposed by the Allies. In that light, they maintained, every sacrifice the government asked of the people was an act of high treason.
In addition to argument, they utilized the devices of sheer obstruction: clamor, debates on points of order, or marching out of the hall in a body as soon as a “Marxist” took the floor. It is a measure of the unruliness of the Nazi faction that, according to a report of the Agenda Committee, some 400 motions of censure had been filed against the 107 Nazi deputies. In February, 1931, a law was passed setting limits on parliamentary immunity. Thereupon, the Nazis, followed by the German Nationalists and for a time by the Communists also, withdrew completely from the Reichstag. They threw their energy more than ever into street demonstrations and public meetings, where they rightly conjectured they had far better prospects for winning followers and projecting a clear and definite image. Goebbels sneered at the deputies who remained in the Reichstag as “backside parties” and pointed out that while they were talking to a powerless legislature he had, in four days, spoken to more than 50,000 persons. For a time the Nazis toyed with the demagogic notion of setting up in Weimar, with the aid of Minister of the Interior Frick of Thuringia, a counter-Reichstag of the nationalist opposition. But they dropped this idea when the federal government threatened sanctions against the state.
There was a certain logic to the Nazi exodus from the Reichstag. After all, the Nazis themselves had done everything they could to paralyze the work of the legislature and to reduce its prestige. It was now no longer the site of political decision making. Even before the elections of September, 1930, Chancellor Bruning had sometimes acted without the assent of the dissension-torn Reichstag, invoking the President’s emergency powers under Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution. But now that the paths to normal legislative operations by the formation of a majority were blocked, he governed almost exclusively by drawing on the President’s exceptional powers. In practice, he was running a semidictatorial administration. Anyone, however, who considers Bruning’s action as “the death knell for the Weimar Republic” (as the Marxist historian Arthur Rosenberg did) ought to consider that the shift in power from the legislature to the executive was possible only because it accorded with the tendency of nearly all the parties to dodge political responsibility. To this day, some historians blame the turn to authoritarianism upon the “nonpolitical masses.” But, rather than the masses, it was the political parties, from right to left, who at moments of crisis rushed to shift the responsibility to the “Ersatz Kaiser,” the President, anxious to be disassociated from the unpopular decisions that crises called for. In leaving the Reichstag, the Nazis were only demonstrating that they were superior in consistency compared with the other political parties; and although they, too, were running from responsibility, running forward not backward. Part of the “secret” of their rise was this lead in consistency.
The vexation with democracy—to understate the case—was intensified by the government’s obvious failures in both domestic and foreign affairs. Bruning’s austerity policy, which he pursued to the point of masochism, had not succeeded in eliminating either the fiscal problems or the decline of demand, and in no way diminished the vast army of unemployed. Nor did the government win any ground on questions of reparations and disarmament. Above all, France—alarmed by the results of the September elections—refused all concessions and cultivated her hysterias.
The Depression had brought on general economic warfare among governments. Tentative efforts toward trade agreements and a lowering of customs barriers stagnated at the beginning of 1931. Germany and Austria thereupon, on their own initiative, concluded a tariffs treaty that did not infringe on the economic autonomy of both partners and explicitly called upon other countries to join. But France viewed this agreement as undermining a crucial feature of the Treaty of Versailles and concluded that “peace on the old Continent was once again imperiled.”12 French banks in both Germany and Austria promptly called their short-term loans, throwing both countries “into a massive bankruptcy,” which compelled them, in the autumn of 1931, abjectly to abandon the plan. Austria had to make considerable economic concessions. In Germany Hitler and the radical Right gloated over the government’s loss of prestige and its further enforced efforts at accommodation. When, on June 20, President Hoover proposed a moratorium on reparations payments for one year, “a mood like that at the outbreak of war” prevailed in the Chamber of Deputies in Paris.13 Subsequently, France, which admittedly would be most affected by this plan, spun out the negotiations until a series of vast collapses in Germany intensified the crisis to a degree far worse than anyone had thought possible. In Berlin, too, a contemporary observer was reminded of the days before the outbreak of the war. But it was more the deserted look of the streets, the silence brooding over the city, and the extreme tension in the atmosphere, that produced this feeling.14 At the end of 1931 Hitler announced that during the previous year the party had had fifty men killed and about 4,000 wounded.
It was apparent to all that the democratic party system was on its last legs, in theory as well as reality. There were all sorts of proposals for a revised Constitution. They combined contempt for the inadequacies of parliamentary democracy with anxiety over the totalitarian drive of extremists from both Right and Left.
