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Reviews of Books
supporting the Nazis. This work is in effect a further
contribution to this theme, although its spotlight falls
on the whole period from 1918 to 1933. The main
accent is on the Reichslandbund or Reich Rural
Federation (RLB), Germany's largest agrarian association, which actually boasted six million members in
1924, if the families of individual subscribers are
included. Stephanie Merkenich's declared aim is to
produce an examination of this precise, large-scale
social formation, not for its own sake but to analyze its
political implications. The RLB, she argues, set out to
influence governmental policies but ultimately failed,
and her research attempts to explain why.
Merkenich has adopted a broadly chronological
framework in which to set out the evaluation of the
origins and ideology of the organization, including the
continuity of both ideas and personnel between the
RLB and its closest pre-1918 counterpart, the Bund
der Landwirte (Farmers' Federation). The author
shows convincingly that although the traditional deference of the peasantry toward the landed gentry had
been weakened during the war, the latter were soon
able to reassert their old dominance, as the peasantry
became absorbed in the daily routine of their holdings.
Nonetheless, the RLB did not merely restore the
status quo ante on the land, nor did it ever achieve the
goal of uniting the entire agricultural community in
one lobby. Catholic farmers in the south and west
stayed obdurately independent and loyal to their existing agrarian associations.
Merkenich brings out very well how relatively weak
the RLB was from its inception, despite the membership statistics already cited. Its decentralized structure
entailed financial weakness at the top. More serious
internally was the membership split in terms of allegiance to political parties. Must members favured the
German National People's Party (DNVP), although
there was a faction that leaned toward the German
People's Party (DVP). Inevitably a grave problem
arose for the DNVP majority as the latter party
increasingly abandoned belief in parliamentary democracy and eventually chose Alfred Hugenberg as its
leader, a rightist politician on whom Merkenich is
severe. His election is seen as the end of moderate
conservatism in his party. Its undying opposition to
governmental policies and its ceaseless concentration
on narrow agrarian interests robbed the RLB of real
political influence.
Hugenberg is also seen here as instrumental in
causing the fall of Martin Schiele, on whom the landed
population had placed great hopes when he entered
national government as the minister of agriculture.
Since Schiele was an RLB leader, the chance for the
association to exercise real political influence seemed
to have arrived. Schiele's downfall signaled in effect
the exclusion of the RLB from the real corridors of
power. It assumed even greater significance since
Schiele himself had proposed the foundation of a new
political party, including the RLB, which would unite
agriculture. As the author shows, the DNVP faction
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
around Hugenberg sabotaged the idea as it would have
undermined the DNVP-landowner leadership of the
RLB.
The elimination of the moderate group in the association, led by Schiele and Karl Hcpp (DVP) was
disastrous at a time when economic distress was
steadily mounting. In the last sections of the book
Merkenich chronicles the familiar two-stage process of
radicalization that ensued in the countryside from
1928 onwards. Loss of confidence in the leadership
drove the radicalized peasantry to act on their own
initiative, using buyers' strikes of agricultural equipment, tax boycotts, and the like. Their lack of real
political sense left a gap into which the Nazis stepped
with alacrity.
Overall, this is an exhaustive study of an already
well-documented theme. Exactly how detailed it is may
be deduced from the list of secondary sources consulted, which runs to forty-one pages, apart from the
archival evidence. The book is a revised Ph.D. thesis
and still has a considerable feel of its origins: this is
especially true of the over-use of direct quotations.
That is a minor reservation, however, and although the
final conclusions of this book are not in any way novel,
the author is to be congratulated upon the diligence of
her research.
J. FARQUHARSON
Emeritus,
University of Bradford
WILLlAM L. PATCH, JR. Heinrich Briining and the Dissolution of the Weimar Republic. New York: Cambridge
University Press. 1998. Pp. ix, 358. $54.95.
Willaim L. Patch, Jr. sets himself a formidable task in
this ambitious work: to put a statue back on its
pedestal after the statue has done a quite effective job
of demolishing itself. Specifically, it is the author's
thesis that Heinrich Bruning, the first of the so-called
presidential chancellors at the end of the Weimar
Republic, does not deserve the reputation of gravedigger of German democracy, an accusation that finds
considerable support in Bruning's posthumously published memoirs. Patch is convinced that, for reasons of
his own, Bruning was not telling the truth when he
wrote his memoirs. According to Patch, Bruning's
primary aim in these reminiscences was to show that
Reich President Paul von Hindenburg was wrong to
fire the chancellor in May 1932. Bruning's life-long
anger at his abrupt dismissal and disappointment with
the reception he received in Germany when he briefly
returned there after World War II so warped his
judgment that he pictured himself as a right-wing
authoritarian.
Actually, Patch insists, Bruning was really a "classic
republican" (in the sense in which the term might be
used in France and the United States) who wanted to
preserve parliamentary constitutionalism and the rule
of law in Germany by relying on the Prussian ideals of
diligence, self-denial, and devotion to the common
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2000
Europe: Early Modern and Modern
good. Patch looks upon Bruning much as the chancellor's contemporary admirers did, as the tower of
strength who alone could break the Nazi flood. Patch
claims that, had it not been for the Machiavellian
intrigues of Kurt von Schleicher and Alfred Hugenberg-the villains in the book-Briining, in cooperation with the Social Democrats, would have prevented
Adolf Hitler and his henchmen from coming to power.
It is in the nature of this decidedly revisionist work
that the author covers much familiar ground, and
specialists may at times get a little impatient with the
narrative. This is not a mere repetition of previously
known facts, however. Rather, Patch repeatedly contrasts Bruning's account in his memoirs of the crucial
events of his chancellorship with contemporary evidence drawn from a prodigious array of archival
sources, notably the Bruning papers at Harvard University, an important collection that did not become
available to scholars until 1992.
Patch succeeds to a considerable extent in revising
the negative image of Bruning. He demonstrates that
the memoirs are often unreliable, that Bruning was a
far more sophisticated parliamentary politician than
he would have us believe, and that the chancellor
certainly had no intention of destroying the Weimar
Republic as a parliamentary, constitutional system.
Even the picture of the Hungerkanzler, who deliberately ignored human misery at home in order to pursue
his ambitious foreign policy aims, looks less damning
in light of the political straightjacket in which Bruning
found himself in 1931 and 1932. Patch argues persuasively that by that time only foreign policy successes
could prevent the rise of anti-democratic extremists in
Germany.
Perhaps inevitably, Patch cannot quite resist the
temptation, once he has put the Bruning statue back
on its pedestal, to gild it as well. This effort is rather
less successful. It involves a considerable amount of "if
only" argumentation, some one-dimensional characterizations of the chancellor's political enemies and
partners (especially the Social Democrats), and some
fuzzy reasoning. Patch has a tendency to attribute
Bruning's authoritarian thoughts and actions to the
had advice of his associates, while more democratic
leanings reflect the chancellor's true feelings. In the
final analysis, Patch's own description of Bruning as
"mildly authoritarian" is more convincing than the
label "Jeffersonian democrat" with which he attempts
to adorn his subject in the book's conclusion.
The chancellor also does not come out as quite the
astute politician that the author would like him to be.
Patch contends that Bruning's early economic program
would have been quite successful if only Agriculture
Minister Martin Schiele had not forced the cabinet to
agree to some disastrous agricultural tariffs. Rut surely
it was a bit naive of Bruning to think that the head of
the largest farmers' lobby would not demand something substantial to benefit his constituency. Similarly,
only someone who saw the Depression as a judgment
for the hedonistic excesses of the 1920s would fail to
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1035
grasp the political consequences of mass unemployment until January 1931. Finally, there is the matter of
Bruning's abortive alliance with a faction of the Nazis
at the end of 1932. The chancellor's intended cooperation with the Nazis' number two man, the "mildmannered" (a characterization few historians would
agree with) Gregor Strasser, was not, I think, an action
that would be typical of a Jeffersonian democrat.
Overall, then, this is an important revisionist study
that will need to be considered seriously by future
historians of the Weimar Republic. Patch at times
overshoots his mark, and the Buuning statue is still left
with some cracks, but that should not detract from the
substantial merits of this book.
DIETRICH ORLOW
Boston University
VICTORIA J. BARNETT. Bystanders: Conscience and Complicity during the Holocaust. (Christianity and the Holocaust-Core Issues.) Westport, Conn.: Greenwood.
1999. Pp. xviii, 185. $57.95.
Scholars of the Holocaust have tended to focus on the
victims and the perpetrators. Victoria J. Barnett, a
consultant at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum,
however, has convincingly argued in her book that the
bystanders cannot be ignored, since they helped to
make possible the success of those Nazis energized by
virulent anti-Semitism and/or rabid nationalism. She
has carefully used a wide range of historical analyses as
well as such psychological contributions as those by
Robert Jay Lifton, Herbert Kelman, Stanley Milgram,
and Erwin Staub. Her book unpacks for the historian
the psychosocial dynamics at work in value construction, attitude formation, and the development of behavioral patterns so that the bystanders' role as a
major support in the brutal terror that was the Holocaust can be understood as an activist force.
Barnett's theme is that the Holocaust takes us
beyond the normal understanding of daily life into the
psychosocial issues centering on life and death. The
Shoah demands that theologians and philosophers, for
example, pose questions about God's identity and
humanity's own self-image and not simply rely on
traditional theodicy categories. Her analysis of the
ethical and theological consequences stemming from
the Nazi psychological strategy that nurtured a solution of sanctioned murder can help contemporary
scholars recognize that the evil of Nazi policy was not
ontological hut rather was rooted in the dehumanization and ohjectification of others.
Following the lead of Elie Wiesel, Barnett has
sought to understand how and why people remained
indifferent during this era and so were instrumental in
carrying out the political initiatives of the Nazis.
Analyzing why the bystanders acted as spectators
serves to raise fundamental questions about the ties
that bind humans together in communities. Auschwitz
is what happens when good and ordinary people do
nothing. To avoid sanctioned, political murder in the
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