I was thinking about the article by David Blackburn that we read this week for class. Again, I’m going to preface all of this with the thought that it’s very difficult to connect how Germany’s past can be connected to its eventual turn into the Third Reich. I think that anyone claiming that a country could be predestined to make that kind of turn is kind of silly. Although I think that the predestination idea is laughable, I can of course see how various events and political situations could have led the country to turn into the Nazi Party.
From what I took from the Blackburn article, the peasants of the German countryside began to see the city as a place where the growth of the negative was becoming rampant. In class, we discussed how the cities began to have that feeling of “impersonality” where no one knew anyone due to the sheer mass in numbers that came from living in an urban area. Maybe because of this impersonality the peasantry felt that the city had less moral fiber than that of the countryside. Many of the views state that the peasant community was being manipulated by the political world and that even the market stood as a threatening symbol to them. If there really was such a divide between the city and the countryside, maybe the only thing that really divided them was the lack of understanding between the two. This wouldn’t be the first time in history that a lack of understanding led to something unnecessary. With the view of manipulation in mind, let’s think about what was said in class regarding the idea that maybe the other political parties were simply attempting to accommodate the peasants. Politicians still do this today. Everyone at the beginning of our presidential elections comes out with very strong ideas in mind, but as they begin getting down to the wire in the process, the candidates start to sound the same in some of the smaller things. They focus on a few key issues that will bring in the votes that they need.
Seeing this, the peasants (who I doubt were uninformed or stupid) starting using their votes as not only political weapons by going against what people expected them to do, but as a form of political protest. The more the people used this as an act of personal choice, the concept of deference began to vanish. They began to realize that power in numbers could mean power in politics. I can only imagine how it would have been to live at a time like that when the statues quo was so powerfully shaken as it was then. As we look at all of this progress being made, it is easier to see how these people began making their way into a Third Reich. The possibility was becoming ever more present, whether they knew it or not. The peasants were all anti-elitist, anti-Semitic, and anti-urban (not to mention that, as we learned in class, anti-urban sentiment could have been the same thing as anti-Weimar Republic thought). As you look back, it’s easier to see how the idea of the community (or, forgive me if I misspell this, “Gemeinschaft”) could have shifted to the Societal (or, again forgive me if I mess this up, “Gesellschaft”) view. I think that given the standing up to their current governmental arguments and anti-Semitic, anti-urban, and anti-elitist views were what helped set up a true unification of Germans. Think of what the Third Reich was built upon. The peasants hated the elitist view of things: that’s fine because we’re all Germans and we’re ALL elite compared to other people. We’re anti-urban and sick of the Weimar Republic. That’s good; the Third Reich will represent everyone in a new and more powerful way. The Third Reich is coming and if you’re angry with how things are going, have we got a scapegoat for you. In my opinion, the Germans allowed the Third Reich and the Nazi party to come to power because of a reckless confidence and a need to blame their faults on anyone but themselves. Calling that predestination is giving that kind of mindset too generous an out.