From reading Weber's excellent Becoming Hitler I was struck by how the distinction between the right and the left in 20's Germany appears so alien to our modern way of drawing these lines. Weber is clear that Hitler and the NSDAP were firmly right-wing, so there is no question there. However he speaks of certain policies that they believed in which today would be a component of more left-wing ideas. Although there was plenty of more recognisably far-right talk of national unity and scapegoating of minorities, Weber talks of how the NSDAP and other far-right parties also spoke against anti-finance and anti-capitalism.
Today any kind of anti-capitalist talk is considered a firm hallmark of the far-left. But in 1920 Germany, we see far-right parties openly calling for it. Was this just a ploy to deceive the working class into voting for them or were they genuinely trying to create a blend between far-right nationalism and a “worker’s party”.
As context, Weber writes: "The recurrent theme of Hitler’s speeches of 1920 was that Germany would be able to live under the “sun of liberty” again only if national solidarity and a belief in one’s own abilities were boosted. Further, that golden future could be achieved only if Bavarian separatism was combated, a classless workers’ state established, the peace conditions of the Versailles Treaty undone, and high finance and “interest slavery” destroyed."
It’s hard to get my head around this. Weber is excellent at examining the events of Hitler’s life, but I’m confused by the wider political scene and eager for more detail. So I’m looking for more information on this seemingly cross-party idea of anti-capitalism and workers’ rights in the politics of Weimar Germany, and the differences between the way it was talked about in the various socialist and communist parties on the left and the national socialists and their ilk on the right.
Firstly, what was causing such a hatred of “international finance” in Germany at the time? Were there specific scandals that had caused such widespread fear and anger, or was it just a general economic malaise? And what did right-wing speakers like Hitler mean precisely when they ranted against “interest slavery”, and international capitalism, other than being coded language for anti-semitism?
Secondly, can someone explain clearly to me the political scene of Weimar Germany; what was the distinction between the left-wing and right-wing – primarily in terms of their economic and class-based policies? What defined them economically in opposition to each other, and did the right-wing genuinely believe in fighting for worker’s rights and against capitalist interests, or was this just a ploy to steal the voter base of the communists and socialists?
Parsing out the exact political positions of the NSDAP in the Republic is an exercise in frustration. For one thing, as an insurgent anti-Republican political party, Hitler and company enjoyed considerable tactical freedom to adapt political positions without the burden of actually having to implement them. For example, the NSDAP could and did attack German banks to gain supporters without having any substantive plan for banking under their new order. The social question, which was interwar political shorthand for how to create a just socioeconomic order, was a case in point for this phenomenon. The NSDAP was often ideologically incoherent on the social question and its policies were a mish-mash of right-wing ideas.
The NSDAP fell into a tradition of German right-wing political discourse that did not reject capitalism and private property per se, but rather specific types of capitalism and the market. The Strasser brothers and Ernst Röhm were the general leaders of the party's "left-wing," but this label is deceptive. The "left wing" was not really left in the sense of the contemporary German KPD or SPD was; the NSDAP's approach to the social question, including the Strassers, tended to stress that removing "foreign" elements within the economy would render socioeconomic distinctions moot. The Strassers and others of the this "left-wing" focused on schaffendes Kapital (creative/ productive capital) and Finanzkapitalismus (financial capitalism) or raffendes Kapital (which translates roughly to "money-grubbing capitalism). The focus of the Strassers' ire in the Republic was very much on the latter two species of capitalism.
The fractious nature of the party, which cobbled together a variety of political outsiders, loners, and outcasts, meant that the social question was one of many potential faultlines within the NSDAP. Hitler emerged after his imprisonment after the Beer Hall Putsch as the central figure that smoothed over this potential fracture. The 1926 Bamberg Conference is famous for Hitler's defense of the 1920 25-Point platform of the NSDAP. However, there was more than going on here than Hitler defending the status quo. The Party's Strasser faction was pushing for a revision of the platform especially with regards to the private property of German nobles from the old Kaiserreich. This was following the SPD and KPD's lead in trying to expropriate the nobles' German property without compensation. The Strassers' loose-knit faction, which included Joseph Goebbels, wanted to support this move, albeit on terms justified by National Socialism. Hitler threw cold water on even this potential political realignment at Bamberg. Goebbels's diary entries claim that Hitler in private refused this move, with Hitler declaring "The law must remain the law for aristocrats as well. No questioning of private property!" Hitler's speech too touched on the noble question. Towards the conclusion of his speech, he laid out two-components of the Party's policy towards noble property and property in general:
- We demand that the princes be given nothing to them which they did not already own.
- But we will not tolerate the taking from them of what they already own, because we stand on the side of law, and will not give a Jewish system of exploitation a legal pretext to plunder our race to their last. Only the non-German "princes" of money, the stock market, trade, and business should be expropriated. Only when there is a guarantee that victims' goods will be returned to the German people will our reservations fall away. But that is not possible in the November democracy.
As was usual for Hitler's speeches, his ideas are often mealy-mouthed and contradictory. But the Bamberg speech though was a tactical maneuver wherein Hitler sidelined the Strasser faction but colonized some of their rhetoric. His attack on "non-German 'princes' " was in keeping with the type of anticapitalism of the German right which held that money made through finance or other effete means was not really German and tainted by Jews. Note that before he launched into his attack on these financiers, he connected the Republic's use of taxes to steal wealth as a Jewish plot against Germany. This linkage between money made without real work and Jewish penetration of the economy soon emerged as one of the hallmarks of NSDAP discourses on the economy and economic policies. In this vision, real Germans created tangible business empires that made tangible stuff, such as Krupp steel or Messerschmitt aircraft while non-German interlopers got rich out of inflaming greed through the arcane wizardry of finance.
These type of distinctions for economic activity were common within the Weimar right and had their antecedents within the Kaiserreich. There was a strong strain among the German universities' mandarins that supported the closer cooperation of the state and productive industry. Right-wing Catholic political thought often veered into notions that rejected free-trade liberalism and a coordinated economy in which all parts, rich and poor, functioned for the greater good. The First World War sharpened the division between productive/non-productive capitalism within the German right as the stock image of the UK in wartime propaganda was that it was the haven of Mammonism and finance. The advent of American-style consumerism and the penetration of American imports like Ford, Coca-Cola, and Josephine Baker in the 1920s added further fuel to this right-wing reaction.
This stands in stark contrast to its fellow critics of capitalism on the German left. Ideologues within the SPD and the KPD did not come to reject capitalism on the basis of some mystical connection between the Volkcommunity and labor, but rather through specific Marxian critiques of capital and exploitation. The gradations of capitalism were anathema to KPD ideologues who called for a revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist system root and branch. The SPD tacked to a more moderate approach than the KPD; the Erfurt Program and the subsequent Görlitz and Heidelberg Programs tended to argue for a revolution via a gradual democratic process. Differences between the KPD and SPD aside, their approach to the social question was fundamentally different than that of even the Strasserite faction eithin the NSDAP. For the German left, the problems of capitalism were innate to the socioeconomic system itself. The interwar German left was not immune to antisemitism or xenophobia, but neither of these was central to its critiques of capitalism. The same could not be said of NSDAP, which invariably tied its critiques to the party's antisemitic ideology.
In power, the NSDAP proved decidedly less radical on economic matters than in its insurgent phase. While there was some friction and distrust between the German financial sector and the dictatorship, they did manage to form something approaching a functional relationship. This was at odds with Hitler's pre-1933 rhetoric that attacked finance capital. Ironically, the Reichsbank's issuance of MEFO bills to pay for German rearmament more closely resembled the Nazis' caricature of financial chicanery than anything the Republic ever did. Workers' rights functionally disappeared within the Third Reich as the DAF replaced all unions and made a mockery of the NSDAP's notions of the state acting as an arbiter between labor and capital. The state and the DAF invariably sided with businesses in labor disputes. The dictatorship's relationship with industry was complex and multi-faceted, but German industrial chiefs, with few notable exceptions, enjoyed a cordial relationship with the state. The Third Reich adapted a carrot and stick approach to its economic regulation, but often used the former more than the latter.