Heinrich Claß 1868–1953. Die politische Biographie eines Alldeutschen by Johannes Leicht
2015; German Studies Association; Volume: 38; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/gsr.2015.0006
ISSN2164-8646
Autores ResumoReviewed by: Heinrich Claß 1868–1953. Die politische Biographie eines Alldeutschen by Johannes Leicht Geoff Eley Johannes Leicht, Heinrich Claß 1868–1953. Die politische Biographie eines Alldeutschen. Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2012. Pp. 463. Cloth €58.00. ISBN 978-3506773791. The Pan-German League remained for many years surprisingly ill-served in print, so this biography of the League’s longstanding leader Heinrich Claß is a welcome contribution, joining Barry Jackisch’s recent The Pan-German League and Radical Nationalist Politics in Interwar Germany, 1918–39 (2012). Like Stefan Frech’s Wegbereiter Hitlers? Theodor Reismann-Grone. Ein völkischer Nationalist (1863–1949) from 2009, Leicht’s study also spans the usual divider of World War I. From a strongly National Liberal background of non-Prussian, north German Protestant culture, whose ethos was shaped via the heroics and accomplishments of Bismarck’s unification, Claß studied law in Berlin and Giessen before completing his training in Mainz. There he brought together a circle of young, likeminded intellectuals whose outlook was self-consciously völkisch—an emergent amalgam [End Page 187] of ethno-racial, biopolitical, antisemitic, and imperialist thought joined to an anti-Marxist, antidemocratic, authoritarian populism. Finding his way initially to Friedrich Lange’s Deutschbund and thence in 1897 to the Pan-German League, Claß broke decisively away from the National Liberalism of the parental generation. He sought the ground of a supra-party radical nationalism structured around confrontational critique of the main “parties of order” and their post-Bismarckian fragmentation and drift. By 1903, Claß translated this critique into a stance of “national opposition,” most overtly in “Die Bilanz des Neuen Kurses,” which signaled a novel turn to the domestic arena. Claß increasingly shaped the League’s activity, assembling a key group of collaborators and succeeding the deceased Ernst Hasse as leader in 1908. By 1912–1913, he was pressing for an antisocialist coup d’état—constitutional revision toward a form of plebiscitary dictatorship—as the best means to the patriotic unity needed for the inevitable imperialist war. Under the pseudonym Daniel Fryman, he outlined these ideas programmatically in his sensationally received Wenn ich der Kaiser wär’ (1912). Despite early success with the naval agitation of the later 1890s and the pro-Boer campaigning of 1901–1902, the Pan-Germans never achieved much popular resonance except in a few places—Dresden was the most interesting—or inside wider nationalist coalitions as in the patriotic electioneering of 1906–1907. Rather, they operated via less public circuits of influence, most notably in the Prussian anti-Polish policies in the east but also during the nascent regroupment of the right in 1912–1913. Wartime conditions then brought much of that politics to fruition, allowing Claß and other leading Pan-Germans a new degree of influence, whose potentials defeat and revolution in 1918 then abruptly severed. Relaunched with the Bamberg Declaration of February 1919, the League hitched its fortunes to the rightwing popularity of antisemitism for which the Deutschvölkischer Schutz- und Trutzbund (1919–1923) became the front. Seeing the nascent National Socialist movement as a possible popular proxy, Claß opened contacts with Adolf Hitler during 1920–1921 too, but these quickly aborted. Dismayed both by the fiasco of the November 1923 Putsch and the inept volatility of the German völkisch Freedom Party, Claß reverted to backstairs influence, focusing on the right’s main organ, the Deutschnationale Volkspartei (DNVP), while activating his ties to Alfred Hugenberg and an inner circle. If Hugenberg’s advent to the DNVP leadership in 1928 crowned this strategy with success, it also fragmented the party’s earlier breadth of constituency and popular support. By committing the DNVP so relentlessly to its antirepublican intransigence in the years after 1925–1926, the Claß circle had preempted any constructive parliamentarism while driving relentlessly toward antidemocratic dictatorship. During Weimar’s final crisis, Claß and Hugenberg adhered doggedly to their national opposition, only to be outmaneuvered by Hitler. Claß was politically sidelined. After the League’s disbandment in 1939, he withdrew into disillusioned seclusion. Leicht tells this story well. He brings impressive archival coverage to bear, though [End Page 188] not always to best effect. Rather than broadening into a collective portrait of...
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