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Michael Kitzing. Für den christlichen und sozialen Volksstaat: Die Badische Zentrumspartei in der Weimarer Republik.

2015; Oxford University Press; Volume: 120; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/ahr/120.2.735

1937-5239

Maria D. Mitchell,

European history and politics

One chapter in the story of National Socialism's defeat of German political Catholicism, the demise of the Baden Center Party (Badische Zentrumspartei, or BZP) marks a dramatic end to this expert account of a leading regional party in the Weimar Republic. A birthplace of German liberal constitutionalism, Baden owed its vibrant Weimar-era democracy to no small degree to traditional Catholics' avowed republicanism. Drawing from extensive research, Michael Kitzing paints a largely positive picture of Catholic politicians committed to republican values before succumbing to Nazi dictatorship. Explicitly political in approach, Kitzing's detailed chronicle, the first of the Weimar-era Center Party in Baden, will serve as a valuable resource for historians. Focused on the Catholic milieu and politics of the Rhineland, Westphalia, and Bavaria, historians have hitherto evinced less interest in regions regarded as peripheral to national Catholic politics. Compensating for the absence of a central party archive by relying on the Catholic press and personal papers, Kitzing helps fill a lacuna by reconstituting the history of the Baden Landtag's largest party from 1919 to the last Weimar Landtag election in 1929. Nationally, the German Center Party (Deutsche Zentrumspartei, or DZP) drew more votes for Reichstag elections from Baden voters than did any other party through July 1932, when it was overtaken by the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP); the BZP also sent two chancellors, Josef Wirth and Constantin Fehrenbach, and one finance minister, Heinrich Köhler, to the national stage.