The Problems with the German Character Explanation of the Nazis
A follow-up post to my criticism of Shirer's intellectual history, including a discussion of the Sonderweg explanation of Nazi history
This week, I got some push back in response to my post on Monday on chapter 4 of Shirer’s book. I thought it might bear diving into a little further on what the nature of this problem and what I meant by my critique.
I focused on Shirer’s cherry-picking from the German past in order to explain the intellectual roots of the Nazis. An imminent journalist who is a reader of this Substack inquired whether Shirer’s description was actually just “journalistic” rather than bad history or anything else.
My response is that Shirer was a journalist by trade, but he really took on the hat of a historian to write this book. And so it should be judged as a history, especially since it has come to be the most read history of Nazi Germany, influencing the views of countless readers. Shirer spent several years of his life on it, not just a quick few months on leave from his regular beat. He had gotten caught up in the Red Scare in the late 1940s and early 1950s for his left-of-center views and so was quietly blacklisted from working. He wasn’t really working as a journalist anymore, and, more importantly, he had the time to dive into the archival record in a way that few journalists ever do.
In retrospect, though, perhaps I should have focused on something different from the historian-journalist distinction. Maybe, I should have focused on the type of historical explanation that Shirer provides. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich falls squarely into the Sonderweg type of German history.
In the Sonderweg-type histories, the roots of Nazi Germany are found in the German national character. Shirer is far from the only historian (or journalist) to employ Sonderweg explanations of the Nazis. The fact that many other historians have tried to articulate the reasons behind the rise of the Nazis means that it isn’t purely a journalist vs. historian issue.
Here is historian Richard Evans on the problems inherent in the Sonderweg approach:
It has been all too easy for historians to look back at the course of German history from the vantage-point of 1933 and interpret almost anything that happened in it as contributing to the rise and triumph of Nazism. This has led to all kinds of distortions, with some historians picking choice quotations from German thinkers such as Herder, the late eighteenth-century apostle of nationalism, or Martin Luther, the sixteenth-century founder of Protestantism, to illustrate what they argue are ingrained German traits of contempt for other nationalities and blind obedience to authority within their own borders. yet when we look more closely at the work of thinkers such as these, we discovered that Herder preached tolerance and sympathy for other nationalities, while Luther famously insisted on the right of the individual conscience to rebel against spiritual and intellectual authority. Moreover, while ideas do have a power of their own, that power is always conditioned, however indirectly, by social and political circumstances, a fact that historians who generalized about the 'German character' or 'the German mind' all too often forgot.
In chapter 4 of The Rise and Fall, which is entitled “The Mind of Hitler and the Roots of the Third Reich,” Shirer very much engages in these kinds of characterizations of Luther. He doesn’t mention Herder so much as Fichte and Hegel, but the criticism remains the same. Hitler and other Nazi thinkers could have looked to other elements in the thought of Luther or Herder or Fichte or Hegel to reach other conclusions about politics in Germany in the early 20th century. But they didn’t.
Along with most historians, I prefer to embrace the contingency of historical events. Very few things are over-determined. They don’t absolutely have to happen the way they do. But after the events, as we scramble to put it altogether, as we try to understand how these baffling events could ever have happened, we reach for explanations, cling to quotes and connections that seem to make it all clear. Or even more than clear, the explanations we construct make it seem inevitable.
This is a very human tendency. Whether in our own lives or in our social and political lives, once a surprising event happens, we struggle for a while to come to terms with it. And then, as we think through things, trying to piece it altogether, we start to locate some of the threads that lead to the surprising event. We continue working backwards and discover how they intersect with other threads. Pretty soon they aren’t threads but a woven piece of fabric. And it all begins to seem so obvious, so blatant. How could we have missed it? Of course, it had to happen that way…
But what we miss in that process, whether it is psychological or political, is that there are countless other threads that we aren’t looking at. There are other possible paths that, for whatever reason, weren’t taken.
I can’t speak for psychologists, but for historians, there’s a certain intellectual maturity that happens when you embrace that fact. It is never as tidy as it seems in the middle of that process. And if you dig further and think more, you can place the threads leading up to that surprising event with threads that lead to no place in particular.
When the surprising event in question is Nazi Germany, the stakes are so much higher. When you relativize too much, contextualize too much, you may end up whitewashing horror or implicitly justifying terror.
That’s one of the reasons why these historiographical debates are so fraught.
And they should be fraught. The moral implications of our historical interpretations are enormous.
But that’s also no reason to jettison a fuller understanding of the past.
That’s another way of saying that Shirer gets us well on the road to understanding the Nazis, but he can’t take us all the way there. As I’ve written before here, his book is the best starting place to understand the Nazis, but it is far from the last word.