ABSTRACT
In this sense, the years 1914-23 marked a crucial watershed in the politics of the German right. The disaster that befell the latter in 1918-the double trauma of military defeat and revolution-viciously radicalized its ideological temper. During the civil war that prevailed for much of the period 1918-23 there was ample scope for the resentful activism of the returning right-wing ‘front-soldiers’ and their civilian compatriots, simultaneously elevated and brutalized by the experience of the war,
morally outraged by the dissolution of traditional values that seemed to accompany the revolutionary turbulence of the Republic’s foundation. The burgeoning paramilitary formations that appeared from the end of 1918 were the practical medium of this counter-revolutionary anger, together with the völkisch and anti-Semitic associations that mushroomed during the same period. Much of this momentum carried over into the years of socalled ‘relative stability’ between 1924 and 1928-9, and in its institutionalized forms made a major contribution to the take-off of the Nazi Party between 1928 and 1930. The complexities of this transition from the counter-revolutionary confusion of Weimar’s early years to the growing concentration of popular right-wing energies around the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP) in the years of the Republic’s demise, require detailed explication beyond the range of this chapter. But certain basic truths need stating lest they become obscured in the exposition that follows. Primary among them is the anti-communist and anti-socialist impetus behind Nazi political violence, which in its motivations and direction was also to a great extent anti-working class.1
