ABSTRACT
Although the foundation of the Nationalsozialistiche Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP) as a political movement was a symptom of the crisis of Germany in the revolutionary aftermath of the First World War, the sources of its ideology, its appeal and its social composition lay in the nineteenth century, perhaps even further back in German history.1 Historians have disagreed, however, on the relative weight they would give to the long-term and short-term sources of the Nazi movement. Few would deny altogether that the origins of National Socialism as both an ideology and a social movement lay in some measure in the period before 1914. Similarly, few would contest the immediate contribution of the war itself-that deep scar in European cultural and political consciousness-and of the postwar conjuncture of defeat and revolution in Germany. No history of the radical right in interwar Europe could entirely ignore either of these influences, but at present historians tend to emphasize the conjunctural rather than the structural conditions for the emergence of National Socialism. This is not only a matter of stressing the two successive periods of systemic crisis in Germany-the first, between 1917 and 1923, that fostered the rise of a radical right including the NSDAP, and the second, between 1930 and 1933, that brought Hitler to power. In addition, the conjunctural explanation now relies heavily on the argument that the supporters who made the NSDAP the largest membership and electoral party in Germany by mid-1932 were animated less by the extreme histrionics of the party’s leadership than by calculations of political rationality similar to those that prompted the choices of other voters or political activists.2 In other words, the victory of National Socialism does not need to be ascribed to some deep-laid political or psychological deficiency in German culture and history, but can be adequately explained by reference to the precise and temporary conditions of German history in the 1920s and early 1930s.
