ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the organisational fabric of political conflict in one community from roughly 1880 to the Nazi seizure of power, it can suggest new perspectives for the study of Nazism and the social history of modern German politics. Judging from the importance of the local polity in bourgeois political practice, one should have expected the Marburg Burgertum to have achieved relative political harmony at home in contrast to the cacophony of the national arena. The Social Democratic Party (SPD) was established in Marburg in 1869, five years before the founding of a Liberal Association. In Marburg, the hyperinflation and Depression made people angry and bitter, but they hardly devastated the town or reduced the long-term capacity of the population to act politically. Hans Krawielitzki was attracted to National Socialism because it offered him an outlet for his talents and leadership ambitions, but above all because it gave political meaning to the uncertainty of his social existence.
