90th anniversary of Hitler's accession to power

Today is the 90^th anniversary of the appointment of Adolf Hitleras Germany’s ReichsKanzler but it was January 28-30 1923 when the Nazis held their first mass rally in Munich - as Tom Nairn reminded us in 1998 in one of his many contributions to the NLR, Reflections on Nationalist Disasters which contains a wonderful diagram (which I'm, unfortunately, not able to reproduce) of the various explanations which have been offered for the collapse into Nazism. These events were also recently discussed in a 3-part series of “The Rest is History” podcast which culminated on 26 January

I’ve recounted here several times my own interest in things German which I owe to my father and his links with the country as a Protestant Pastor who in the post-war period established “Versohnung-saustauschen” (reconciliation exchanges) with North German churches in the Detmold and Bad Meinberg areas. Last year I came across a fascinating account of the 10 weeks or so which led up to Hitler’s accession - The Gravediggers – the last winter of the Weimar Republic by R Barth and H Friedrichs (2019 eng tr). The German newspaper headlines of each day between 17 November and 30 January are used ro give a brief description of key events that day – giving a real sense of how finely balanced things were. This is also the sense conveyed by Was Hitler’s Seizure of Power inevitable? Published by Eberhard Kolb in 1997.

The post-war years saw a huge literature about Fascism and how it might have been stopped - but the recent discussions about the rise of the Right seems to take little account of that literature to which I drew attention recently. 

Geoff Eley is, with Richard Evans, someone who has looked deeply at the course of German history and wrote in 1983 a 30 page paper which tried to answer the question “What produces Fascism?” And in 1985 Richard Evans gave us a magisterial tour of the writing on the subject with “The Myth of Germany’s Missing Revolution”

Sociology in Germany by Stephen Moebius (2021) is one of these wonderful finds which suddenly open up a new world for you - how a European country as important as Germany understood such an important discipline as Sociology. I wonder what the French equivalent is? 

The Anatomy of Fascism by Robert Paxton (2004) also looks an important read.