Instruct: Given a question, retrieve passages that can help answer the question.
Query: When was Karl Dietrich Bracher born?
Karl Dietrich Bracher (13 March 1922 – 19 September 2016) was a German political scientist and historian of the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany. Born in Stuttgart, Bracher was awarded a Ph.D. in the classics by the University of Tübingen in 1948 and subsequently studied at Harvard University from 1949 to 1950. During World War II, he served in the Wehrmacht and was captured by the Americans while serving in Tunisia in 1943. He was then held as a POW in Camp Concordia, Kansas. Bracher taught at the Free University of Berlin from 1950 to 1958 and at the University of Bonn since 1959. In 1951 Bracher married Dorothee Schleicher, the niece of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. They had two children.[1]
Against the functionalist view of the Third Reich mostly associated with left-wing historians, Bracher was to write that it was an attempt to:
In the 1990s, Bracher argued that through the prospects of democracy against totalitarianism had much improved, he warned that this was no time for triumphalism.[1] In 1992, Bracher wrote that democracy is a state "of self-limitation and insight into the imperfection of man, just as dictatorship is the rule of man's ideological arrogance."[1] Bracher contended that through there were better chances for democracy in the post-1989 world then was in the "short 20th century" of 1914-89, there only was the hard work of building and maintaining a civil society ahead for the world, and this task could never be completed.[1] In his 1992 book Turning Points in Modern Times Bracher attacked Nolte for his claims that German National Socialism was merely a “mirror image” of the Soviet Union.[71] Bracher wrote that Nolte's work “trivializes” the vicious racism that Bracher stated was at the heart of National Socialism by suggesting that it was just a "copy" of Soviet Communism and thus not as evil as the Soviet original.[72] In a 2003 interview with the Der Spiegel newsmagazine, Bracher was highly critical of Chancellor Gerhard Schröder’s opposition to the Iraq war, and warned against using anti-Americanism to win elections as potentially damaging Germany’s relations with the United States, a development that Bracher much deplored”.[73] He died on 19 September 2016 at the age of 94.[74] The American historian Jeffrey Herf wrote in an obituary:
List of Adolf Hitler books
During the Historikerstreit (Historians' Dispute) of the 1986–88, Bracher argued in a letter to the editor of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung published on 6 September 1986 that nothing new was being presented by either side.[63] Bracher wrote that he approved of Joachim Fest's essay “Encumbered Remembrance“ about the moral equivalence of Nazi and Communist crimes, through he remained pointly silent about Fest's support for the theory of Ernst Nolte of a “casual nexus” with German National Socialism as an extreme, but understandable response to Soviet Communism.[63] Bracher argued that "...the "totalitarian" force of these two ideologies [Communism and National Socialism] seized the whole human and seduced and enslaved him".[63] Bracher accused both Jürgen Habermas and Ernst Nolte of both "...tabooing the concept of totalitarianism and inflating the formula of fascism".[63] Bracher complained about the "politically polarized" dispute that was blinding historians to the "comparability" of Communism and National Socialism[63] Bracher ended his letter by writing that neither National Socialism nor Communism lost none of "...their respective "singular" inhumanity by comparisons. Neither a national nor a socialist apologetic can be supported on that basis".[63]
Bracher wrote that up until July 1932, those Germans who believed in democracy had high spirits and were full of fighting determination to take a stand, and after the Preußenschlag, the same people became demoralized and passive, feeling that they were playing in a game whose rules were rigged against them, losing their fighting spirit.[14] Bracher's views about the "Rape of Prussia" as Papen's coup was also known involved him in heated debate with Arnold Brecht, who maintained that nothing could be done to oppose the Preußenschlag as that would mean breaking the law.[15] Bracher in his turn argued that Papen's reasons for his coup-namely the Social Democrats and the Communists were about to merge into a "united left" to start a Marxist revolution in Germany-were patently absurd, and given that Papen's intention was to dissolve democracy, that there are times when it is acceptable to break the law.[15] Bracher argued that Brecht's thesis that resistance to Papen's coup was impossible because it would have meant breaking the law was just an excuse for passivity.[14] Historians have generally agreed with Bracher's thesis that there are times when in the face of injustice committed by those who hold power that it is acceptable to break the law, and that the Preußenschlag was one of those times when illegality in defense of democracy would have been justified.[14]
Born in Bochum, Northrhine-Westphalia, Konrad attended the University of Bonn on a political science and legal studies major, earning his Ph.D. under supervision of Karl Dietrich Bracher in 1990.
In a letter to the editor of "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung" published on September 6, 1986 Karl Dietrich Bracher accused both Habermas and Nolte of both "...tabooing the concept of totalitarianism and inflating the formula of fascism".
In the Historikerstreit, Bracher mostly stayed on the sidelines, and took a pox-on-both-houses approach.[64] Writing on 14 March 1987, Bracher stated he regarded the Historikerstreit as typical of the Doppelbödigkeit (ambiguities) that Germans felt towards their recent history.[64] Bracher argued that the Federal Republic was one of two rival German states competing for the loyalty of the German people, the successor state to two regimes that failed, and inhabited by two generations with different memories of the past.[64] Bracher wrote that for Germans: "The present dispute concerns not only the orientation and the meaning of a totalitarian "past", which is not easy to historicize, but does not simply pass away despite temporal distance".[64] Bracher argued that given the "burden of the past", West Germany could all too easily slide into dictatorship[64] Bracher saw the major threat to West German democracy as coming from the left.[64] Bracher accused the peace and Green movements as hovering "in the borderline between democracy and dictatorship", and warned that the radical left-peace-Green movements could easily become the instruments of a "pseudo-religious concepts of salvation" that would lead to a return to totalitarianism in West Germany.[64] Bracher claimed that the situation in the late 1980s was the same as in the late 1960s "when we critics of an all-too-general concept of fascism were opposed by a front from Nolte via Habermas to the extraparliamentary opposition".[64]
Another well-known book associated with Bracher was the 1960 monograph co-written with Wolfgang Sauer and Gerhard Schulz Die nationalsozialistische Machtergreifung (The National Socialist Seizure of Power), which described in considerable detail the Gleichschaltung of German life in 1933–1934. In a review of Die nationalsozialistische Machtergreifung, the American historian Walter Laqueur praised Bracher, Sauer and Schulz for their refusal to engage in apologetics, and willingness to ask tough questions about the conduct of Germans under the Nazi regime.[19] In the same review, Laqueur expressed regret that books like William L. Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich were best-sellers, while a book like Die nationalsozialistische Machtergreifung, which Laqueur regarded as infinitely better work of scholarship then Shirer's book was unlikely ever to be translated into English, let alone become a bestseller.[20]
It should be noted that Bracher in writing of a "loss of power" and a "power vacuum" was referring to the decay of the democratic system, not a weakening of the state.[6] Kolb noted in the years 1930-33, the Reichswehr, the bureaucracy, the police and above all President von Hindenburg all saw a dramatic increase in their power, and what was happening in Germany in that period was the gradual collapse of the democratic system with policy decisions increasingly being made by the Reichswehr and the Kamarilla of President Hindenburg instead of the Reichstag.[6]
In the 1960s, Bracher was a leading critic of the theory of generic fascism presented by Ernst Nolte. Bracher criticized the entire notion of generic fascism as intellectually invalid and argued that it was individual choice on the part of Germans as opposed to Nolte's philosophical view of the "metapolitical" that produced National Socialism.[26] Bracher's magnum opus, his 1969 book Die deutsche Diktatur (The German Dictatorship) was partly written to rebut Nolte's theory of generic fascism, and instead presented a picture of the National Socialist dictatorship as a totalitarian regime created and sustained by human actions.[27] In Die deutsche Diktatur, Bracher rejected theories of generic fascism, and instead used totalitarianism theory and the methods of the social sciences to explain Nazi Germany.[28] As an advocate of history as a social science, Bracher took a strong dislike to Nolte's philosophical theories of generic fascism.[29] In a 1971 review, the American historian Lucy Dawidowicz called The German Dictatorship "...a work of unparalleled distinction, combing the most scrupulous objectivity with a passionate commitment to the democratic ethos".[30] In 1989, the British historian Richard J. Evans called The German Dictatorship a "valuable" book[31]
Bracher was highly critical of the Marxist view of the Third Reich, which sees the Nazi leadership as puppets of Big Business.[24] In Bracher's opinion, the exact opposite was the case with a "primacy of politics" being exercised with business subordinate to the Nazi regime rather than a "primacy of economics" as maintained by Marxist historians.[24] Bracher argued that Nazi actions were dictated by Nazi ideological theory, that business interests were just as much subordinate to the dictatorship as any other section of society, and that since Nazi actions were often irrational from a purely economic point of view, a "primacy of politics" prevailed.[24]
Later in the 1980s, Bracher defined totalitarianism as any state system that featured absolute ideology that allowed no rivals; a mass movement that was hierarchically organized and under state control; control of the media; and state control of the economy.[65] Moreover, Bracher contended that totalitarianism was not just a product of the interwar period, but instead very much a product of modern times with modern technology allowing for greater possibilities for totalitarian control of society than what existed in the 1920s, 30s and 40s.[66] Bracher argued that the essential divining line in the world today was not between left and right or between socialism and capitalism, but between dictatorship and democracy.[66] Bracher criticized those left-wing intellectuals who damned democracies like the United States as for being capitalist while praising those dictatorships that were “progressive” like Communist Cuba as holding morally dishonest values.[66]
The Sonderbewusstsein Bracher referred to was the original theory of the Sonderweg, namely the idea of the Prussian-German state as the great Central European power neither of the West nor of the East, but rather was something special and unique; this ideology emphasised opposition to democracy as part of its opposition to "Western civilization".
Interview with Bracher in German.
"The complaints about democracy and liberalism that Bracher examined in The German Dictatorship find echoes in our own time. Our institutions are far more stable than those of the Weimar Republic, but the appeal of authoritarianism and conspiracy-theorizing is growing in Western politics. Therefore Bracher’s work on how democracy was destroyed in Germany in the 1930s remains uncomfortably relevant. Moreover, the era of totalitarian ideology and politics did not end with the collapse of Communism in Europe. Using Bracher’s criteria, it continues, most importantly in the Islamist movements that have fueled the terrorism of recent decades. Totalitarianism has changed both its geographical location and its cultural coordinates, but in its inhumanity and irrationality it merits comparison with its 20th-century predecessors. Here, too, Karl Bracher’s work will remain important for years to come both for historians of the Nazi and Communist dictatorships and for advocates of liberal democracy in a world that faces multiple illiberal challenges."[75]
Through Bracher argued that the work of Ralf Dahrendorf, David Schoenbaum, and Henry Ashby Turner about National Socialism in pursuit of anti-modern goals leading to an unintentional modernization of German society had merit, Bracher felt the question of modernization was too removed from the essence of National Socialism, which Bracher argued were the total revolutionary remodeling of the world along savagely racist and Social Darwinist lines.[44] In Bracher's opinion, the revolution Hitler sought to unleash was besides being one of racism gone mad, was also a moral revolution.[45] Bracher argued that the Nazi revolution sought to destroy traditional values that society had valued such as friendship, kindness, and so forth, and replace them with values such as cruelty, brutality, and destruction.[46] Bracher argued that because Anti-Semitism was so crucial to Hitler's weltanschauung (worldview) and its consequences in the form of genocide for the Jews of Europe were such that this disapproves any notion of generic fascism because Bracher believes that theories of fascism cannot account for the Shoah.[47] Bracher argued that generic fascism theorists were guilty of indiscriminately lumping in too many disparate phenomena for the concept of fascism to be of any intellectual use, and of using the term fascist as a catch-all insult for anyone the left disliked.[47] With respect to the genesis of The Holocaust, he is a confirmed Intentionalist. It is his position that the entire project of the genocide of European Jewry resulted from Adolf Hitler's anti-Semitic hatred.[47]
In a 1971 essay to mark the 100th anniversary of German unification, Bracher rejected the claim that Otto von Bismarck was the "grandfather" of the present-day Federal Republic, and argued that those historians who claimed that there was a line of continuity between Bismarck's Second Reich and the Federal Republic were entirely mistaken. Bracher maintained that the founding of the Federal Republic in 1949 was a decisive break with everything had happened before in German history.[34] Bracher stated that the Federal Republic with its democracy, respect for the individual, equality of all citizens, rule of the law and its pluralist, tolerant society owned nothing to Bismarck's vision of a rigidly hierarchical society dominated by a militaristic, authoritarian state that existed to uphold the power of the Junkers.[35] Bracher wrote that the success of the modern Federal Republic had nothing to do with the "Bismarckian tradition" and stated that the "destruction of the state of 1871" was "the premiss and starting point for a new German state altogether".[35] Bracher maintained that "the second, finally successful democracy in Germany is unimaginable, impossible without the ultimate failure of the Reich of 1871".[35]
In the introduction to his 1982 book Zeit der Ideologien (Age of Ideologies), Bracher wrote: "When the realization of high-pitched political expectations was found to come up against certain limits, there was a revival of the confrontation, especially painful in Germany and one that was generally believed to have been overcome".[1] Bracher attacked Communism under the grounds that its claim to have "scientifically" worked out the laws of history was the source of "its great strength vis-à-vis supporters and sympathizers but also its extremely intolerant and coercive character.”[60] Bracher wrote: “Communist policies are something mystical, something surpassing the rational capability of the individual, something fully accessible only to the collective and its leadership,” which promoted itself as “an exclusively informed elite.”[61] As part of his critique of Communism, Bracher wrote:
In Bracher's opinion, through it was human choices that led to the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the National Socialist period, the roots of National Socialism can be traced back towards the völkisch ideology of 19th century Germany and Austria-Hungary, which found their fullest expression in the personality of Adolf Hitler.[16] Likewise, Bracher complained that too many Germans were willing during the Weimar-Nazi time periods to subscribe to a "readiness for acclamatory agreement and pseudo-military obedience to a strong authoritarian state".[17] Through Bracher was opposed to the Sonderweg interpretation of German history, he did believe in a special German mentality (Sonderbewusstsein) that made the Third Reich possible.[18] Bracher wrote that:
Bracher often criticized the functionist-structuralist interpretation of the Third Reich championed by such scholars such as Martin Broszat and Hans Mommsen, and decried their view of Hitler as a “weak dictator”. In Bracher's view, Hitler was the “Master of the Third Reich”.[32] However, though Bracher argues that the Führer was the driving force behind the Third Reich, he was one of the first historians to argue that Nazi Germany was less well organized than the Nazis liked to pretend.[32] In a 1956 essay, Bracher noted "the antagonism between rival agencies was resolved solely in the omnipotent key position of the Führer", which was the result of "...the complex coexistence and opposition of the power groups and from conflicting personal ties".[32] Unlike the functionists, Bracher saw this disorganization as part of a conscious “divide and rule” strategy on the part of Hitler, and argued at no point was Hitler ever driven by pressure from below or had his power limited in any way.[32] One area where Bracher is in agreement with the functionists concerns the highly ad hoc nature of decision-making in the Third Reich. Bracher commented that the Nazi regime "remained in a state of permanent improvisation".[33]
Historian Karl Dietrich Bracher writes that,
Bracher sharply criticized the Social Democrats for not resisting the Preußenschlag launched by Franz von Papen that saw the Reichswehr oust the Social Democratic government of Otto Braun.[13] Bracher wrote through the Reichswehr would had probably crushed any resistance, but:
In an essay published in 1976 entitled "The Role of Hitler: Perspectives of Interpretation", Bracher argued that Hitler was too often underrated in his own time, and that those historians who rejected the totalitarian paradigm in favor of the fascist paradigm were in danger of making the same mistake.[32] In Bracher's opinion, Hitler was a "world-historical" figure who served as the embodiment of the most radical type of German nationalism and a revolutionary of the most destructive kind, and that such was the force of Hitler's personality that it is correct to speak of National Socialism as "Hitlerism".[32] In his essay, Bracher maintained that Hitler himself was in many ways something of an "unperson" devoid of any real interest for the biographer, but argued that these pedestrian qualities of Hitler led to him being underestimated first by rivals and allies in the Weimar Republic, and then on the international stage in the 1930s.[36] At the same time, Bracher warned of the apologetic tendencies of the “demonizaton" of Hitler which he accused historians like Gerhard Ritter of engaging in, which Bracher maintained allowed too many Germans to place the blame for Nazi crimes solely on the "demon" Hitler.[37] Through Bracher criticized the Great man theory of history as an inadequate historical explanation, Bracher argued that social historians who claim that social developments were more important than the role of individuals were mistaken.[38]