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middle classes, in contrast to those of England, France and even Ital y,
played almost no part in the political affairs of the nation.
They had sold out to Bismarck in return for national unification
-which only Prussian power could accomplish. After 1870 Bismarck
maintained the power of the Prussian monarchy and the conservative
social forces which supported it by reforming both the army and the
bureaucracy so as to exclude all "undesirable" or "liberal" elements.
These measures produced what Franz Neumann has called the "feudal–
bourgeois" type-that is, a middle class corrupted by its aristocratic
pretensions, devoid of any real class-consciousness of its own. And it
was this "feudal" middle class-or at least a large part of it-which
withheld its sympathy and support from the Weimar Republic, and
which, in the disordered frenzy that accompanied Hitler's rise to power,
hailed his "unique revolution" in the name of the restoration of order.
Goebbels, a not untypical member of the German middle class, provides
a final comment on the whole disastrous era. "A historic moment," he
wrote in his diary on the day Hitler took power, "The shield of German
honor has been washed clean again. The standards with our eagles rise
on high. . . . On the streetcars and buses, men, women, and children
stand cheering and singing. A fantastic sight, unique in history."
Wallace Katz
