(In this definitive analysis of the Weimar Republic, Hans ...)
In this definitive analysis of the Weimar Republic, Hans Mommsen surveys the political, social, and economic development of Germany between the end of World War I and the appointment of Adolf Hitler as chancellor in 1933. His assessment of the German experiment with democracy challenges many long-held assumptions about the course and character of German history. Mommsen argues persuasively that the rise of totalitarianism in Germany was not inevitable but was the result of a confluence of specific domestic and international forces. As long as France and Britain exerted pressure on the new Germany after World War I, the radical Right hesitated to overthrow the constitution. But as international scrutiny decreased with the recognition of the legitimacy of the Weimar regime, totalitarian elements were able to gain the upper hand. At the same time, the world economic crisis of the early 1930s, with its social and political ramifications, further destabilized German democracy.
(In this book, Hans Mommsen analyzes perhaps the most appa...)
In this book, Hans Mommsen analyzes perhaps the most appalling political journey of the twentieth century - the road traversed by the German people as the Weimar Republic collapsed and Nazism emerged. Mommsen is one of the foremost political historians writing today, and these are some of his finest essays. Examining the problem of how the relatively hopeful beginnings of German democracy in 1918 and 1919 ended finally in catastrophe, the pieces here confront major questions of human history: the viability of democracy, the nature of politics, and the origins of genocide.
(Professor Hans Mommsen, one of the world's leading expert...)
Professor Hans Mommsen, one of the world's leading experts on the history of the Third Reich, has gathered together a group of historians who are engaged in pioneering research into national socialism. This book covers such topics as the Viennese background to Hitler's career; the development of fascist tendencies amongst the German population during the Weimar period; the nature of popular support for national socialism; the myth of the Nazi economic boom and the ideological concepts and political developments which culminated in the mass murder of European Jews. It makes accessible to a wider public controversial arguments which have resulted from recent reassessments of Hitler's movement and his Nazi regime.
Hans Mommsen was a German historian, known for his studies in German social history, and for his functionalist interpretation of the Third Reich, especially for arguing that Hitler was a weak dictator.
Background
Hans Mommsen was born on November 5, 1930, in Marburg, Hessen, the Federal Republic of Germany. He was the child of the historian Wilhelm Mommsen and Marie-Therese (Iken) Mommsen. His great-grandfather was the Roman historian Theodor Mommsen. Hans Mommsen’s twin brother Wolfgang and their older brother Karl were also historians.
The three grew up in a home overshadowed by Germany’s Nazi past. Their professor father lost his job after he was classified as a Nazi sympathizer by a United States Occupation denazification court. Hans Mommsen later condemned what he saw as the injustices of denazification, which he felt had treated his father very harshly while absolving other academics with more questionable records.
Education
Mommsen studied German, history, and philosophy at the University of Heidelberg, the University of Tübingen and the University of Marburg.
Much of Mommsen's early work concerned the history of the German working class, both as an object of study itself and as a factor in the larger German society. Mommsen's 1979 book, Arbeiterbewegung und Nationale Frage (The Labour Movement and the National Question), a collection of his essays written in the 1960s-1970s was the conclusion of his studies in German working class history.
Mommsen analyzed precisely how Nazi rule undermined and eroded the formal structures of government, prompting a process of “cumulative radicalization”, which ended in the regime “running amok” in a maelstrom of destruction and criminality.
Mommsen first stirred bitter debate in the early 1960s with a highly influential article about the Reichstag fire of 1933. Until then it had been largely presumed that the Nazis had themselves set fire to the Reichstag as part of a preconceived design to take over the German state. Mommsen argued, however, that a young Dutch communist, Marinus van der Lubbe, had acted alone. Hitler and other leading Nazis, he claimed, had merely exploited the opportunity provided by the fire to cement their hold on power.
Conservative historians in West Germany responded with fury to what they saw as a trivialization of Hitler’s plan to gain totalitarian power. Undeterred, Mommsen, in his Beamtentum im Dritten Reich (The Civil Service in the Third Reich, 1966), provocatively asserted that Hitler was in some respects a “weak dictator” - essentially a propagandist preoccupied with upholding his own standing, an indecisive leader who stood under the influence of his entourage.
When he turned to explain the implementation of the Final Solution, Mommsen’s approach inexorably led to further controversy, prompted by his essay Die Realisierung des Utopischen (1983, later published in English translation as The Realisation of the Unthinkable). Mommsen accepted that Hitler’s relentless anti-Jewish rhetoric had done much to stimulate the climate that produced the exterminatory policy, but ruled out any specific order, looking instead to the inner dynamics of a system running increasingly out of control. His interpretation was later more fully expounded in his book Das NS-Regime und die Auslöschung des Judentums in Europa (The Nazi Regime and the Annihilation of the Jews in Europe, revised version 2014).
Another area of interest for Mommsen is dissent, opposition, and resistance in the Third Reich. Much of Mommsen's work in this area concerns the problems of "resistance without the people". Mommsen has drawn unfavorable comparisons between what he sees as conservative opposition and Social Democratic and Communist resistance to the Nazis. Mommsen was an expert on social history and often writes about working-class life in the Weimar and Nazi eras.
Mommsen also wrote extensively on German resistance to Nazi rule. As far back as the 1960s, he was strongly critical of the way in which the political culture of the Federal Republic had turned conservative opponents of Hitler - notably the army officers and higher civil servants who conspired to kill Hitler in 1944 - into iconic forerunners of postwar democracy. Instead, he showed the continuity of their authoritarian ideas and their antisemitism from the 1920s onwards, and how, in a lengthy process, growing disillusionment had gradually led a courageous minority to try to overthrow the regime. It amounted to a substantial revision of the roots of conservative resistance
Mommsen has written highly regarded books and essays on the fall of the Weimar Republic, blaming the downfall of the Republic on German conservatives. Like his brother Wolfgang, Mommsen was a champion of the Sonderweg (Special Path) interpretation of German history that sees the ways German society, culture and politics developed in the 19th century as having made the emergence of Nazi Germany in the 20th century virtually inevitable.
Starting in the 1960s, Mommsen was one of a younger generation of West German historians who provide a more critical assessment of Widerstand within German elites and came to decry the "monumentalization" typical of German historical writing about Widerstand in the 1950s. In two articles published in 1966, Mommsen proved the claim often advanced in the 1950s that the ideas behind "men of July 20" were the inspiration for the 1949 Basic Law of the Federal Republic was false.
In 1986 Volkswagen asked Mommsen to look at how the car company had behaved under the Third Reich. In his book Volkswagen and Its Workers During the Third Reich (1996, written with Manfred Grieger) Mommsen demonstrated convincingly that VW had used slave labour.
In an August 2000 book review, Mommsen called Norman Finkelstein's book The Holocaust Industry "a most trivial book, which appeals to easily aroused anti-Semitic prejudices."
A major figure in Germany, Mommsen often took stands on the great issues of the day, believing that the responsibility for ensuring the mistakes of the past are never repeated rests upon an engaged and historically-conscious citizenry. Mommsen saw it as the duty of the historian to constantly critique contemporary society.
Mommsen served as a professor at Tübingen (1960-1961), Heidelberg (1963-1968) and at the University of Bochum (since 1968). He held that position until his death on his birthday on November 5, 2015.
Mommsen has been a member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany since 1960.
Views
Hans Mommsen was one of the foremost authorities on Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, though his views were not without controversy. He saw the Final Solution as a result of what he called the “cumulative radicalization” of the German state rather than a long-term plan on the part of Adolf Hitler. For Mommsen, although Hitler was clearly anti-semitic lacked a real idea of what he wanted to do with Jews.
Membership
British Academy
Personality
Mommsen was often aggressive and confrontational towards his fellow historians, though invariably warm and encouraging in his dealings with younger colleagues. He was also enormously supportive of his students.
Quotes from others about the person
“He had a very sharp analytical brain, he focused on very important questions in 20th-century German history.” - Heinrich Winkler, a history professor at Berlin’s Humboldt University.