Brief description
Many historians have argued that the survival of old elites and of mentalities rooted in the authoritarian value system of Imperial Germany meant that the German experiment in democracy was fatally flawed at the outset. In this option module the approach will be subjected to an extensive interrogation. In the cultural, social and economic, as well as in the political history of the Weimar Republic, the module will appraise the innovative and adventurous alternative which the adherents of a German Democracy sought to develop, and will ask exactly how and why such alternatives failed or were closed down. It is within this framework that we will seek to understand the processes which first allowed the establishment of a mass electoral base for National Socialism and finally brought Hitler to power in 1933.