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Conservatism in Germany (German : Konservatismus) has encompassed a wide range of theories and ideologies in the last three hundred years, but most historical conservative theories supported the monarchical/hierarchical political structure.
During the pre-revolutionary Vormärz era, the label conservatism united a loose movement of intellectual and political forces without any party organisation comparable to the British Tories. The tradition of conservative theorists like Justus Möser (1720–1794) opposed the Enlightenment tendencies and the ideals of the French Revolution. [1]
While many of the conservative theorists are labelled "political Romantics" (most notably by Carl Schmitt, himself a conservative), at least four strains are distinguishable before 1945:
Also included are the anti-Enlightenment Romanticism of Friedrich Nietzsche, the conservative Realpolitik and statecraft of Otto von Bismarck and the anti-republican monarchism of the German National People's Party (DNVP) during the Weimar Republic.
Conservative thought developed alongside nationalism in Germany, culminating in Germany's victory over France in the Franco-Prussian War, the creation of the unified German Empire in 1871 and the simultaneous rise to power of Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. Bismarck's "balance of power" foreign policy model maintained peace in Europe for decades at the end of the 19th century. His "revolutionary conservatism" was a conservative state-building strategy designed to make ordinary Germans—not just his own Junker elite—more loyal to state and emperor. He created the modern welfare state in Germany in the 1880s. According to Kees van Kersbergen and Barbara Vis, his strategy was "granting social rights to enhance the integration of a hierarchical society, to forge a bond between workers and the state so as to strengthen the latter, to maintain traditional relations of authority between social and status groups, and to provide a countervailing power against the modernist forces of liberalism and socialism". [2]
Bismarck also enacted universal male suffrage in the new German Empire in 1871. [3] He became a great hero to German conservatives, who erected many monuments to his memory after he left office in 1890. [4]
After the Revolutions of 1848, conservative parties were represented in several Landtag assemblies of the German states, particularly in the Prussian Landtag, from 1871 onwards also in the Reichstag parliament of the German Empire. The Prussian conservatives, mainly East Elbian landowners ( Junker ), who had been sceptical towards the Unification of Germany promoted by Minister President Bismarck, re-organised themselves within the German Conservative Party. In the Reichstag, they had to face the rivalry of the Free Conservative secession, which comprised bureaucratic elite leaders as well as Rhenish business magnates, who had supported Bismarck's politics from the beginning.
During Bismarck's time in office, German conservatives more and more turned to statism and paternalism in the rising conflict between economic liberalism as promoted by the National Liberals and the labour movement represented by the Social Democratic Party. They supported the Chancellor's Anti-Socialist Laws, but also strongly embraced the implementation of a social insurance (pensions, accident insurance and medical care) that laid the ground for the German welfare state. Likewise, conservative politicians appreciated the enforcement of what they called national interests during the Kulturkampf against the Catholic Church and the Centre Party. Though Bismarck's domestic policies did not prevail against his opponents, they further strengthened the power of the state.
At the same time, the influence of the parliament on those policy guidelines remained limited. Universal suffrage (for men) had been implemented already in the 1867 Reichstag election of the North German Confederation, but the MPs had few legislative powers. The German government remained responsible only to the Emperor and the Chancellor used to rule by alternating majorities. Not until the late days of World War I a parliamentary reform was carried out, instigated by the Oberste Heeresleitung (Supreme Army Command) in view of the German defeat. Biased by particular interests and reserved towards political parties espousing an ideology or vision in general, German conservatives up to then had not been able to install a big tent in the sense of a people's party.
Conservatism in Germany was shaken by the lost World War I and the German Revolution of 1918–1919. The thinkers of the conservative revolution, a reaction to the lapse of the once venerated monarchical tradition, strived for an inventive realignment (new world order) based on continuous principles while in the late 1920s the DNVP under press baron Alfred Hugenberg turned towards far-right nationalist policies, culminating in the co-operation with the Nazi Party on the eve of the Machtergreifung in 1933. Several conservative politicians like Hugenberg himself, Franz von Papen and Konstantin von Neurath became members of the Hitler Cabinet and some like Franz Seldte even joined the NSDAP.
During the period of Nazi rule, all other political parties, including conservative, were outlawed. The "national revolution" of the Nazis had priority and the racist and social changes in German society were not allowed to be stopped by the conservative forces of "reaction" (Reaktion, see "Horst-Wessel-Lied"), like for instance the Catholic, Christian-democratic Zentrum and the Prussian monarchists. Several conservative opponents of the Nazi regime like former Chancellor Kurt von Schleicher or Edgar Julius Jung were murdered during the Night of the Long Knives in 1934. After a period of pacification in the Third Reich, notable conservatives were involved in the German Resistance, most notably in the 20 July plot.
After World War II, conservatism in Germany had to deal with the experience of totalitarianism and its own involvement. Its protagonists finally adopted the ideals of a liberal constitutional ( Rechtsstaat ) democracy and in turn eliminated themselves as a separate political power.
In modern Germany, the post-war Christian Democratic Union (CDU) along with the Christian Social Union in Bavaria (CSU) claim to represent all forms of conservatism in Germany. National conservative new establishments like the German Party did not last while up to today there remain some marginal parties to the right of the CDU and CSU, difficult to distinguish from the far-right-parties, e.g. The Republicans. There also exist marginal movements to restore the German monarchy, most notably Tradition und Leben. During the German student movement of the late 1960s, CDU/CSU politicians called for a "strong state" and the restriction of individual rights in order to put down the disturbances.
Notable modern ("technocratic") conservative theorists included Ernst Jünger (1895–1998) and his brother Friedrich Georg Jünger (1898–1977), Hans Freyer (1887–1969), Helmut Schelsky (1912–1984) and Arnold Gehlen (1904–1976). They stressed the subjection of political decisions to the circumstances determined by a technologically advanced civilisation, denying ideological claims to overcome social alienation, which would remain an illusion only advocated by demagogues.
Like most political parties in Germany, the CDU and the CSU to a lesser extent has turned to centrist policies after German reunification. This has led to an emphasis on economic liberalism and social justice (in the tradition of Catholic social teaching) compared to firm conservative positions. However, the party's claimed conservative feature remains a non-defined iridescent term, oscillating between national and social manifestation.
Since West Germany Chancellor Helmut Kohl formed a coalition government of the CDU and the liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP) in 1982, both parties have often been frequently referred to as belonging to a larger centre-right (bürgerlich, "civic") faction within the German party system. However, this distinction has been criticised for neglecting not only social liberal trends, but also conservative tendencies within centre-left parties like the Social Democrats or The Greens.
The German People's Party was a conservative-liberal political party during the Weimar Republic that was the successor to the National Liberal Party of the German Empire. Along with the left-liberal German Democratic Party (DDP), it represented political liberalism in Germany between 1918 and 1933.
Alfred Ernst Christian Alexander Hugenberg was an influential German businessman and politician. An important figure in nationalist politics in Germany during the first three decades of the twentieth century, Hugenberg became the country's leading media proprietor during the 1920s. As leader of the German National People's Party, he played a part in helping Adolf Hitler become chancellor of Germany and served in his first cabinet in 1933, hoping to control Hitler and use him as his tool. The plan failed, and by the end of 1933 Hugenberg had been pushed to the sidelines. Although he continued to serve as a guest member of the Reichstag until 1945, he wielded no political influence. Following World War II, he was interned by the British in 1946 and classified as "exonerated" in 1951 after undergoing denazification.
The Centre Party, officially the German Centre Party and also known in English as the Catholic Centre Party, is a Christian democratic political party in Germany. It was most Influential in the German Empire and Weimar Republic. Formed in 1870, it successfully battled the Kulturkampf waged by Chancellor Otto von Bismarck against the Catholic Church. It soon won a quarter of the seats in the Reichstag, and its middle position on most issues allowed it to play a decisive role in the formation of majorities. The party name Zentrum (Centre) originally came from the fact that Catholic representatives would take up the middle section of seats in parliament between the social democrats and the conservatives.
The German National People's Party was a national-conservative and monarchist political party in Germany during the Weimar Republic. Before the rise of the Nazi Party, it was the major nationalist party in Weimar Germany. It was an alliance of conservative, nationalist, monarchist, völkisch, and antisemitic elements supported by the Pan-German League. Ideologically, the party was described as subscribing to authoritarian conservatism, German nationalism, monarchism, and from 1931 onwards also to corporatism in economic policy. It held anti-communist, anti-Catholic, and antisemitic views. On the left–right political spectrum, it belonged on the right-wing, and is classified as far-right in its early years and then again from the late 1920s when it moved back rightward.
The Bavarian People's Party was a Catholic political party in Bavaria during the Weimar Republic. After the collapse of the German Empire in 1918, it split away from the national-level Catholic Centre Party and formed the BVP in order to pursue a more conservative and particularist Bavarian course. It consistently had more seats in the Bavarian state parliament than any other party and provided all Bavarian minister presidents from 1920 on. In the national Reichstag it remained a minor player with only about three percent of total votes in all elections. The BVP disbanded shortly after the Nazi seizure of power in early 1933.
The Weimar Coalition is the name given to the coalition government formed by the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), the German Democratic Party (DDP) and the Catholic Centre Party (Z), who together had a large majority of the delegates to the Constituent Assembly that met at Weimar in 1919, and were the principal groups that designed the constitution of the Weimar Republic. These three parties were seen as the most committed to Germany's new democratic system, and together governed Germany until the elections of 1920, when the first elections under the new constitution were held, and both the SPD and especially the DDP lost a considerable share of their votes. Although the Coalition was revived in the ministry of Joseph Wirth from 1921 to 1922, the pro-democratic elements never truly had a majority in the Reichstag from this point on, and the situation gradually grew worse for them with the continued weakening of the DDP. This meant that any pro-republican group that hoped to attain a majority would need to form a "Grand Coalition" with the conservative-liberal German People's Party (DVP), which only gradually moved from monarchism to republicanism over the course of the Weimar Republic and was virtually wiped out politically after the death of their most prominent figure, Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann in 1929.
The Conservative People's Party was a short-lived conservative and Christian democratic political party of the moderate right in the last years of the Weimar Republic. It broke away from the German National People's Party (DNVP) in July 1930 as a result of the DNVP's increasing shift to the right under the leadership of Alfred Hugenberg. It remained a numerically insignificant minor party but was represented in the governments of Heinrich Brüning (1930–1932). The KVP folded on 31 March 1933 after it ran out of funds.
The German Conservative Party was a right-wing political party of the German Empire founded in 1876. It largely represented the wealthy landowning German nobility and the Prussian Junker class.
The Free Conservative Party was a liberal-conservative political party in Prussia and the German Empire which emerged from the Prussian Conservative Party in the Prussian Landtag in 1866. In the federal elections to the Reichstag parliament from 1871, it ran as the German Reich Party. DRP was classified as centrist or centre-right by political standards at the time, and it also put forward the slogan "conservative progress".
State Socialism was a set of social programs implemented in the German Empire that were initiated by Otto von Bismarck in 1883 as remedial measures to appease the working class and detract support for socialism and the Social Democratic Party of Germany following earlier attempts to achieve the same objective through Bismarck's Anti-Socialist Laws. As a term, it was coined by Bismarck's liberal opposition to these social welfare policies, but it was later accepted by Bismarck. This did not prevent the Social Democrats from becoming the biggest party in the Reichstag by 1912. According to historian Jonathan Steinberg, "[a]ll told, Bismarck's system was a massive success—except in one respect. His goal to keep the Social Democratic Party out of power utterly failed. The vote for the Social Democratic Party went up and by 1912 they were the biggest party in the Reichstag".
Federal elections were held in Germany on 14 September 1930. Despite losing ten seats, the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) remained the largest party in the Reichstag, winning 143 of the 577 seats, while the Nazi Party (NSDAP) dramatically increased its number of seats from 12 to 107. The Communists also increased their parliamentary representation, gaining 23 seats and becoming the third-largest party in the Reichstag.
The Harzburg Front was a short-lived radical right-wing, anti-democratic political alliance in Weimar Germany, formed in 1931 as an attempt to present a unified opposition to the government of Chancellor Heinrich Brüning. It was a coalition of the national conservative German National People's Party (DNVP) under millionaire press-baron Alfred Hugenberg with Adolf Hitler's National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP), the leadership of Der Stahlhelm paramilitary veterans' association, the Agricultural League and the Pan-German League organizations.
Franz Seldte was a German reactionary and politician who served as the Reich Minister for Labour in Nazi Germany. Prior to his ministry, Seldte was a founding leader of Der Stahlhelm World War I ex-servicemen's organisation from 1918 to 1934.
The Christian Social Party was a right-wing political party in the German Empire founded in 1878 by Adolf Stoecker as the Christian Social Workers' Party.
Count Kuno Friedrich Viktor von Westarp was a conservative politician in Germany.
The 1929 German Referendum was an attempt during the Weimar Republic to use popular legislation to annul the agreement in the Young Plan between the German government and the World War I opponents of the German Reich regarding the amount and conditions of reparations payments. The referendum was the result of the initiative "Against the Enslavement of the German People " launched in 1929 by right-wing parties and organizations. It called for an overall revision of the Treaty of Versailles and stipulated that government officials who accepted new reparation obligations would be committing treason.
Hermann Strathmann was a German theologian and politician.
Agrarian conservatism in Germany was a type of conservatism that began to wane in popularity prior to the rise of the Nazi Party.
Herbert von Bismarck was a German lawyer and politician. In 1930 he switched to national politics, serving between 1930 and 1933 as a Member of the Reichstag in Berlin. He represented the conservative-nationalist DNVP (party). During a couple of months at the start of 1933 he served very briefly as secretary of state at the Prussian Interior Ministry before being placed in "temporary retirement". After the war he returned to public life between 1948 and 1952 as the first spokesman for the new Pommersche Landsmannschaft, an association created to represent the interests of those who had been expelled from their homes in Pomerania.
