Hermann Beck

The Antibourgeois Character of National Socialism

In his autobiographical Confessions of an Original Sinner, John Lukacs explains why he came to appreciate certain bourgeois virtues, such as “solidity, reliability, probity, decency, modesty . . . and, most of all, the cult of privacy.” This, Lukacs tells the reader, was due to “the fact that, even more than the Marxists, the Nazis and the extreme nationalists hated everyone and everything that was bourgeois, bürgerlich.” In his The Last European War, Lukacs argued that the defeat of France in 1940 signified above all “the defeat of bourgeois Europe, the collapse of the European bourgeoisie, the end of the Bourgeois Age in the history of the World.” The antibourgeois component of National Socialism recognized by Lukacs has received surprisingly little consideration in historical research, given that antagonism toward bourgeois values was a central element in National Socialist selfpresentation and propaganda in the years before 1932 and then again in the first phase of the Nazi seizure of power in the winter and early spring of 1933. Though virtually suspended during the long phase of the regime’s success and acceptance between the summerof 1933 and early 1943,when the creationof a “national community” (Volksgemeinschaft) was foremost on the political agenda, public expressions by the regime disparaging the bourgeoisie reemerged in the last phase of the war. This antibourgeois thrust of Nazism appears paradoxical, since it was directed against core voting groups of the National Socialist Party (NSDAP): a significant part of the petty bourgeoisie (Mittelstand) and, beginning in the spring of 1932, large segments of the haute bourgeoisie. In his electoral analysis of Germany’s larger cities, Richard Hamilton demonstrated, for example, that inhabitants of the Villenvororte, the more affluent suburbs of large German cities from Berlin to Hamburg andMunich toMannheim, voted in disproportionate numbers for the NSDAP. Apart from factory owners and businessmen, the Villenvororte were made up largely of members of the educated middle classes, professionals, and various categories of higher civil servants employed by the Reich, the fed-