Masters Theses

Date of Award

12-1999

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts

Major

History

Major Professor

Owen Bradley

Committee Members

Vejas Liulevicius,Palmira Brummet

Abstract

This thesis is a study of how Oswald Spengler, Friedrich Meinecke, and Thomas Mann criticized National Socialism. I analyze their criticisms to demonstrate how, despite their opposition to Nazism, they reiterated a fatalistic mood in interwar Germany that contributed to the appeal of Hitler's revolution and, in retrospect, made it appear inevitable. They each approached the topic of Nazism from different disciplines and political attitudes, allowing me to examine the fatalism of German interwar culture through several kinds of discourse.

My discussion of these authors’ discourses is premised on this pervasive mood of fatalism, which has been thoroughly examined from various angles by a number of scholars of early twentieth century German culture, including Mosse, Iggers, Stern, Gay, and Eksteins. These scholars all suggest that fatalistic discourses were interwoven with the goals of interwar culture and represented a catastrophic collision with modernity as the nation's highest ideal.

I explore how Spengler depicted modernity and Germany in a manner that reinforced the fatalistic mood of German, interwar culture. I look at similar themes in Meinecke and Mann, each of whom participated in the same despairing discourses even though they were not part of the extreme political culture of the period. In the context of Germany's cultural and political despair, even moderate critics of extreme nationalism tended to reiterate a fatalistic anti-modernism and tragic representation of the German spirit.

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