Across the modern era, the traditional stereotype of Germans as authoritarian and subservient has faded, as they have become (mostly) model democrats. This book, for the first time, examines 130 years of history to comprehensively address the central questions of German democratization: How and why did this process occur? What has democracy meant to various Germans? And how stable is their, or indeed anyone's, democracy?
Looking at six German regimes across thirteen decades, this study enables you to see how and why some Germans have always chosen to be politically active (even under dictatorships); the enormous range of conceptions of political culture and democracy they have held; and how interactions among various factors undercut or facilitated democracy at different times. Michael L. Hughes also makes clear that recent surges of support for 'populism' and 'authoritarianism' have not come out of nowhere but are inherent in long-standing contestations about democracy and political citizenship. Hughes argues that democracy - in Germany or elsewhere - cannot be a story of adversity overcome which culminates in a happy ending; it is an ongoing, open-ended process whose ultimate outcome remains uncertain.
Autorentext
Michael L. Hughes is Professor of History at Wake Forest University, USA. He is the author of Shouldering the Burdens of Defeat: West Germany and the Reconstruction of Social Justice (1999) and Paying for the German Inflation (1988).
Inhalt
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. Democratic Elements in an Authoritarian Regime: Enabling and Containing Political Participation in Imperial Germany, 1871-1918
2. Searching for Authority: Challenges to Parliamentary Democracy in the Weimar Republic, 1918-1933
3. Agency in a Total State: Compliance and Non-compliance in the Third Reich, 1933-1945
4. Re-Imagining Democracy: Creating a Federal Republic in Postwar West Germany
5. Daring More Democracy: The Rise of Extra-Parliamentary Political Action in West Germany, 1968-1980s
6. Democratic Citizenship in a Dictatorship: Negotiating Agency in East Germany, 1945-1989
7. Coming to Fruition? Unification and Democracy in the Berlin Republic
Bibliography
Index