In 1955 the German academic world was startled by the publication of a massive study called Die Auflösung der Weimarer Republik (The Dissolution of the Weimar Republic), which constituted the first serious attempt to explain the collapse of Germany’s first democracy from 1930 to Hitler’s appointment as chancellor in 1933. It was startling because it rejected the common idea that the rise of Hitler was the inevitable culmination of the long course of German history – or, alternatively, the product of the harsh terms of the Treaty of Versailles at the end of the first world war.
Its author, Karl Dietrich Bracher, who has died aged 94, saw the triumph of nazism instead as the product of human decision-making – a combination of weakness, poor judgment and, in some cases, misguided hostility to modern democracy. The book, an instant classic, is still essential reading today: it is notable not least for the sometimes breathtaking, always uncompromising, directness of its judgments of the personalities involved in the fatal drama, not least Heinrich Brüning, the conservative chancellor from 1930 to 1932 at whose feet he laid much of the responsibility for the republic’s collapse.
Bracher argued that, under the impact of economic and political collapse from 1929 onwards, the Weimar Republic’s institutions leached away political power, until by 1932 there was in effect a power vacuum in Germany. Into this vacuum, with the help of the reactionaries grouped around the aged president, Paul von Hindenburg, stepped the Nazis. In his second major work, Stufen der Machtergreifung (Stages of the Seizure of Power), part of a three-volume study of the Nazi seizure of power co-written with Wolfgang Sauer and Gerhard Schulz, he went on to portray precisely how the Nazis managed to build up a dictatorship in the first half of 1933. This compelling work destroyed the then current arguments that power was handed to the Nazis on a plate by big business, or the army, or the old elites. It too remains a classic that all students of these events must consult.
Bracher’s magnum opus, which, unlike his earlier works, was rapidly translated into English, was The German Dictatorship: Origins, Structure and Consequences of National Socialism (1970). The first comprehensive synthesis of scholarship on the Hitler regime, it regarded the Third Reich as a classic example of totalitarianism, comparable to, though more extreme than, Stalin’s Soviet Union. Hitler’s role was so crucial, he argued, that nazism might with equal justification be called “Hitlerism”. He rejected the idea that it was a variant of fascism, pointing out that the centrality of antisemitism to Hitler’s movement made it fundamentally different from other authoritarian regimes such as Mussolini’s in Italy.
The German Dictatorship completed Bracher’s great trilogy of works on Germany from 1930 to 1945 and remains the classic exposition of what came to be called the “intentionalist” concept of the Third Reich, in which what Hitler wanted was by far the most important factor in deciding what happened. Although Bracher was one of the first to recognise that the regime was riven by internal rivalries and contradictions, these in his view only served to strengthen the dictator’s absolute power. Already by the time the book was published, however, this argument was beginning to come under attack from a new generation of social historians on the liberal left who played down the role of Hitler and emphasised structural factors, and saw the roots of nazism stretching far back into Germany’s past.
Bracher removed himself even further from the mainstream of historical debate with his next book, The Age of Ideologies (1982), a political history of 20th-century Europe in which he reasserted the importance of parliamentary democracy as the only guarantor of civic freedom in the face of the totalitarian threat. A pragmatic conservative, Bracher did not belong to any political party, and steered clear of controversies. He was equally critical of philosophical theories of fascism such as that propounded by Ernst Nolte, and of quasi-Marxist interpretations of nazism, which he regarded as detracting from the responsibilities of individual actors in the drama and trivialising the threat that totalitarian ideologies posed to parliamentary democracy.
Born in Stuttgart, Karl was the son of Theodor Bracher, a Protestant schoolteacher and later an official in the education ministry of the south German state of Württemberg. He was educated at the Eberhard-Ludwigs-Gymnasium in Stuttgart, then did his military service in Rommel’s Afrika Korps. Following capture by US troops near Tunis in 1943, he was held at a prisoner-of-war camp in Kansas for three years. On his release he enrolled as a student at Tübingen University, financing his studies by playing jazz, with which he had become familiar during his time in the US at one of the local clubs (he was an accomplished double bassist). Later in life he became a fine classical pianist, often accompanying his wife, Dorothee (nee Schleicher), whom he met in 1951, in Schubert’s lieder.
After completing a dissertation on decline and progress in the thought of the early Roman empire, he returned to the US to study for a year at Harvard. It was here that he turned from ancient history to modern political science, but in essence his preoccupation remained the same: how democracies fall, and why dictatorships come to power. All his work was aimed at defending the initially fragile structures of the second German democracy and asserting its values against what he conceived of as internal and external threats.
Bracher’s 1955 work on the dissolution of the Weimar Republic, completed as the obligatory “habilitation” or second doctorate at the Free University of Berlin, was the first such work to be submitted in political science in postwar West Germany, and he has some claim to be the founder of the discipline in the Federal Republic, following this up with publication series, seminars and other necessary accoutrements of an academic discipline.
After some years teaching in junior positions at the Free University of Berlin, Bracher moved in 1959 to a chair of political science at Bonn University, where he remained until his retirement. His presence in the then capital of the Federal Republic of Germany brought him into close contact with successive governments of various political hues, and leading figures in German politics were always keen to ask his advice. For Bracher, the Federal Republic had become a “post-national” state whose identity was shaped by its democratic constitution, a view he continued to propound after reunification in 1990. He was also a passionate proponent of European unity, which he saw as a way of overcoming the nationalist deformations of the European past.
Although he did not absolve the German people of their part in the triumph of nazism, he was an early sympathiser of the conservative resistance to Hitler, at a time when many conservative Germans regarded its members as little better than traitors, and indeed his wife was the niece of Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a leading figure in the resistance.
Dorothee and his children, Christian and Susanne, survive him.
• Karl Dietrich Bracher, political scientist and author, born 13 March 1922; died 19 September 2016
