I am currently in the midst of the Dark Night of the Comps. My exams will be at the end of May, so my life between now and then feels like the finals week that does not end. But it's not as bad as all that...
In reading up on the Sonderweg debate and German history more generally, I was reminded of a couple maps which were posted to the comments section of a post last July. In light of my current studies, I think they are worth posting front and center.
On this first map you can see which regions of Germany voted for the National Socialist German Worker's Party (NSDAP or Nazi).
Put broadly, the northeastern portions of the country voted Hitler into office, with some support from the central areas. The regions of the country which most opposed the Nazis were in the south and west.Now notice the distribution of Protestants and Catholics in German:
(Yes, the maps are from slightly different periods, the election returns from 1933, the religious map before 1918. But they're close enough.) The juxtaposition is startling. Which regions of Germany were most solidly Protestant? The northeast. And where were the highest concentrations of Catholics? In the south and west. Put baldly: Protestants voted Hitler into office.This is not to say, of course, that all Protestants supported Hitler. Far from it. Some, like Dietrich Bonhoeffer were heroic in their resistance. Nor did all Catholics oppose the Nazis. But the electoral data is quite striking (and begins to push back some of the Hitler's Pope nonsense about the Church being in bed with the National Socialists).
3 comments:
Good post, Aaron.
You might also want to check out the maps in Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn's "Leftism Revisited." One map is the same as yours--where people in Germany voted for Hitler in 1933. The other map shows where people had voted for the SDP in previous elections, and as the years go on the red on the map becomes brown. In other words, a lot of people made the switch from the (at that time) overtly Marxist SPD to Hitler without much difficulty. It puts the lie to the myth that Marxism and Nazism were polar opposites.
The naked eye is best at discerning trends where there are none. I would find this interesting if you had actually analyzed data and produced results. Pictures aren't results. However, as looking at pictures is considered science at UD, I feel there is little hope for the future of that institution.
Admittedly, this is data of the most general sort, but it is indeed data. So perhaps we could qualify your statement to read, "The naked eye is best at discerning only the vaguest of trends."
If, however, you would like to see numerical data and the analysis thereof, there are plenty of sources. The first which comes to mind is V. R. Berghahn's Modern Germany: Society, Economy and Politics in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge UP). Berghahn demonstrates that in the elections from 1930 to 1933 neither the Catholic Center Party nor the SPD lost significant votes; instead, it was the liberal parties (eg DVP, WP, DStP) and the right-wing parties (eg DNVP) which lost votes to the NSDAP.
If the Protestant character of these various parties is more difficult to detail - particularly in this space - the Catholic character of the Center Party (and its Bavarian branch, the BVP) is beyond dispute.
Perhaps another time I'll sit down and chart a regression using 1930s religious and political data. I would be quite surprised if there wasn't a correlation. I would also be surprised if someone hasn't already done this. Anyone know of a source?
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