Karl Dietrich Bracher

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Karl Dietrich Bracher (born 13 March 1922) is a German political scientist and historian of the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany. Born in Stuttgart, Bracher was awarded a Ph.D. in the Classics by the University of Tübingen in 1948 and subsequently studied at Harvard University between 1949-1950. During World War II, Bracher served in the Wehrmacht and was captured by the Americans in 1943. Bracher married Dorothea Schleicher in 1951 and taught at the Free University of Berlin between 1950-1958 and at the University of Bonn from 1959.

Bracher is mainly concerned with the problems of preserving and developing democracy. Bracher sees democracy as a frail institution and has argued that only a concerned citizenry can guarantee it. Bracher is best known for his 1955 book Die Auflösung der Weimarer Republik (The Disintegration of the Weimar Republic), in which he ascribed the collapse of German democracy not to the Sonderweg ("special path" of German historical development) or other impersonal forces but to human action that followed conscious choice. Bracher advocates the view that Nazi Germany was a totalitarian regime.

Bracher has often criticized the functionist-structuralist interpretation of the Third Reich championed by such scholars such as Martin Broszat and Hans Mommsen. Bracher has decried their view of Hitler as a “weak dictator”. In Bracher’s view, Hitler was the “Master of the Third Reich”. With respect to the genesis of the Holocaust, Bracher is a confirmed Intentionist. It is his position that the entire project of the genocide of European Jewry resulted from Adolf Hitler’s anti-Semitic hatred.

In Bracher's view, totalitarianism, whether stemming from the Left or Right, is the leading threat to democracy all over the world. Bracher has argued that the differences between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were of degree, not kind. Bracher is opposed to the notion of generic fascism and has often urged scholars to reject "totalitarian" fascism theory in favour of "democratic" totalitarian theory as a means of explaining the Nazi dictatorship. Bracher is pro-American and was one of the few German professors to support fully the foreign policy of the United States during the Cold War. In the 1960s and 1970s, Bracher often attacked left-wing and New Left intellectuals in particular for comparing the actions of the United States in the Vietnam War and the West German state to Nazi Germany. For Bracher, these attacks were both an absurd trivialization of Nazi crimes and a sinister attempt to advance the cause of Communism.

[edit] Work

Verfall und Fortschritt im Denken der frûhen römischen Kaiserzeit: Studien zum Zeitgeühl und Geschichtsbewusstein des Jahrhunderts nach Augustus, 1948.
Die Aufösung der Weimarer Republik: eine Studie zum Problem des Machtverfalls in der Demokratie, 1955.
Die nationalsozialistische Machtergreifung: Studien zur Errichtung des totalitären Herrschaftssystems in Deutschland 1933-34, 1960.
Deutschland zwischen Demokratie und Diktatur: Beiträge zur neueren Politik und Geschichte, 1964.
Die deutsche Diktatur: Entstehung, Struktur, Folgen des Nationalsozialismus, 1969.
Das deutsche Dilemma: Leidenswege der politischen Emanzipation, 1971.
Die Krise Europas, 1917-1975, 1976.
Zeitgeschichtiche Kontroversen: Um Faschismus, Totalitarismus, Demokratie, 1976.
Geschichte und Gewalt: Zur Politik im 20. Jahrhundert, 1981.
Zeit der Ideologien: Eine Geschichte politischen Denkens im 20. Jahrhundert, 1982.
Die Totalitäre Erfahrung, 1987.
Wendezeiten der Geschichte: Historisch-politische Essays, 1987-1992, 1992.

[edit] References

Dijk, Ruud van "Bracher, Karl Dietrich" pages 111-112 from The Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing, Volume 1, edited by Kelly Boyd, London: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishing, 1999.
Funke, Manfred (editor) Demokratie und Diktatur: Geist und Gestalt politischer Herrschaft in Deutschland und Europa, Festschrift für Karl Dietrich Bracher (Democracy and Dictatorship: The Spirit and Form of Political Power in Germany and Europe) Düsseldorf: Droste, 1987.
Kershaw, Ian The Nazi Dictatorship : problems and perspectives of interpretation, London : Arnold ; New York : Copublished in the USA by Oxford University Press, 2000