Vyrupaeva A.P. A stranger among his own: early Weimar as seen by the “old” middle class (1918–1919)

Abstract: This article examines the perception of the Weimar republic by the German middle class. The author’s attention is focused on the so-called “old” middle class: representatives of medium and small enterprises, as well as of liberal professions. At the heart of this study lie the events and factors that had a decisive influence on the opinions of that milieu regarding the first German democracy – from the particularities of the German burghers’ political culture to the hungry post-war daily life of defeated Germany. The study of this question permits to determine the many components which motivated the negative attitude (as in the overwhelming majority of cases it was negative) among the middle class towards the November revolution and the Weimar republic in general. As a rule, there developed a specific perception of the new republican reality as a foreign living environment in which the German burghers felt uncomfortable and unsafe, especially under the conditions of revolutionary confrontations and ideas of socialisation. The bourgeois felt themselves pare from the new world. Besides that, the analysis of the given topic allows to discover the origins of the future successes of the “nazi” among this population group, which played, as has been established in historical studies, a decisive role in the successes of the National-Socialists during the Reichstag election at the turn of the 1920–1930s.

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