Nationaler Sozialismus und Soziale Demokratie. Die sozialdemokratische Junge Rechte 1918–1945. By Stefan Vogt. Bonn: Dietz Verlag. 2006. Pp. 502. Cloth €48.00. ISBN 3-8012-4161-0.

摘要

The “Young Right” was an oppositional current within the Social DemocraticnParty (SPD) of the Weimar Republic whose core members were born in then1890s and molded by the youth movement of the lateWilhelmine era and patri-notic fervor during World War I. It arose among university students in the youthnorganization of the SPD who held a rally at Hofgeismar on Easter Sundayn1923 to express solidarity with their fellow Germans in the occupied Ruhr andnthen organized a series of follow-up conferences. Stefan Vogt skillfully explainsnin chapter one the ideas that they adopted from Eduard Bernstein, thenMarburg School of neo-Kantian philosophy, the social psychologist Hendriknde Man, and the Berlin circle of “Religious Socialists” led by Paul Tillich. ThenYoung Rightists believed that Marx’s materialistic understanding of humannnature had made the SPD far too radical in theory and passive in practice; theynpropagated instead an activist reformism based on dedication to the welfare ofnthe German people. They gained a foothold in party offices in the late 1920s,nand three of them became Reichstag delegates, Carl Mierendorff, KurtnSchumacher, and Gustav Dahrendorf. They also founded a monthly magazinenthat gained a respectable circulation of three to six thousand in the yearsn1930–33. Vogt studies this little-known group to evaluate the arguments recently advanced by Wolfram Pyta and Heinrich August Winkler that the SPD shouldnhave considered cooperation with the “presidential” governments of 1930–32nto reform the Weimar constitution so as to prevent the Nazi seizure of power.nVogt also seeks to analyze the extent to which the Young Right deservesncredit for the “modernization” of the SPD after 1945 (pp. 15–16).