The Interwar Years : Threats to Masculinity and World War I Veterans’ Political Repercussions Within the German Weimar Republic

Abstract

75 p.While veterans made up a small segment of society proportionally, they were a unique group that had a distinctive effect on Weimar’s politics. In response to growing resentment and anxiety towards working women and the shifting of traditional gender roles and norms in the middle-class workforce, some veterans informed their politics through a lens of a ‘female invasion and takeover of the labor market’ that was being presented to them by newspapers, critics, and political elites. Veterans' political engagements were based on perceived threats to masculinity, as they worried how these shifts would affect and change the greater German society. Some veterans also reacted politically to generated myths, such as the stab-in-the-back legend, through protest and political violence, as resentments with the newly established government festered. Some of these groups of veterans found political asylum in the right and with the growing Nazi Party. Their involvement within elections is central to understanding the rise of the Nazi Party and the catapulting of Adolf Hitler into power. While multiple other elements may have shifted veterans to the right, such as the effects of massive inflation, the Great Depression, and fears of communism— potentially sparked by communists effects on a national scale in Russia— all of these effects and how they spurred political action within veteran groups cannot be studied simultaneously in a small case review. Focus on the traumatic experiences veterans received from the war as well as the shift in gendered labor in post-war Germany will provide unique insights into the politics of resentment that groups of veterans practiced in Weimar Germany that ultimately led to the internal rise in right-extremist political parties