Ian Kershaw - Structuralist Views

Structuralist Views

Like Broszat, Kershaw sees the structures of the Nazi state as far more important than the personality of Hitler (or any other individual for that matter) as an explanation for the way Nazi Germany developed. In particular, Kershaw subscribes to the view argued by Broszat and the German historian Hans Mommsen that Nazi Germany was a chaotic collection of rival bureaucracies in perpetual power struggles with each other. In Kershaw's view, the Nazi dictatorship was not a totalitarian monolith, but rather comprised an unstable coalition of several blocs in a "power cartel" comprising the NSDAP, big business, the German state bureaucracy, the Army and SS/police agencies (and moreover, each of the “power blocs” in turn were divided into several factions). In Kershaw's opinion, the more "radical" blocs such as the SS/police and the Nazi Party gained increasing ascendency over the other blocs after the 1936 economic crisis, and then onwards increased their power at the expense of the other blocs.

For Kershaw, the real significance of Hitler lies not in the dictator himself, but rather in the German people's perception of him. In his biography of Hitler, Kershaw presented him as the ultimate “unperson”; a boring, pedestrian man devoid of even the “negative greatness” attributed to him by Joachim Fest. Kershaw has no time for the Great Man theory of history and has criticised those who seek to explain everything that happened in the Third Reich as the result of Hitler’s will and intentions. Kershaw has argued that it is absurd to seek to explain German history in the Nazi era solely through Hitler as Germany had sixty-eight million people during the Third Reich, and to seek to explain the fate of sixty-eight million people solely though the prism of one man is in Kershaw’s opinion a flawed position. Kershaw wrote about the problems of an excessive focus on Hitler that "...even the best biographies have seemed at times in danger of elevating Hitler's personal power to a level where the history of Germany between 1933 and 1945 becomes reduced to little more than an expression of the dictator's will". Kershaw has a low opinion of those who seek to provide "personalized" theories about the Holocaust and/or World War II as due to some defect, medical or otherwise in Hitler. In his 2000 edition of The Nazi Dictatorship, Kershaw quoted with approval the dismissive remarks made by the German historian Hans-Ulrich Wehler in 1980 about such theories. Wehler wrote:

"Does our understanding of National Socialist policies really depend on whether Hitler had only one testicle?...Perhaps the Führer had three, which made things difficult for him, who knows?...Even if Hitler could be regarded irrefutably as a sado-masochist, which scientific interest does that further?...Does the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question" thus become more easily understandable or the "twisted road to Auschwitz" become the one-way street of a psychopath in power?"

Kershaw shares Wehler's opinion, that, besides the problem that such theories about Hitler's medical condition were extremely difficult to prove, they had the effect of personalizing the phenomena of Nazi Germany by more or less attributing everything that happened in the Third Reich to one flawed individual.

Kershaw’s biography of Hitler is an examination of Hitler’s power; how he obtained it and how he maintained it. Following up on ideas that he had first introduced in a 1991 book about Hitler, Kershaw has argued that Hitler's leadership is a model example of Max Weber's theory of Charismatic leadership. Kershaw's 1991 book Hitler: A Profile in Power marked a change for Kershaw from writing about how people viewed Hitler to about Hitler himself. In his two-volume biography of Hitler published in 1998 and 2000, Kershaw stated "What I tried to do was to embed Hitler into the social and political context that I had already studied". Kershaw finds the picture of Hitler as a “mountebank” (opportunistic adventurer) in Alan Bullock's biography unsatisfactory, and Joachim Fest's quest to determine how "great" Hitler was senseless. In a wider sense, Kershaw sees the Nazi regime as part of a broader crisis which afflicted European society from 1914 to 1945. Though in disagreement with many of their claims (especially Nolte’s), Kershaw’s concept of a “Second Thirty Years’ War” reflects many similarities with Ernst Nolte, A. J. P. Taylor and Arno J. Mayer who have also advanced the concept of a “Thirty Years’ Crisis” to explain European history between 1914–1945.

In the Functionalism versus intentionalism debate, Kershaw has argued for a synthesis of the two schools, though Kershaw leans towards the functionalist school. Despite some disagreements, Kerhaw has called Mommsen a “good personal friend” and an “important further vital stimulus to my own work on Nazism". Kershaw has argued in his two-volume biography of Hitler that Hitler did play a decisive role in the development of policies of genocide, but also argued that many of the measures that led to the Holocaust were undertaken by many lower-ranking officials without direct orders from Hitler in the expectation that such steps would win them favour. Though Kershaw does not deny the radical anti-Semitism of the Nazis, he favors Mommsen’s view of the Holocaust being caused by the “culminative radicalization” of the Third Reich caused by the endless bureaucratic power struggles and a turn towards increasingly radical anti-Semitism within the Nazi elite. Despite his background in the functionalist historiography, Kershaw admits that his account of Hitler in World War II owes much to intentionalist historians like Gerhard Weinberg, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Lucy Dawidowicz and Eberhard Jäckel. Kershaw accepts the picture of Hitler drawn by intentionalist historians as a fanatical ideologue who was obsessed with Social Darwinism, völkisch anti-Semitism (in which the Jewish people were viewed as a "race" biologically different from the rest of humanity rather than a religion), militarism and the perceived need for Lebensraum. However, in a 1992 essay, "'Improvised genocide?'", in which Kershaw traces how the ethnic cleansing campaign of Gauleiter Arthur Greiser in the Warthegau region annexed to Germany from Poland in 1939 led to a campaign of genocide by 1941, Kershaw argued that the process was indeed "improvised genocide" rather the fulfilment of a masterplan. Kershaw views the Holocaust not as a plan, as argued by the intentionists, but rather a process caused by the "culminative radicalization" of the Nazi state as articulated by the functionalists. Citing the work of the American historian Christopher Browning in his biography of Hitler, Kershaw argues that in the period 1939–41 the phrase "Final Solution to the Jewish Question" was a "territorial solution", that such plans as the Nisko Plan and Madagascar Plan were serious and only in the latter half of 1941 did the phrase "Final Solution" come to refer to genocide. This view of the Holocaust as a process rather than a plan is the antithesis of the extreme intentionist approach as advocated by Lucy Dawidowicz, who argues that Hitler had decided upon genocide as early as November 1918, and that everything he did from that time onwards was directed towards that goal.

In recent years Kershaw has come to form a thesis based on the ideas of both traditions of Nazi theory.