Karl Dietrich Bracher - Political Views

Political Views

Bracher believes that totalitarianism, whether from the Left or Right, is the leading threat to democracy all over the world, and 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 as championed by the "radical-left" in favour of "democratic" totalitarian theory as a means of explaining the Nazi dictatorship. In particular, Bracher has argued that Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany possessed such fundamental differences that any theory of generic fascism is not supported by the historical evidence. He 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. Bracher was a consistent advocate of the values of the Federal Republic, and its American ally against the values of East Germany and its Soviet patron. In the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s he 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. Bracher argued that the defeatist and uncertain mood of the 1970s-80s in West Germany was not unlike the mood of the 1920s-30s.

In the introduction to his 1982 book Zeit der Ideologien (Age of Ideologies), Bracher wrote "When the realization of high-pitched political expectations was found to come up against certain limits, there was a revival of the confrontation, especially painful in Germany and one that was generally believed to have been overcome". Bracher warned against "Peace" and "Green" movements operating outside of the political system offering a radical version of an alternative utopian system which he warned if the crisis in confidence in democracy continued could lead to a gradual undermining of democracy in Germany. In their turn, elements of the West German Left attacked Bracher as a neo-Nazi and branded him an "American stooge". In his 1977 essay entitled "Zeitgeschichte im Wandel der Interpretationen" published in the Historische Zeitschrift journal, Bracher argued that the student protests of the late 1960s had resulted in a "Marxist renaissance" with the "New Left" exercising increasing control over the university curricula. Through Bracher felt that some of the resulting work was of value, too much of the resulting publications were in his opinion executed with "crude weapons" in which "the ideological struggle was carried out on the back and in the name of scholarship" with a corrosive effect on academic standards. Bracher wrote the student protests of the late 1960s had "politicized and often...objectionably distorted" the work of historians. In particular, Bracher warned of the "tendency, through theorizing and ideologizing alienation from the history of persons and events, to show and put into effect as the dominant leading theme the contemporary criticism of capitalism and democracy". Along the same lines, Bracher criticized the return to what he regarded as the crude Comintern theories of the 1920-1930s which labeled democracy as a form of "late capitalist" and "late bourgeois" rule, and of the New Left practice of referring to the Federal Republic as a "restorative" Nazi state. In his 1976 book Zeitgeschichtliche Kontroversen, Bracher criticized the Marxist-New Left interpretation of the Nazi period under the grounds that in such in an interpretation "the ideological and totalitarian dimension of National Socialism shrinks to such an extent that the barbarism of 1933-45 disappears as a moral phenomenon", which Bracher felt meant that "...a new wave of trivialization or even apologetics was beginning". In his 1978 book Schlüsselwörter in der Geschichte, Bracher warned the "totalitarian temptation" which he associated with the New Left, above all with the Red Army Faction terrorist group was a serious threat to West German democracy, and called upon scholars to do their part to combat such trends before it was too late.

During the Historikerstreit (Historians' Dispute) of the 1986-88, Bracher argued in a letter to the editor of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung published on September 6, 1986 that nothing new was being presented by either side Bracher wrote that he approved of Joachim Fest's essay “Encumbered Remembrance“ about the moral equivalence of Nazi and Communist crimes, through he remained pointly silent about Fest’s support for the theory of Ernst Nolte of a “casual nexus” with German National Socialism as an extreme, but understandable response to Soviet Communism. Bracher argued that "...the "totalitarian" force of these two ideologies seized the whole human and seduced and enslaved him" Bracher accused both Jürgen Habermas and Ernst Nolte of both "...tabooing the concept of totalitarianism and inflating the formula of fascism" Bracher complained about the "politically polarized" dispute that was blinding historians to the "comparability" of Communism and National Socialism Bracher ended his letter by writing that neither National Socialism nor Communism lost none of "...their respective "singular" inhumanity by comparisons. Neither a national nor a socialist apologetic can be supported on that basis"

In the Historikerstreit, Bracher mostly stayed on the sidelines, and took a pox-on-both-houses approach Writing on March 14, 1987, Bracher stated he regarded the Historikerstreit as typical of the Doppelbödigkeit (ambiguities) that Germans felt towards their recent history Bracher argued that the Federal Republic was one of two rival German states competing for the loyalty of the German people, the successor state to two regimes that failed, and inhabited by two generations with different memories of the past Bracher wrote that for Germans: "The present dispute concerns not only the orientation and the meaning of a totalitarian "past", which is not easy to historicize, but does not simply pass away despite temporal distance" Bracher argued that given the "burden of the past", West Germany could all too easily slide into dictatorship Bracher saw the major threat to West German democracy as coming from the left Bracher accused the peace and Green movements as hovering in "in the borderline between democracy and dictatorship", and warned that the radical left-peace-Green movements could easily become the instruments of a "pseudo-religious concepts of salvation" that would lead to a return to totalitarianism in West Germany Bracher claimed that the situation today was the same as in the late 1960s "when we critics of an all-too-general concept of fascism were opposed by a front from Nolte via Habermas to the extraparliamentary opposition"

Later in the 1980s, Bracher defined totalitarianism as any state system that featured absolute ideology that allowed no rivals; a mass movement that was hierarchically organized and under state control; control of the media; and state control of the economy Moreover, Bracher contended that totalitarianism was not just a product of the interwar period, but instead very much a product of modern times with modern technology allowing for greater possibilities for totalitarian control of society than what existed in the 1920s, 30s and 40s Bracher argued that the essential divining line in the world today was not between left and right or between socialism and capitalism, but between dictatorship and democracy Bracher criticized those left-wing intellectuals who damned democracies like the United States as long as there were capitalist while praising those dictatorships that were “progressive” like Cuba as holding false values

In the 1990s, Bracher argued that through the prospects of democracy against totalitarianism had much improved, he warned that this was no time for triumphalism. In 1992, Bracher wrote that democracy is a state "of self-limitation and insight into the imperfection of man, just as dictatorship is the rule of man's ideological arrogance." Bracher contended that through there were better chances for democracy in the post-1989 world then was in the "short 20th century" of 1914-89, there only was the only the hard work of building and maintaining a civil society ahead for the world, and this task could never be completed. In a 2003 interview with the Der Spiegel newsmagazine, Bracher was highly critical of Chancellor Gerhard Schröder’s opposition to the Iraq war, and warned against using anti-Americanism to win elections as potentially damaging Germany’s relations with the United States, a development that Bracher much deplored”.