The Price of Exclusion

About this book

""The failure of Liberalism" and its responsibility for the rise of Nazism has been widely discussed among scholars inside and outside Germany. This book argues that German liberalism failed because of the irreconcilable conflict between two competing visions of national identity. In following the German liberal parties from the Empire through the Third Reich, Kurlander illustrates how an exclusionary racist Weltanschauung, conditioned by profound transformations in German political culture at large, gradually displaced the liberal-universalist conception of a democratic Rechtsstaat. Although there were some notable exceptions, this widespread obsession with "racial community" caused the liberal parties to succumb to ideological lassitude and self-contradiction, paving the way for National Socialism."--Jacket.