Heinrich Claß. The Political Memoirs of the Chairman of the Pan-German League, 1915-1933/36

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The edition of the memoirs of Heinrich Claß (1868-1953), who served as chairman of the Pan-German League (1891-1939), aims to contribute to the continuing study of contemporary German nationalism. The project combines two levels of analysis: First, the autobiographical and biographical perspective allows a study of the individual experiences of fundamental social and political change of the most important representative of the Pan-German League. Second, the project offers a structural analysis of the Pan-German League at the crucial turning point in the Leagues history from being the most important pressure group of old bourgeois nationalism of Imperial Germany to an mere interest group of notables in the Weimar Republic.The memoirs of Claß, which were completed in 1936, allow a unique view at the importance of Pan-German concepts of social and political order in the development of extra-parliamentary associations as well as parties of the political Right. The memoirs also illuminate the structural limits of Pan-German politics due to increasing ideological and mobilizational competition with new paramilitary and populist mass movements of the Right since the First World War. The memoirs show the variety of attempts of Claß to generate cooperation within the Right that changed fundamentally during the period under consideration. Despite the adaptability of the Pan-German League and its political radicalization under the leadership of Claß between 1908 and 1939, as well as the increasing adaptation of Pan-German core elements by new nationalist organizations, the Pan-Germans developed a significant demarcation to the more radical movements after 1918. This process had been underestimated in the historiography of the nationalist Right.The project will show that the so-called national opposition between Imperial Germany and the Third Reich was more stratified along Weltanschauung and milieu than had been systematically reflected in current research. The Pan-German League was not only an ideological and political missing link between old and new movements of the nationalist Right. Specific characteristics of generational socialization of the cohort of the 1860s around Claß and a remarkable stability of bourgeois values of a political culture that was shaped by conservatism, national liberalism, and ethnic nationalism of the Imperial era prevented Claß to adapt unconditionally to the political style of violence and mass politics of Volksgemeinschaft, as the National Socialists had propagated.