Karl Dietrich Bracher

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Karl Dietrich Bracher bigraphy, stories - Historians

Karl Dietrich Bracher : biography

13 March 1922 –

Karl Dietrich Bracher (born 13 March 1922) is a German political scientist and historian of the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany. Born in Stuttgart, Bracher was awarded a Ph.D. in the Classics by the University of Tübingen in 1948 and subsequently studied at Harvard University from 1949 to 1950. During World War II, he served in the Wehrmacht and was captured by the Americans while serving in Tunisia in 1943. He was then held as a POW in Camp Concordia, Kansas. Bracher has often expressed appreciation for the "reeducation" he received during his time as a POW. He taught at the Free University of Berlin from 1950 to 1958 and at the University of Bonn since 1959. In 1951 Bracher married Dorothea Schleicher, the niece of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. They have two children.Ruud van Dijk, "Bracher, Karl Dietrich," in Kelly Boyd, ed., The Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing, Vol. 1, London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1999, pp. 111-112.

Honors

  • Emeritus of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
  • Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy.
  • Member of the American Philosophical Society.
  • Member of the Historische Kommission zu Berlin.
  • Member of the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung.
  • Member of the Nordrhein-Westfälische Akademie.

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.Burleigh, Michael & Wippermann, Wolfgang The Racial State : Germany 1933-1945, Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1991 page 20. 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.Kershaw, Ian The Nazi Dictatorship : Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation, London : Arnold ; New York page 15; Bracher, Karl Dietrich "The Role of Hitler" pages 211-225 from Fascism: A Reader’s Guide, edited by Walter Laqueur, Harmondsworth, 1976 pages 212-213 & 218. 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.Kershaw, Ian The Nazi Dictatorship : Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation, London : Arnold ; New York page 15. 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.Maier, Charles The Unmasterable Past, Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1988 page 90. 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".Kershaw, Ian The Nazi Dictatorship : Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation, London : Arnold page 16. 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.Kershaw, Ian The Nazi Dictatorship : Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation, London : Arnold page 15. 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".Kershaw, Ian The Nazi Dictatorship : Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation, London : Arnold ; New York page 18. 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.