Behemoth (Franz Neumann)

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Behemoth. Structure and Practice of National Socialism 1933–1944 is a standard work on political sociology and state theory . It was written by Franz Neumann between 1941 and 1944 during his exile in the USA and was first published in 1942, and in an expanded form in 1944. The German translation appeared in 1977.

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To the title

In Jewish eschatology , which for its part goes back to Babylonian origins, two monsters are reported who rule chaos . Behemoth rules the land or the desert, Leviathan the sea. According to the apocalyptic writings, both fight each other and establish a reign of terror shortly before the end of the world. After both doom, the day of righteousness comes. While the late antique church father Augustine equated Behemoth with Satan , the political thinker Thomas Hobbes took the Leviathan in the early modern period as a metaphor for the state as a political coercive system with a remnant of the rule of law; his behemoth, on the other hand, depicts the English civil war of the 17th century, an unstate , a state of lawlessness.

Neumann refers to it when he writes:

“Because we believe that National Socialism is or is developing into a non-state, a chaos, a rule of lawlessness and anarchy, which has 'swallowed up' rights and human dignity and is there, the world through supremacy over huge land masses to transform into chaos, this seems to us the right name for the National Socialist system: THE BEHEMOTH. "

- Franz Neumann

The collapse of the Weimar Republic

The policy of the German Empire pursued the goal of imperialist expansion through the development of military strength. Reich Chancellor Bismarck tried to counter the threat posed by socialist efforts by the workers' movement by means of police repression and social concessions. The Prussian bureaucracy was restructured into a stronghold of semi-absolutism. The army was developed into a bulwark of monarchical power. Agricultural and industrial capital reconciled through the agreement on protective tariffs for agricultural products as well as for arming the navy. This coalition of the mighty, however, had no generally accepted justification for state sovereignty.

The German constitution of 1919 adopted the peace program of US President Woodrow Wilson , but otherwise avoided setting the new constitution on a particular political point of view. In this way, instead of class struggle, there should be class cooperation, which came close to the ideology of the Catholic Center Party . In the doctrine of pluralism , the state was viewed as a particular association of individuals among many possible others. As a result, the state was deprived of supreme coercive power; the pluralistic balancing of interests thus presupposes a social harmony that suppressed the de facto prevailing inequality of power and influence.

On November 10, 1918, Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg and the SPD leader Friedrich Ebert entered into an alliance “against Bolshevism”. With the Stinnes Legien Agreement of November 15, 1918, the creation of a “central working group of employers and employees” was agreed, which created the prerequisites for the negotiation of collective employment contracts. The Weimar Constitution thus essentially implemented points that had previously been decided in agreements by relevant social groups. The main pillars of the pluralistic system thus formed the social democratic party and the trade unions. The other groups such as industry, the judiciary and the armed forces, on the other hand, tried to assert their interests, with which they were increasingly successful due to the political mistakes of the social democratic politicians. Favored by concentration processes due to war and inflation as well as constantly underutilized production capacities, the trend towards “defaming” the German economy was intensified ( Stinnes Group , United Steel Works , IG Farben ). The decline of the labor movement due to economic development and socio-structural change in the structure of the workforce corresponded to a strengthening of the political movement of the counterrevolution, which was particularly evident in the area of ​​political justice (a significant example is the legal treatment of the Hitler putsch of 1923). Democracy collapsed because the social democratic leadership and trade unions were helpless in the face of these attacks.

The political structure of National Socialism

With its great internal incoherence, the ideology of National Socialism rejects all traditional doctrines and values ​​in relation to a fundamental goal: "to solve the discrepancy between the potential and the previous and currently existing possibilities of the German industrial apparatus through an imperialist war". Both externally and internally, the National Socialist ideology was fused with sheer terror.

In 1935, Hitler publicly admitted that his attempted coup had been a political mistake. The NSDAP blossomed into a legal party that used all formal means of the constitutional state against it. The demand to unite all power in the hands of the Reich President formed state theorists such as Carl Schmitt and Ernst Forsthoff on the idea of ​​the “total state”. Political life was "brought into line". After the war began, political power was further concentrated. The contradiction between the party and the state led to a revolt by the party, which ideologically opposed the idea of ​​the “total state”. Carl Schmitt reacted to this discussion with his thesis of the threefold division into state, movement and people. Contrary to statements to the contrary, however, the tendency increased for the party to take precedence over the state by infiltrating the state administrative apparatus more and more and, on the other hand, by developing a bureaucratic apparatus itself. According to the National Socialist ideology, the Führer was the charismatic keystone of the Führer state. The people were seen as the source of this charism .

The totalitarian monopoly economy

Which forces hold the National Socialist society together? The economic system is capitalist, but does not correspond to the contradicting concept of "state capitalism" or that of a "corporate state" (although corporatist ideas were willingly adopted by the cartelized economy to eliminate outsiders and competitors). There was no binding economic theory under National Socialism. The organizational structure of the economic order was in many ways a continuation of the structures from the time of the Weimar Republic. In particular, the cartel system endangered by the economic crisis was saved by National Socialism and strengthened through processes of "self-cleaning" and compulsory cartelization. The trend towards monopoly was intensified by the Germanization and Aryanization of capital ownership and the elimination of small business owners. The economic policy of the “command economy” (state intervention and regulation) can be divided into four phases: 1. Initial phase, 2. Schacht's new plan, 3. Four-year plan, 4. War.

The new company

Under the title “The ruling class”, Franz Neumann deals with the following aspects: the ministerial bureaucracy, the party hierarchy, civil service and party, armed forces and party, industrial leadership, agricultural leadership, the renewal of the ruling class. The "Continental Oil Company", which controls the profits from oil production in the newly conquered areas, is to be seen as a model for a new form of cooperation between the old and the new management circles.

The ruled classes are subjected to certain National Socialist organizational principles. These solidify into certain organizational structures, such as the German Labor Front , in labor law the “company group” and the “manager”. The company should build on the "social honor" of work and a corresponding honorary jurisdiction. Free time is regulated. Wage and income policy as well as propaganda and violence are used as a means of mass domination.

Impact history

Political Sociology

In political sociology in Germany Neumann has been largely ignored.

Nazi research

Immediately after its publication, the work served as standard literature for American Nazi research and as a reference work to make the responsibilities and functional processes in the defeated Nazi regime more understandable to the US occupation authorities. The prosecution also followed this analysis in the preparation of the Nuremberg trials and the subsequent trials .

Shortly after its publication, C. Wright Mills called the Behemoth both a definitive analysis of the German Empire and a fundamental contribution to the social sciences. The positive comments range from Ernst Fraenkel to Ernst Nolte .

Hannah Arendt

In her major work The Origins of Totalitarianism , published in New York in 1951, the political philosopher Hannah Arendt dealt with Neumann's analysis of the Nazi system in two places. In the section on the totalitarian state apparatus of National Socialism, it is said that some observers noticed the peculiar "structurelessness" of totalitarian governments. In the footnote she writes: “ ... and Franz Neumann emphasizes in his Behemoth 1942 that Germany's constitution differs from that of Italy in its absolute lack of structure. “In the same section on the state apparatus, she criticizes the statements that it was a gangster or a clique regime. In the corresponding note, she noted succinctly with reference to the 1942 edition of Behemoth : “ Franz Neumann is of the opinion that the Third Reich was a gangster government. "

By autumn 1947, Arendt had adopted the term “racial imperialism” in preliminary studies for her great work from Neumann's analysis. Only then did she decide to analyze not only National Socialism but also Stalinism and to summarize both systems under the term “total domination”.

It is not known why Hannah Arendt does not consider Franz Neumann's study in exile in more detail. According to Funke, Behemoth was - even if Neumann's political-sociological practical analyzes of National Socialist Fascism as a social system were in the meantime partly funded and supplemented, partly modified and varied by further and more extensive research over the last sixty years - " the first structural analysis of the Third Reich " (see web links), because the social scientist Neumann and the newly developed techniques of domination of fascist Nazism as a social and governmental system looked at the institutional system of the German Empire acquired both analytically and thus Ernst Fraenkel's theory of the dual nationality ( the Dual State in 1942) went:

Neumann recognized “a technique of mass manipulation through terror ” in the Nazi legal system in particular ( Behemoth 1984, p. 458). Mention should be made: Abolition of the separation of powers (legislative: legislation - jurisdiction: jurisprudence - executive: execution), elimination of lay judges, reduction of the German professional judiciary "to the status of police officers", finally the erosion of the principle nulla poena sine lege , nullum crimen sine lege (“Without law no punishment, without law no crime”).

Frankfurt School

In the German Behemoth edition, Neumann's thesis of Nazi mass manipulation through terror in legal form ( mass manipulation by terror in form of law ³1966, p. 453) is reproduced as follows: “Today the criminal courts are in association with the Secret State Police, the public prosecutor and the executioners are primarily practitioners of violence, and the civil courts are primarily the executive agents of the monopoly business associations ”(1984, p. 530).

Franz Neumann's guiding concept of totalitarian monopoly capitalism largely agrees with the theses of the Frankfurt School in the analysis of a general trend towards the bureaucratisation of society (s) . In addition, he pleaded for independent political-sociological-empirical studies: For example, Neumann promised himself a systematic analysis of the Nuremberg follow -up trials against the main war criminals (he mentions the "case" of the " German tobacco king, Reemtsma , at Hamburg " as being highly interesting ) Undoubtedly an important contribution “ [to] contribute a great deal toward preventing in the future circumventions and violations similar to those which occurred after Versailles. "

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literature

Web links

References

  1. ↑ Behemoth. Structure and Practice of National Socialism 1933 - 1944. Edited and with an afterword by Gert Schäfer. Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag September 1988. ISBN 3-596-24306-8 . P. 16
  2. ↑ Eckart Kehr: The social system of reaction in Prussia under the Puttkamer Ministry. In: E. Kehr: The primacy of domestic policy. Ed. Hans-Ulrich Wehler. Berlin 1965
  3. ^ Eckart Kehr: Building of the battle fleet and party politics 1894-1901. Berlin 1930
  4. ↑ Carl Schmitt: State, Movement, People. The threefolding of political unity . Hamburg 1933
  5. ↑ that political sociology hardly followed the suggestions of Franz Neumann. Political sociology has differentiated itself, but an appropriate relationship between description and - Google search. Retrieved April 11, 2020 .
  6. ↑ Hubertus Buchstein: Anatomy of the Unstaats . Soziopolis July 17, 2018, accessed May 27, 2019.
  7. ^ "Franz Neumann's book is at once a definitive analysis of the German Reich and a basic contribution to the social sciences." (Charles Wright Mills: Neumann and Behemoth the best of German Tradition. In: Power, Politics and People , New York 1967 ( Memento of the original from January 12, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this note. ) @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.wbenjamin.org
  8. ^ Gert Schäfer : Franz Neumann's Behemoth and today's fascism discussion . In: Franz Neumann: Behemoth. Structure and Practice of National Socialism 1933 - 1944. Edited and with an afterword by Gert Schäfer. Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag September 1988. ISBN 3-596-24306-8 . P. 665
  9. ^ Hannah Arendt: Elements and origins of total domination . Munich, Zurich 1986, p. 828
  10. ↑ Hannah Arendt: Elements and origins of total rule (EuU). Munich, Zurich 1986, p. 846. She herself spoke about National Socialism as a rule of the mob over the bourgeoisie . " The mob very quickly proved that they were willing and able to govern themselves, and disempowered the bourgeoisie along with all other classes and state institutions." EuU 1995, p. 218.
  11. ^ Elisabeth Young-Bruehl: Hannah Arendt. Life and time. Frankfurt am Main 1986, p. 290. (Original edition New York 1982)
  12. ↑ p. 517; in the original [³1966, pp. 444, 447, 458]: police official , administrative official , mere policeman and "Polizeibüttel" ( Karl Marx )
  13. ↑ ³1966, p. 454
  14. ^ The War Crimes Trials , in: World Politics , Vol. 1 (1946/49), No. 2, pp. 135-137
  15. ↑ On the totalitarian, comparison of Neumann, Max Horkheimer and Hannah Arendt