Humanities and Social Sciences Colloquium - Sabine Hake

Conversion Stories: Turning Communists into Nazis

The rise of populist movements has once against turned critical attention to the Weimar Republic as the first German experiment in democracy and a veritable laboratory of political emotions.

Then and now, the crisis of liberal democracy is inseparable from the culture of resentment that finds expression across literary forms and audio-visual media. The fluidity of class resentments, in particular, becomes apparent in the Nazi Bewegungsromane (movement novels) published between 1932 and 1935. Their stories about Communists becoming Nazis sheds light not only on the populist rhetorics shared by Left and Right but also on the emotional appeal of antagonism as a political habitus.