National Mentality And The Nazi's Rising In The Weimar Republic

The national mentality's formation and change has deep historical roots and social background in the Weimar Republic. Different social classes have different mentality, though class mentality compose the social mentality, the latter affects the correlative community's behaviors.This paper begins from discussing the different social class mentality, its performance and underlying causes, origins and the characteristics of mentality etc., especially that of the Fascism community mentality. Borrowed theories and methods from the history of mentality and the psychological history as well as the sociology, the paper tries to explain the relationship between the mentality of various social classes at that time and the Nazi's rise, as well as why the counter- Fascist forces were defeated, and how did Hitler utilize national mentality to deludingly propagandize and legitimately ascend the political arena through the election. The author think through the analysis of deep the Nazis rise to power and national mentality, it tries to provide a deep understanding of the Nazi's rise to power.The thesis is divided into five chapters. The first chapter classifies the Weimar social classes into four kinds: the upper, the middle, the lower and the special classes. It analyzes their different mentalities in term of social background and the role that each social class played in the social system. The second chapter discuss the reasons why national mentality forms in that formation in the era of Weimar Germany. It argues that various historical events and the social trouble factors, affected the German's national mentality at that time. The third chapter summarizes common characteristics of the national mentality in the Weimar Republic period, and points out the abnormal development of the national mentality. The fourth chapter carries on a psychological analysis of fascism groups, introducing the theories of Reich, Fromm, Adorno, Peter Lobewenberg , Harvey Asher etc., analyzing the popular psychological origin which produced the Fascism.The last chapter of the thesis deals with the interaction and reaction between national mentality of the Weimar Republic and Nazi, as well as how Hitler took advantage of deceptive practices, trying to get the support from people of all social classes to the greatest extent. There were also anti-fascism in the national mentality. Why weren't they able to defeat the fascist? Why did rationality gave away to irrational mentality? Why can't it prevent the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the Nazi came to power, and what lessons should we learn from? All there were discussed in the thesis.