The German People and the Postwar World: A Study Based on Election Statistics, 1871–1933

Sydney L. W. Mellen

American Political Science Review, 1943, vol. 37, issue 4, 601-625

Abstract: What are the German people really like? A weird assortment of catchwords and formulas have been put forward, most of them as unscientific as Hitler's own racial doctrines: aggressors throughout the ages, perpetrators of a black record of war and aggression, submissive and obedient regiments, cultural and political romanticists, rebels against the established order, victims of a national inferiority complex, sentimentalists, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and so on. And yet unless the people of the democracies attain a realistic understanding of the Germans there will be a poor chance, after the war is finally won, of attaining a permanent solution of the German problem.In the articles and books written about the German people in recent months and years, little or no attention has been given to one set of historical facts which is capable of providing a trustworthy and statistically balanced background: the record of popular election results from 1871 to 1933. In the long series of Reichstag elections in this period, the German people as a whole expressed their composite preferences concerning the dominant political issues of the times; and the very multiplicity of the political parties, each with more or less distinct character and policies, provides us with fairly extensive breakdowns of public opinion.

Date: 1943
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