The end of Germany's twenty-year flirtation with Integralist tyranny, much like its beginning, was marked not by a grand event marking historical sea change, but by a widespread sense of disorientation and loss. Too many historians today readily share the facile dismissal recorded by the movement's nominal leader and focus, Wilhelm III, as “my personal comic opera”. In reality, millions of Germans dedicated their lives to the cause of Kaiserheil and felt a devastating emptiness in their lives as the Conservative Revolution petered out in a series of corruption scandals and broken promises. Even Wilhelm himself, though famously cynic and no respect of protocol, spoke his famous words in 1946, not in 1930, when he was still happy to participate in the pomp and circumstance that his admiring populace laid on.
Even though it must have appeared difficult to believe even at the time, the tens of thousands of youths assembled in Berlin to shout “Heil dem Kaiser”, the paunchy, middle-aged petit-bourgeis squeezed into their fantasy uniforms, the white-clad girls performing gymnastics calculated to prepare them for healthy motherhood, and the thousands of elderly teachers reading out fervid orations to sleepy classes just before term's end in the summer heat were entirely serious. They believed what they were told by a carefully orchestrated array of media – newspapers and magazines, educational films, and the new radio. They genuinely saw themselves as part of a greater whole and wanted to serve the Volkskörper with every fibre of their being.
That is why the succession of chancellors as the Nationalpartei replaced the Nationale Volkspartei as the strongest party in the Reichstag in 1936, then was eclipsed by the Deutschnationale Partei in the snap election of 1938, then returned to brief pre-eminence in 1939 was such a galling disappointment. We understand the infighting behind the scenes that led to these machinations better today, but a movement that venerated leadership and depended on personal sacrifice to function was ill served by this spectacle. Though a right-wing majority coalition could still be devised in the 1940 and 1942 Reichstage, the end was inexorably drawing near, not because a powerful new movement was taking power – nothing electrified the German voting public – but because the voting pool dissipated. In more and more districts, as the various conservative parties called off their electoral pact, shares of 20-30% returned Zentrum and SPD candidates to office buoyed not by enthusiasm, but by the exhaustion of their opponents. Despite all efforts to rig the vote in rural constituencies, the conservative revolution was finished. As chancellor von Thaden resigned in disgrace in late 1942, the nation awoke to a collective hangover.
It could not have been timed more inauspiciously. The conservative parties had drawn the country's public into an obsessive preoccupation with internal dissent, national character and austerity that had excluded almost all outside events except as they pertained to domestic policy. Their foreign policy had largely consisted of a show of strength, the victory dividend of 1908 that allowed Germ,any to claim uncontested hegemony of its Eastern periphery. They had no actual plans to reinforce or make good such claims, never considering the need for anything but the power to assert them. Now disgraced in the public eye, their rhetorical tropes failed to convince even where they would have been appropriate.
While the representatives of the conservative political movement had been well known for bellicose speeches, the actual masterminds of the Great General Staff proved reluctant warriors. Von Seeckt was shaken by the experience of losing the basis of public support that the army had been building patiently since the tenure of Field Marshal von der Goltz. The resurgence of Russian power had long been viewed with majestic unconcern, but this had rapidly turned into dismayed panic as the Greco-Turkish War unfolded. Bureaucratic infighting had returned the commanding heights of a number of departments to 'Falkenhayner' officers who deplored the use of copious resources on paramilitary programmes and mass mobilisation. Their chorus that the military was unprepared, underequipped and technologically backward added to the indecision at the top. Emperor Wilhelm was in the habit of taking experts seriously, even when they brought bad news.
Meanwhile, the actual cabinet, the one entity that could have taken a determined stance in the face of Russian aggression, consisted of an uneasy alliance of Zentrum, SPD, national minority parties and liberals, all with two decades' worth of opposition under their belt and no government experience. Desperate to distance themselves from the noisy and muscular diplomacy of their predecessors and only too ready to embrace the narrative of misgovernment having left the army unready for war, they proved unwilling to escalate the confrontation to the last.
None of this translated into a deliberate policy of appeasement. Germany spent the years between 1942 and 1944 rearming, preparing for a conflict that was largely considered inevitable. However, the indecision at the highest levels of government, an increasingly reclusive and ailing emperor and a certain amount of blundering by inexperienced ministers encouraged the Russian leadership to take risks that made a climbdown increasingly impossible. There is a degree of truth in the charge of future historians that as the Russian bear had been needled into the first war, he had been baited into the second.