of the vagaries of democratic institutions and political pluralism. Kershaw cites the Weimar period's increasing gulf between the perceived need for "national integration and unity and the patent lack of integration which prevailed in reality." This gulf, Kershaw continues,
was enhanced and accentuated by three interlinked factors; the social and political disruption accompanying a practically simultaneous transition to nation-state, constitutional government (if strongly authoritarian in character), and industrialized society; the deep fragmentation of the political system (reflecting fundamental social cleavages); and, not least, the spread of a chauvinistic-imperialist ideology clamouring for a rightful "place in the sun" for Germany, a supposed have-not nation."
Hitler and the Nazis perpetuated the gulf but transformed its emphasis, by means of propaganda. The power of the Hitler "myth," conceived and developed during the years of the Weimar Republic, increased, and was to be employed as a nationalistic rallying symbol, owing to Hitler's undoubted charisma. This appears to have been reinforced by the fact that Germany's ideological climate in general favored the right more than the left. Shirer cites Weimar's 1918 suppression of the Spartacists, led by Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, who wanted to duplicate the Bolshevik revolution in Bavaria and who threw up their barricades at just about the time the Weimar Constitution was proclaimed. What ensued was "Bloody Week," in which "regular and freecorps troops under the direction of [new Defense Minister Gustav] Noske and the command of General von Luettwitz crushed the Spartacists." The army acted in response to a promise by Weimar's Social Democrat party leader Friedrich Ebert to oppose Bolshevism under all circumstances. Later, Shirer says, Weimar officials "ruthlessly applied" treason laws to liberals who supported the republic but also publicly criticized the German arm...