The ‘muddled middle’ and more

Mary Fulbrook claims that a Bystander Society will emerge when most citizens come to believe that collective confrontation of state-supported violence is impossible and that individual confrontation would be both ineffective and potentially catastrophic. She presents Nazi Germany as a case study in support of this claim.

In 1934, American sociologist Theodore Abel held an essay competition for 'the best personal life story' written by someone who, by 30 January 1933, was already a member of what was to become the Nazi Party. A few years later, psychologist Gordon Allport and some other Harvard professors held a similar but more inclusive competition, this time for essays with the title, 'My life in Germany before and after January 30, 1933'. The date specified in both essay titles is the date that Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany.

Fulbrook weaves together personal accounts from such source materials to generate an insider's history of everyday life during the rise of Nazi Germany. Use of such data makes for gripping, if frequently ghastly, reading.

As would be expected from an award-winning historian, Fulbrook historically contextualises the stories she relays, although major geopolitical events are often briefly mentioned rather than described or explained in detail.

Fulbrook believes that when Naziism was at its most dominant, a minority of Germans were genuine enthusiasts, a tiny minority were active resisters, and most stood by and witnessed horrific events to such an extent that their initial passivity increasingly became complicity. Her main concern is to explain the behaviour of the latter group, whom she calls the muddled middle. Her explanation is, essentially, violent populism.

Taking the populist aspect first, in a time of widespread suffering and obvious national decline, Hitler rose to power by making grand promises to make Germany great again, positioning himself as a bracing alternative to what he claimed were the tired, corrupt, useless members of the privileged, establishment elite, all as bad as each other. He gloried in patriotism and grandiose rhetoric. He expressed fervent wishes to sweep away naysayers, doubters, critics, and stifling bureaucracy resulting from allegedly outdated legal and political systems. He quickly attracted disciples unencumbered by concerns about nuance or balance; unafraid to demonstrate strength in opposing the enemies of progress identified by their leader. In no time, people were either 'us' or 'them,' and woe betide anyone identified as the latter, or whose loyalty was ever in doubt.

The Nazis were not just populists. They were genocidally murderous populists. And therein lies the main issue with Fulbrook's book. She relays people's fascinating accounts of living through the rise of Fascism but seems unsure about how much to explain their consequent behaviour in terms of the effects of populism per se, and how much to attribute to the more specific effects of extremely violent populism.

Given both her subject matter and her method of analysis, it is surprising how little Fulbrook explicitly makes use of methods and theories from across the social sciences. She occasionally refers to psychological theories but never with enthusiasm or thoroughness. She mentions 'pluralistic ignorance,' for example, but immediately dismisses it as explanatorily irrelevant and redundant. She announces without argument or evidence that such concepts cannot help with 'understanding behaviour in conditions where stepping out of line might easily lead to denunciation and potentially severe penalties' . This seems analytically superficial, in that it assumes the exclusive relevance of one potential cause and simply dismisses the possible relevance of another, apparently because the case for doing so is 'obvious.' It also seems disingenuous, as part of what Fulbrook compellingly shows is that pluralistic ignorance initially played a substantial role in the emergence of widespread bystanding in Nazi Germany. She describes many instances of members of the muddled middle publicly conforming with emerging norms suggestive of allegiance to the Reich while simultaneously being awed by others' identical behaviour, thinking that it might express widespread genuine ideological commitment. These people may well have acted as they did largely to avoid the anticipated costs of not doing so but these actions nevertheless resulted in them misattributing the causes and meaning of others' behaviour, i.e., in pluralistic ignorance. As Fulbrook notes, behaving repeatedly in such ways and with such consequences must surely have affected their subsequent worldviews and actions.

Much of Fulbrook's analysis is like this. It seems almost completely compatible with multiple well-established psychological theories that she does not refer to, explicitly use to inform her analysis, or rigorously assess in light of her conclusions, all of which seems a pity.

People love to make or resist comparisons between current events and Nazi Germany and Fulbrook's primary source material offers great potential for research that would illuminate when such comparisons are likely to be valid and informative. Fulbrook's own analysis provides limited help in this regard. While her analysis of the processes contributing to Germany becoming a Bystander Society has considerable merit, her takeaway message seems to be that expert analysis is trivially important once politics is backed up with violence.