[3] This theme began with Bracher's first book in 1948, Verfall und Fortschritt im Denken der frühen römischen Kaiserzeit which concerned the downfall of the Roman Republic and the rise of Augustus.
[6] Furthermore, Bracher wrote that under Weimar, the judicial system had already politicized as the judges, almost all of whom had begun their careers in the Imperial era, had a tendency to impose very lenient sentences for political crimes done in the name of the right.
[5] Bracher maintained that the end of German democracy was not inevitable, but instead was due to conscious choices coupled with "momentous errors and failures" made by Germany's leaders, especially President Paul von Hindenburg.
[13] Brüning, a conservative Catholic who never married and is not known to had a relationship with any women during the course of his life, revealed himself in his memoirs to be a man with an unhealthy emotional dependence on Hindenburg, to whom he was slavishly devoted and whom he regarded in homoerotic terms as the epitome of German masculinity and strength.
Brüning openly admitted in his memoirs that the purpose of the "presidential government" was to do away with democracy and restore the monarchy by bringing back the exiled Wilhelm II, and complained at much length about how unfair it was that Schleicher had turned Hindenburg against him in the spring of 1932, leading to the president to fire him and replace him with Papen.
[14] After the publication of Brüning's memoirs, which largely confirmed Bracher's thesis, Bracher wrote that the coming of presidential government was "not a move to save democracy, but part of a conscious plan to bring about a right-wing regime independent of party and parliament and to keep the Social Democrats out of power...Brüning's policy oscillated between the defense of a bureaucratic version of a state based on the rule of law, and paving the way for a dictatorship...He was not...the last chancellor before the break-up of the Weimar Republic, but the first chancellor in the process of destroying German democracy".
[17] Bracher's views about the "Rape of Prussia", as Papen's coup was also known, involved him in heated debate with Arnold Brecht, who maintained that nothing could be done to oppose the Preußenschlag as that would mean breaking the law.
The road from democracy to dictatorship was not a particular German case, but the radical nature of the National Socialist dictatorship corresponded to the power of the German ideology that in 1933–1945 became a political and totalitarian reality"[21] The Sonderbewusstsein Bracher referred to was the original theory of the Sonderweg, namely the idea of the Prussian-German state as the great Central European power neither of the West nor of the East, but rather was something special and unique; this ideology emphasised opposition to democracy as part of its opposition to "Western civilization".
Another well-known book associated with Bracher was the 1960 monograph co-written with Wolfgang Sauer and Gerhard Schulz Die nationalsozialistische Machtergreifung (The National Socialist Seizure of Power), which described in considerable detail the Gleichschaltung of German life in 1933–1934.
In a review of Die nationalsozialistische Machtergreifung, the American historian Walter Laqueur praised Bracher, Sauer and Schulz for their refusal to engage in apologetics, and willingness to ask tough questions about the conduct of Germans under the Nazi regime.
[25] Speaking of historical work in his own area of speciality, namely the Weimar-Nazi periods, Bracher stated: "It was not with Himmler, Bormann, and Heydrich, also not with the National Socialist Party, but with Hitler that the German people identified itself enthusiastically.
Against the functionalist view of Nazi Germany mostly associated with left-wing historians, Bracher was to write that it was an attempt to: "turn against the "old-liberal" totalitarianism theory and talk about a relativizing interpretation, which emphasizes the "improvisational" politics of power and domination of National Socialism.
Bracher criticized the entire notion of generic fascism as intellectually invalid and argued that it was individual choice on the part of Germans as opposed to Nolte's philosophical view of the "metapolitical" that produced National Socialism.
[32] In a 1971 review, the American historian Lucy Dawidowicz called The German Dictatorship "...a work of unparalleled distinction, combing the most scrupulous objectivity with a passionate commitment to the democratic ethos".
[33] In 1989, the British historian Richard J. Evans called The German Dictatorship a "valuable" book[34] Bracher often criticized the functionist-structuralist interpretation of Nazi Germany championed by such scholars such as Martin Broszat and Hans Mommsen, and decried their view of Hitler as a "weak dictator".
[35] In a 1956 essay, Bracher noted "the antagonism between rival agencies was resolved solely in the omnipotent key position of the Führer", which was the result of "...the complex coexistence and opposition of the power groups and from conflicting personal ties".
The great examples of this cult of leadership and pseudo-religious veneration and adoration are Lenin and Stalin and at present Mao and the North Korean demigod Kim Il Sung".
[46] In addition, Bracher maintained that the importance of Hitler derived from his being the most effective exponent of an extremely radical type of racist German nationalism, which allowed for ideas that otherwise would be ignored by historians coming to a terrible fruition.
Bracher believed that totalitarianism, whether from the Left or Right, is the leading threat to democracy all over the world, and has argued that the differences between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were of degree, not kind.
[3] In 1969–74, Bracher supported the Social Democratic-Free Democrat government of Chancellor Willy Brandt and his policy of Ostpolitik, arguing that it long overdue that the Federal Republic recognize the Oder-Neisse Line.
[58] In his 1977 essay entitled "Zeitgeschichte im Wandel der Interpretationen" published in the Historische Zeitschrift journal, Bracher argued that the student protests of the late 1960s had resulted in a "Marxist renaissance" with the "New Left" exercising increasing control over the university curricula.
[60] In his 1978 book Schlüsselwörter in der Geschichte, Bracher warned of the "totalitarian temptation" which he associated with the New Left, above all with the Red Army Faction terrorist group was a serious threat to West German democracy, and called upon scholars to do their part to combat such trends before it was too late.
In particular, Bracher warned of the "tendency, through theorizing and ideologizing alienation from the history of persons and events, to show and put into effect as the dominant leading theme the contemporary criticism of capitalism and democracy".
In the introduction to his 1982 book Zeit der Ideologien (Age of Ideologies), Bracher wrote: "When the realization of high-pitched political expectations was found to come up against certain limits, there was a revival of the confrontation, especially painful in Germany and one that was generally believed to have been overcome".
It was able to bring salvation from doubts in a modern complex world, but it was bound, time and again, to come into conflict with the facts of that complexity.”[65]During the Historikerstreit (Historians' Dispute) of the 1986–88, Bracher argued in a letter to the editor of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung published on 6 September 1986 that nothing new was being presented by either side.
[67] Bracher wrote that for Germans: "The present dispute concerns not only the orientation and the meaning of a totalitarian "past", which is not easy to historicize, but does not simply pass away despite temporal distance".
[69] Bracher criticized those left-wing intellectuals who damned democracies like the United States as for being capitalist while praising those dictatorships that were “progressive” like Communist Cuba as holding morally dishonest values.
[70] In the 1970s–80s, Bracher published a series of essays calling for "constitutional patriotism" and a "post-national democracy" that redefined Deutschtum in terms of republican belonging to a democratic state and rejected the old definitions of the nation-state.
[76] The American historian Jeffrey Herf wrote in an obituary: The complaints about democracy and liberalism that Bracher examined in The German Dictatorship find echoes in our own time.
Here, too, Karl Bracher’s work will remain important for years to come both for historians of the Nazi and Communist dictatorships and for advocates of liberal democracy in a world that faces multiple illiberal challenges.