"Long Live Liberty, Equality, Fraternity and Dynamite:" (1) the German Bourgeoisie and the Constructing of Popular Liberal and National-Socialist Subcultures in Marginal Germany‪.‬

Interest in European Liberalism as a cultural phenomenon and its relation to the European Bourgeoisie has certainly increased in the last decade. One of the new arguments is that, like Socialism and Catholicism in continental Europe, Liberalism in 19th-early 20th century Europe was not an elitist bourgeois movement but a mass-movement, and sometimes a radical one. (2) This argument, however, is not applied to Germany. Liberalism as a mass democratic movement, and the German Burgertum as a cultural liberal formation, it was said until recently, only existed in Germany until 1849, or, some will say, until the early 1870s, after which both lost their mass democratic-liberal appeal. (3) In this article, however, I would like to speak of German 19th and early 20th-century Liberalism not in terms of crisis and collapse. I would like to offer new interpretations of the strength and peculiarities of Liberalism in Germany by introducing the term Popular Liberalism, hitherto usually applied to a pattern of political behavior in mid and late 19th-century Britain. (4)