Contested City

In the wake of the First World War, many Germans saw the future of their nation as contingent on a vision of municipal progress. In this well-researched study, Anthony McElligott uses an analysis of local politics to decipher the fate of the Weimar Republic. Focusing on the industrial city of Altona, McElligott locates his discussion of the contradictions of the Weimar “local state” along two axes--first, persistent financial, policy, and political conflict between the central and the local state and, second, the conflicts within the Weimar local state between the displaced and resentful middle/lower-middle class and the newly enfranchised working class. Social Democrats used their considerable political influence at the level of local government to pursue progressive social policies, local experiments in “practical socialism.” Socialist programs, however, alienated middle and lower middle-class voters without guaranteeing the support of all workers, since the dwindling financial resources of local governments made it impossible to extend the benefits of the new social programs to many of the unskilled and poorer sections of the working class. Ultimately, the translation of the democratic republican vision into active policy provoked the conservative push for a reassertion of central authority in the state. McElligott probes beneath the level of formal, local party conflicts to reconstruct the “politics of everyday life” at the street level. This study will be of wide interest to historians and political scientists. Anthony McElligott is Lecturer in Modern History, University of St. Andrews, Scotland.