Why did Weimar fail? This remains one of the central questions in modern German historiography, and it is the question that has guided Larry Eugene Jones throughout his long and distinguished career. What began with his work on Weimar liberalism and the failure of Germany's first experiment in democracy has now culminated in this masterful and comprehensive political history of the non-Nazi Right from the Republic's founding to the Nazi breakthrough in the September 1930 Reichstag elections.

Jones begins with a question inspired by Daniel Ziblatt's work on British conservatism, namely, “why a party like the Conservative Party in Great Britain never succeeded in establishing itself as a durable political force in pre-Nazi Germany” (2). More specifically, Jones asks why the German National People's Party (DNVP) did not become “a state-supporting conservative party committed to pursuing its objectives within the framework of Germany's republican system of government” (5). What he finds is a party that could never reconcile its ideological stance of total opposition with the practical need to protect the interests of its constituent elements through negotiation and compromise, a process fundamental to democracy but heresy to the DNVP.

Until the Nazi breakthrough, division was the one characteristic that marked the German Right. With the DNVP's founding in 1918, it might have seemed as if the Right had finally overcome its fragmentation under the umbrella of a party that included such diverse interests as East Prussian aristocrats and small farmers, big business owners and industrial workers, pragmatic conservatives and extremist Pan-Germans. Real unity, however, proved elusive. Instead, the DNVP maintained a tenuous balance, with the only binding force being opposition to Weimar and Versailles. But how long could the party continue like this, bound only by what party activist Hans Erdmann von Lindeiner-Wildau called, “the unity of the no” (87)?

With relative stabilization came the real test for the DNVP's oppositional stance. The Dawes Plan debate in 1924 and the party's potential entry into the government exposed deep fissures and highlighted the paradox of trying to combine total opposition with the need to defend its constituents' economic interests. How can a party that proclaims fundamental rejection of the system play any positive role in that very same system? The split that resulted in enough DNVP votes to pass the Dawes Plan, but with the majority voting against, perfectly illustrates the party's political immaturity. What would they have done if they had scuttled the Dawes Plan? How can a political party maintain total opposition?

This is a question the DNVP never answered, in part because they never fully stepped out of the reality they had constructed for themselves following the 1918 revolution. In their world, the same Jewish and Marxist traitors who allegedly stabbed the army in the back in World War I also established and led the “foreign” republic. As a result, traditional political calculations did not apply. Hatred—as expressed by Elhard von Morosowicz in a September 1928 meeting of the right-wing veterans' organization Stahlhelm—twisted and warped their politics. There, in the “Fürstenwald Hate Declaration,” he proclaimed, “We hate the present form of government . . . with all our hearts – its form and content, its appearance and essence . . . For us there is only the uncompromising struggle against the system that dominates today's state” (434).

Ultimately, the few brief experiments in engagement with the republic proved the impossibility of such a position, helping weaken the party as there emerged no replacement for Lindeiner-Wildau's “unity of the no.” While entry into the government and Paul von Hindenburg's election as president in 1925 led some German Nationals to soften their opposition and see the potential benefits of working within the system, the experience of engagement and the toll it took on their electoral fortunes drove the party's right-wing into even more hardline opposition. Jones does an outstanding job of detailing the splintering process on the party's left-wing between 1928 and 1930 and the takeover by media magnate and Pan-German Alfred Hugenberg—a result that ended any role the DNVP may have played in stabilizing the republic. With the Depression deepening and the Reichstag frozen, conservative powerbrokers turned to Adolf Hitler as the last, best opportunity to realize their plans for ending democracy. But what Jones clearly shows is how the Right's inability to coalesce into a stable, state-supporting party left them unable to “manage” Hitler and instead enabled him to gain total control after January 30, 1933.

Among Jones's many strengths is the clarity with which he tells an incredibly complicated story. This includes his ability to illustrate the remarkable diversity of interests that constituted the Right, including business, agriculture, religion, and labor. The time frame Jones selected is also important. By not looking simply at the point of failure in 1930 but including the moments of possibility for the party and therefore also for Weimar's survival, he highlights the crucial importance of contingency. His expansive geographical view, thanks to extensive archival work, allows him to show how important regional differences, along with the politics of local and national party organizations, are for understanding the radicalization and resulting failure of the DNVP.

In The German Right, 1918-1930, Larry Jones tells a story that is at once fascinating, frustrating, frightening, and also timely. It is the story of a major political party that refused to accept the reality of its situation, was unable to reconcile its ideology with the fundamental nature of politics as a process of negotiation and compromise, and was consumed by a hatred so intense that politics became an existential struggle. The path from 1930 to 1933—much less 1918 to 1933—was not inevitable. But the failure of the DNVP made the survival of Weimar democracy exponentially more difficult. Larry Jones describes that failure in what is now the definitive work on the non-Nazi Right in Weimar Germany. But beyond its value for understanding modern Germany, it also serves as an invaluable warning at a time when democracy is once again under threat from authoritarianism around the globe.