Karl Dietrich Bracher
| Karl Dietrich Bracher | |
|---|---|
| Born |
13 March 1922 Stuttgart, Weimar Republic |
| Died | 19 September 2016 (aged 94) Bonn, Germany |
| Nationality | German |
| Fields |
Political science Modern history |
| Institutions |
Free University of Berlin University of Bonn |
| Alma mater |
University of Tübingen Harvard University |
| Doctoral students | Alemann, Bredow, Eisel, Forndran, Hoffmann, Inacker, Knütter, Konrad, Mathiopoulos, Mennekes, Mirow, Miller, Neustadt, Pflüger, Schönbohm, Stausberg, Vieregge, Vorländer, Wittke |
| Other notable students | Bergsdorf, Hüttenberger, Jacobsen, Hüseyin Bagci, Kaiser, Kühnhardt |
| Known for | Arguing that the collapse of the Weimar Republic was not inevitable and that Nazi Germany was a totalitarian dictatorship. |
Karl Dietrich Bracher (13 March 1922 – 19 September 2016) was a German political scientist and historian of the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany. Born in Stuttgart, Bracher was awarded a Ph.D. in the classics by the University of Tübingen in 1948 and subsequently studied at Harvard University from 1949 to 1950. During World War II, he served in the Wehrmacht and was captured by the Americans while serving in Tunisia in 1943. He was then held as a POW in Camp Concordia, Kansas. Bracher taught at the Free University of Berlin from 1950 to 1958 and at the University of Bonn since 1959. In 1951 Bracher married Dorothee Schleicher, the niece of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. They had two children.
Bracher is mainly concerned with the problems of preserving and developing democracy. Bracher has been consistent in all his works in arguing for the value of human rights, pluralism and constitutional values, together with urging that Germans align themselves with the democratic values of the West. He sees democracy as a frail institution and has argued that only a concerned citizenry can guarantee it. 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. His 1955 book Die Auflösung der Weimarer Republik (The Disintegration of the Weimar Republic) is his best known book, in which he ascribed the collapse of German democracy not to the Sonderweg ("special path" of German historical development) or other impersonal forces but to human action that followed conscious choice. In that book, Bracher rejected not only the Sonderweg thesis, but also the Marxist theory of National Socialism as the result of a capitalist "conspiracy", the theory that the Treaty of Versailles caused the collapse of the Weimar Republic, and the view that the Nazi dicatorship was simply the work of "fate". Bracher's methodology in Die Auflösung der Weimarer Republik involving a mixture of political science and history was considered to be highly innovative and controversial in the 1950s.
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