The concept of generation as a historical category has never been used more effectively than in Lost Comrades. The socialists of the Front Generation, young men in 1914, were driven into political activity and ideological exploration by the experience of the First World War. Their efforts to renew socialism, to carry it beyond Marxism and beyond the working class, were profound and original, yet ultimately they failed.

Lost Comrades follows the Front Generation socialists from their questioning of Marxist orthodoxies in the 1920s into their confrontations with the twin challenges of fascism and world depression in the early 1930s. Responding to these dangers, they devised—with little success—counterpropaganda against the fascists and planning blueprints for the economy. Eventually, some of the most prominent—Sir Oswald Mosley in Britain, Hendrik de Man in Belgium, Marcel Déat in France—shifted their hopes to fascism or, during the Second World War, to collaborationism in Hitler’s Europe. Others, however, like Carlo Mierendorff and Theodor Haubach in Germany, ended as martyrs in the anti-Nazi resistance. Yet even these divergent paths showed parallels reflecting their common starting point.

In tracing these unfulfilled careers, Dan S. White brings a new clarity to the hopes and limitations of European socialism between the two world wars.

As a study of the greatest middle class party of Imperial Germany, The Splintered Party is inevitably, in its broadest aspect, an inquiry into the weaknesses of liberalism in the Empire of Bismarck and Wilhelm II. How did the National Liberals, the dominant force in the Reichstag of the 1870s, become by 1914 a spent and divided power? Dan White explores this question from a new perspective, emphasizing regional circumstances as primary agents of the party’s decline. The resulting portrait underscores the paradox of the National Liberals: a party with strength in all areas of the Empire, a rarity before 1914, yet a party whose impact was undermined by divisions among its regional branches.

In The Splintered Party the former Grand Duchy of Hessen serves as a testing ground where the regional foundations of National Liberalism can be exposed. As Professor White points out, the party’s reversals on the Imperial plane after 1878—rejection by Bismarck, electoral defeats, internal splits—not only ended its early primacy in German affairs but also shifted political initiative from Berlin and the Reichstag delegation to the National Liberal branches in the states and provinces, which had maintained unity, power, and alliances with local government in spite of the upheaval above them. The consequences of this change become visible through close examination of the political and social structure in Hessen. On the regional level a liberalism based on the claim to majority representation by the notables (Honoratioren) of bourgeois society, a creed no longer plausible in national politics, remained defensible. Through the Heidelberg Declaration of 1884 the National Liberals of the German Southwest attempted to buttress this approach with an economic and social platform and, simultaneously, to make it the impulse of the national party’s revival. But they succeeded only in deferring National Liberalism’s adjustment to democratic politics and in subordinating their movement to the clash of regional and constituency interests. The result was a chronically splintered party.

Against the backdrop of this main theme, White delineates several additional features of the changing political and social scene in Imperial Germany—the local power of the notables, Bismarck’s skills as a political manager, the character of agrarian discontent and rural anti-Semitism, the steady advance of socialism. The uniquely German element in National Liberalism’s failure is assessed in a concluding comparison with the development of liberal politics in Britain and Italy.