Isabella Weber has a new book out. The Guardian profiled it on 16 October: Anti-Fascist Economics: In Defence of Affordability, Dignity and Democracy (Allen Lane). The prescription fits in one sentence, and the article gives it in one: make life’s necessities affordable.
“Fascism is rising from frustration, born out of a crisis of livelihoods,” says Weber. “So, we need to reclaim these essentials now.”
The German record says the opposite. Low prices were a tool of the fascist regime. They did nothing to stop it.
Prices fell every year from 1929 to 1932. Heinrich Brüning governed by emergency decree, cut wages, salaries and benefits and raised taxes; the Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung calls it radical deflation and records the name it earned him, “Hungerkanzler”. His fourth emergency decree of 8 December 1931 went beyond letting prices fall. It ordered them down. Bound prices, meaning cartel and branded-goods prices, had to be cut by at least ten percent against their mid-1931 level from January 1932, under a Reich commissioner for price supervision with powers to enforce it, as a 1933 account from inside the commissioner’s office sets out. Registered unemployment passed six million the same winter.
The Nazi vote rose through every one of those years.
| Reichstag election | NSDAP share |
|---|---|
| 20 May 1928 | 2.6 % |
| 14 September 1930 | 18.3 % |
| 31 July 1932 | 37.3 % |
| 6 November 1932 | 33.1 % |
Source: Deutscher Bundestag. Seven months after a decree cutting prices by ten percent, the NSDAP took 37.3 percent and became the largest party in the Reichstag.
Weber’s school has an answer to this, and it has evidence. Galofré-Vilà, Meissner, McKee and Stuckler, “Austerity and the Rise of the Nazi Party”, Journal of Economic History (2021), matched voting data from a thousand districts and a hundred cities across four elections between 1930 and 1933 against spending cuts and tax increases, and found higher Nazi vote shares where the cuts went deepest. I accept the finding. Read what it measures. The variable is the state withdrawing: benefits cut, taxes raised. Prices sit outside it, because the same government was pushing prices down at the same time. Austerity and cheap goods arrived together, and the vote went to the party promising work and revenge. Cheap bread bought the republic nothing.
Then the end, which was a transaction. The NSDAP lost two million votes in November 1932. Hindenburg appointed Hitler chancellor on 30 January 1933 after that loss, in a cabinet arranged by Franz von Papen and the conservatives around the president. The Reichstag Fire Decree of 28 February suspended civil liberties. The election of 5 March was held under SA terror. The Reichstag passed the Enabling Act on 23 March, and the law of 14 July 1933 made the NSDAP the only legal party. Appointed, then entrenched. A majority voted for it at no point.
The regime then did what Weber recommends. On 26 November 1936 the Reich commissioner for price formation issued the Verordnung über das Verbot von Preiserhöhungen, a general ban on price increases for goods, services and rents, pegged to the level of 18 October 1936; the Berlin Institut für Konjunkturforschung reported the decree the week it came out. In March 1937 the same institute recorded that wholesale and retail prices still stood a fifth to a quarter below their 1928/29 peak. The freeze capped the inflation that rearmament on MEFO bills had built up. Adam Tooze sets out the mechanism in The Wages of Destruction (2006): prices held on paper while quality fell and goods ran short, the fat shortage of 1935 and 1936 being the case the regime could least hide. The regime delivered the appearance of affordable essentials, and the appearance was enough.
Götz Aly went further in Hitlers Volksstaat (2005): the regime bought loyalty with tax relief and benefits financed by plunder and “Aryanisation”. The thesis is contested. Tooze answered in the taz that Aly had grossly underestimated what the war cost Germans by counting taxes and leaving out the bonds; Johannes Bähr called the book the legend of the “Wohlfühldiktatur”. That dispute is about who paid. On the point that matters here the parties agree: cheap essentials, real or staged, were a technique of the regime.
A democracy whose case rests on cheap essentials has no answer when a strongman delivers them cheaper, and that’s what 1936 shows.
Weber’s own example in the article shows the mechanism running today. Mexican retailers cap the total price of a basket of two dozen essentials, the canasta básica, and the government rewards them with tariff and tax relief, “and at a weekly press conference lauds those who do a good job and calls out those who don’t”. The article’s verdict: “In Mexico’s 2024 presidential election, the governing Morena party increased its vote share from 55% to 61%.”
The same governing party then spent the mandate. In September 2024 Congress passed, and a majority of states ratified, the judicial overhaul that puts every judge in the country up for popular election. Eight of the eleven justices of the Supreme Court, the chief justice among them, resigned rather than stand. Affordability bought votes for a government concentrating power. The example argues against the book that cites it.
The demagogue can promise without delivering and blame an enemy when the promise fails. Donald Trump in Bozeman, Montana, 9 August 2024:
Starting on day one, we will end inflation and make America affordable again, to bring down the prices of all goods.
Trump at a cabinet meeting, 2 December 2025:
Look, affordability’s a hoax that was started by Democrats who caused the problem of pricing.
That is the full cycle in sixteen months. An economist who builds democracy’s case on affordability competes on the demagogue’s terms, and the demagogue is free to lie.
The article closes with family.
Family legend is that her grandfather, a priest in the Ruhr Valley, refused to hang a swastika in his church.
The sentence is the journalist’s, and “family legend” is his phrase. The grandfather goes unnamed. The legend is the whole evidence.
The records exist, and they are open. A priest with grandchildren in the Ruhr is in all likelihood an evangelischer Pfarrer. The Protestant church kept personnel files on its clergy, and those files sit in the Landeskirchliches Archiv of the Evangelische Kirche von Westfalen in Bielefeld or the Archiv der Evangelischen Kirche im Rheinland in Düsseldorf, depending on the parish. The NSDAP membership card index sits in the Bundesarchiv, which states on its own site that a signed application was a condition of admission. The denazification files for all of North Rhine-Westphalia sit in the Landesarchiv NRW in Duisburg, which put about 610,000 of them online in August 2023, searchable by name.
The swastika in the church is itself a documented question. Decorating churches with swastikas was the practice of the Deutsche Christen, the Nazi faction that won the church elections of July 1933. Pastors who refused left records: Otto Mörike in Württemberg demanded in March 1933 that the flag come down from his church tower, and his Landeskirche’s own flag decrees of that spring are in the file. So the question a record answers is which side the grandfather’s church stood on, Deutsche Christen or Bekennende Kirche. A legend answers nothing. I make no claim about who he was or what he did. The point is that she offers legend where records exist.
Her grandfather story is the national pattern, not an exception. Harald Welzer, Sabine Moller and Karoline Tschuggnall interviewed forty German families for “Opa war kein Nazi”. Nationalsozialismus und Holocaust im Familiengedächtnis (Fischer, 2002). Families keep the official story of German guilt and move their own grandparents across to the bystanders, the victims and the resisters, and with each generation the grandfather improves. The authors’ term is kumulative Heroisierung.
The other side of German politics tells the same story. Friedrich Merz on his grandfather Josef Paul Sauvigny, mayor of Brilon from 1917 to 1937:
| Date | Statement or record |
|---|---|
| 2004, Merz in writing | Grandfather entered the NSDAP “ohne eigenes Zutun”, had “geweigert” to join, was “kein Nationalsozialist” |
| January 2025, Merz in the Zeit podcast “Alles gesagt” | Grandfather “in diese Abgründe des Nationalsozialismus hineingeraten” |
| March 1936, Landrat’s file note | Sauvigny “von Anfang an als SA-Mann eifrig betätigt” |
| Personnel file, Landesarchiv NRW | Membership application made between May 1933 and February 1936 |
| NSDAP card index, Bundesarchiv | Member from 1 May 1937 |
Kersten Augustin and Martin Teigeler published the files in the taz on 8 May 2025. Merz did not answer the taz. One detail from their piece: the 2004 wording from Merz matches almost word for word the statement his grandfather gave the denazification committee in 1946 to clear himself. The family legend was the grandfather’s own Persilschein, handed down intact.
A conservative chancellor and an anti-fascist economist tell the same family story. The pattern is national, not partisan.
Dignity is in the title of the book. In the record, the regime that froze prices also stripped dignity from everyone it chose, and the freeze helped it hold the rest. A democracy whose case rests on cheap essentials has no answer when a strongman delivers them cheaper, and that’s what 1936 shows.