Resistance

The definition of ‘resistance’ deployed at the start of their work by the team of archivists from the Bavarian State Archives involved in the project clearly indicates this widening and new emphasis: ‘Resistance is understood as every form of active or passive behaviour which allows recognition of the rejection of the National Socialist regime or a partial area of National Socialist ideology and was bound up with certain risks’. In an original, if highly abstract, theoretical exposition of the concept of resistance soon after the project began, its first director, Peter Hüttenberger – after a short time this role was assumed by Martin Broszat – defined resistance as ‘every form of rebellion against at least potentially total rule within the context of asymmetrical relations of rule’. This definition was based upon concepts of changing mechanisms of rule and social reactions to that rule. It was premissed upon an understanding of ‘rule’ or ‘domination’ (Herrschaft) as a process of balancing the aims, interests, standards, and norms of rulers with those of the ruled. For Hüttenberger, ‘symmetrical’ rule obtains where such a ‘bargain’ is struck. In such a system, most notably in a democracy, there is no ‘resistance’, but merely rivalry and conflict within, and immanent to, the system. Even where the system is breaking down, it is misleading to speak of ‘resistance’.

—Ian Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship, (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 223.