Collective biography method and historical portrait of political elite in the Weimar Republic

The article is devoted to the historical research of political elite in the Weimar Republic carried out by means of acollective biography method appeared at the junction of history and social and political sciences. As historical narrative of a biography canbe oriented to a description standard set by a concrete science, the authors proceeded from intersubject connections between history andpolitology. The subject of the research is biographies of Reich chancellors of Weimar Germany as representatives of the ruling political elite.The Weimar chancellors' collective portrait is presented in three aspects: social; institutional and legal; practical and political. The researchof the political biographies was oriented to these three aspects. During the Weimar period a generational change took place in the politicalelite, which lead to substantial changes in the social elite in common. The biographical analysis of Weimar chancellors' work shows thattheir political typology: the so-called "aussenseiters", "forced republicans" and "neo-traditionalists", depicted the fragmentation character ofthe whole political elite. Though a traditional segment of the political elite's structure is still the nobility, there are new social, ethnic andconfessional, party and political groups in it. Individual socialization character and professional background of the majority of the new eliteoriented it not to getting the so-called status rent and privileges but to effective solution for practical issues by means of education,communication and personal characteristics. It was a functional elite to a large extent. The main field of struggle for the political elite'svarious groups was decision-making process during which the demarcation of party and group interests and national interests becameobviously evident. The chronological order of Weimar chancellors' figures revealed a characteristic tendency of the evolution of the politicalelite in Germany in the interwar period. The results of the Reichstag elections showed that the number of supporters of democracy decreasedsharply after every elections and democratically oriented elite started to lose its electorate. Because of constant contradictions between partyand national interests, the representatives of the ruling political elite came into conflicts with their own parties, not to mention theiroppositional parties. In that situation the fundamental base of the Weimar elite, its open character, became subject to revision. Transitionfrom an open to a close elite, from party representatives to non-party administrators revealed itself also during the forming of cabinets ofministers and election of Reich chancellors as their heads. The variant of the characteristic of the political elite in the Weimar Republicpresented in the article, which model is a biographical analysis of personalities making a representative group, let us positively assess thepossibilities of a collective biography method in the historical research.

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