Fringe Irritant Case Study

A ‘fringe irritant’ in German domestic politics must be a term widely used for many minority parties in a struggling Weimar Germany, whilst designed to lower the thought of their actual influence and reputation amongst the readers of historical sources it also shows the significance of their effects on the population. In the case of the DAP (later NSDAP) it was minute, and at even said by Hitler himself: “at a low club level form”. Germany, being a new country which had gained experience of defeat and humiliation at the hands of the allies, was still primarily made up of states run under a somewhat ‘federal’ system of government and this would have led to a very authoritarian regime given the times, thus altering the scope of power parties
These all led to short term effects on the NSDAP and it hindered the rise of the party to a national level to a little extent. However the biggest limitations to power were probably the exclusion from Von Kahr’s plans and this possibly led to the term fringe irritant being associated with the NSDAP – this exclusion can be seen as the main drive behind the failed Beer Hall Putsch but even this had its limitations as it resulted in Hitler being imprisoned for 5 years (parole after 6 months) thus halting the progress of the Nazi Party at 20.000 members in Bavaria for most of 1924. The definitive factor which classes the Beer Hall Putsch as something created by a fringe irritant party was the fact that this was just another Putsch, confined to a small region/province and with only a handful of support thus emphasising the fact that the party was still working at a low level in comparison to the rest of the Weimar republic’s political system whilst holding very little strength on the