Red Saxony: Online Supplement

Red Saxony book cover

This Online Supplement provides readers of Red Saxony with maps, tables, charts, and illustrations that could not be included in the book’s print edition due to their large format or use of colour. These items are complementary to the book: their historical context and significance are explained there.

Red Saxony image

Red Saxony: Election Battles and the Spectre of Democracy in Germany, 1860-1918, by James Retallack, was published by Oxford University Press in 2017. It illuminates the reciprocal rela­tion­ship between political mod­ernization and authoritarian­ism in Ger­many. Using a regional lens to rethink older assump­tions about Germany’s changing pol­i­ti­cal culture, the book focuses on contem­porary Ger­mans’ perceptions of elector­al fairness. It high­lights semi-democratic voting systems in which a general and equal suffrage (for the Reichs­tag) was combined with limited and unequal ones for local and regional parliaments. Red Saxony illustrates how Ger­mans grew to fear the spectre of democracy. Certainly twists and turns lay ahead, yet that fear made it easier for Hitler and the Nazis to win elections in the 1920s and to entomb German democracy in 1933.

Red Saxony map

Copyright © 2017 James Retallack. Some rights reserved.  Except where otherwise noted, content on this Open Access site, Online Supplement to Red Saxony: Election Battles and the Spectre of Democracy in Germany, 1860-1918 by James Retallack, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License, which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The written permission of James Retallack must be obtained for commercial re-use.

creative commons 4.0 international license

Principal Investigator: James Retallack

Project Website: Red Saxony: Online Supplement