When Culture Follows, Not Leads: The Case of Exogenous Democratization in Germany (1890-1945)

Germany's recent history has been characterized by economic and political crises, fascism, and two global wars. While obstacles existed until the final establishment of democracy, the underlying cultural preferences remain understudied. Here, we compiled a corpus of German fiction and analyzed the expression of cooperation and tolerance, replicating previous studies on democratization. We developed bag-of-words dictionaries measuring multiple facets of cooperation and tolerance to track their diachronic trends through 1890 and 1945 across the German Empire, Weimar Republic, and Third Reich. We tested whether cooperation and tolerance 1) increased over time, 2) preceded democratic shifts, and 3) followed socioeconomic performance (proxied by real wages and GDP per Capita). Generally, those hypotheses were not confirmed. First, while Openness increased over time, other proxies did not. Second, unlike shifts in England and France, cultural changes followed (not preceded) regime transitions, with Sympathy increasing during democracy and Prosociality and Positivity increasing during autocracy. Finally, while real wages and GDPpc may predict Sympathy and Prosociality, these results lacked robustness. We discuss how these findings might have been impacted by the exogenous character of Weimar’s democratization, the world wars, and data availability bias due to censorship and a lack of digitized literature from the Nazi-era.