Karl Dietrich Bracher
Karl Dietrich Bracher (13 March 1922 – 19 September 2016) was a German political scientist and historian of the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany. Born in Stuttgart, Bracher was awarded a Ph.D. in the classics by the University of Tübingen in 1948 and subsequently studied at Harvard University from 1949 to 1950. During World War II, he served in the Wehrmacht and was captured by the Americans while serving in Tunisia in 1943. He was then held as a POW in Camp Concordia, Kansas. Bracher taught at the Free University of Berlin from 1950 to 1958 and at the University of Bonn since 1959. In 1951 Bracher married Dorothee Schleicher, the niece of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. They had two children.
Karl Dietrich Bracher
In the introduction to his 1982 book "Zeit der Ideologien" ("Age of Ideologies"), Bracher wrote: "When the realization of high-pitched political expectations was found to come up against certain limits, there was a revival of the confrontation, especially painful in Germany and one that was generally believed to have been overcome". Bracher attacked Communism under the grounds that its claim to have "scientifically" worked out the laws of history was the source of "its great strength vis-à-vis supporters and sympathizers but also its extremely intolerant and coercive character.” Bracher wrote: “Communist policies are something mystical, something surpassing the rational capability of the individual, something fully accessible only to the collective and its leadership,” which promoted itself as “an exclusively informed elite.” As part of his critique of Communism, Bracher wrote:"No limits were to that elite’s supranational competence…. It is this moral and intellectual totalitarianism pseudo-scientifically justified and politically enforced, that represents both the strength and the weakness of communist ideology. It was able to bring salvation from doubts in a modern complex world, but it was bound, time and again, to come into conflict with the facts of that complexity.”