The German aristocracy in the service of the state and the fracture of 1918

1918 is undoubtedly apolitical and demographical turn for the German nobility, which loses the privileged situation it occupied in the imperial institutions. But can we talk of an aristocratic decline in the 1920s? The article aims at evaluating the position of the nobility in the State organization of the Weimar Republic, by studying successively the cases of the army, the diplomatic service and the Prussian administration. The empirical studies show that, even though the nobility is not anymore the power elite, it continues to exert an influence within these different functional elites. However, the trauma of the defeat and the revolution did not make the nobility more homogeneous, on the contrary, it increased its fragmentation. This political division is one of the elements that explains the nobility's weakness towards Nazism on the eve of the 1930s.