History Thread: Revisiting Weimar (original) (raw)

In the past few years, it’s become a cliche to compare our present predicament with the Weimar Republic. Germany’s first experiment with democracy produced an era that, despite its relatively brief existence (1918 through 1933), has presented us with indelible, contradictory images: a culture of artistic expression, sexual experimentation, political turmoil and violence, heady excitement and impending dread. If the average person is only familiar with Weimar through splashy cultural depictions (from Cabaret to the recent Babylon Berlin TV series), they’re at least no more reductive than the pundit who sees echoes of Gustav Stresemann and Rosa Luxemburg, Hindenburg and Hitler in every political crisis.

Recent writers have often honed in on specific aspects of the Republic. We’ve seen books in the past few years centered around the November Revolution which ousted Kaiser Wilhelm, ended World War I and concluded in violence between the social democrat government and communists hoping for a Bolshevik-style rising; two volumes about the tumultuous year of 1923, which began with French troops occupying the coal-rich Ruhr and ended with Adolf Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch in Munich, a clownish failure that elevated Hitler to a national celebrity; other books have tackled the nightmare inflation, which reduced marks to waste paper. We’ve seen at least four books reconstructing the political maneuvers where conservatives brought Hitler into the government, a familiar story with obvious resonance to fascist-weary readers.

Life is a cabaret

Two recent books attempt to put Weimar’s existence in a larger perspective, beyond its obvious highpoints and surface glitz. Frank McDonough’s The Weimar Years: Rise and Fall, 1918-1933 is as utilitarian as its title, a detailed, often plodding political history of the Republic, while Harald Janger’s Vertigo: The Rise and Fall of Weimar Germany is a more exciting, culturally focused work. Neither achieves the “definitive” status promised by their respective blurbs, but taken together they give the reader a fair overview of how the Weimar Republic functioned, or failed to function.

In The Weimar Years McDonough, who has written two similarly dense volumes on the Third Reich, lays out the Republic’s history, breaking it down into year-by-year chapters. After the chaos of early 1918, the Republic struggled to reconcile its reformist impulses with the needs of a functioning state. Under the Premiership of Friedrich Ebert, a “conservative socialist,” the government crafted a remarkably liberal constitution that established universal franchise to all over 20, codified legal qualities across gender and class lines, abolished the aristocracy, and liberalized German laws. But one observer archly branded the Weimar Constitution (so named because it was signed in the city of Weimar) “a document in search of a people,” more idealistic than reality permitted.

For set against these early achievements were setbacks and humiliations. Starvation caused by the Allied blockade (which continued for months after the Armistice), the punitive terms of the Treaty of Versailles, onerous reparations payments by the vengeful allies, and massive economic turmoil made life painfully difficult. Regular political violence began almost immediately, and continued regularly through 1923; right wing groups alone murdered 354 political leaders in the Republic’s first five years. Revolutionaries from the Spartacists of 1919 to communists in Munich and workers in the Ruhr challenged the Republic from the Left. In search of illusory “order,” Ebert and his cabinet (notably Defense Minister Gustav Noske, branded the “Bloodhound”) supplemented the military with bands of demobbed veterans dubbed the Freikorps, who suppressed leftists without mercy.

But the political Right was a greater, more persistent threat. Both mainstream conservatives and nationalist fringe groups grasped onto the myth that the “November criminals” had “stabbed” Germany in the back, a blatant re-rewriting of history (the Kaiser’s generals in fact had insisted upon both his surrender and abdication) that delegitimized the Republic. A toxic brew of revanchist nationalism and anti-Semitism became animating forces on the right. The military, humiliated by defeat and the restriction of the postwar Reichswehr to 100,000 men, remained only conditionally loyal to the Republic; the Republic encouraged this by treating the Freikorps as an auxiliary force to skirt around Versailles. Businessmen like media mogul Alfred Hugenberg openly parlayed with far right groups, even as they profited from hyperinflation.

Thunder from the Right: the Freikorps during the Kapp Putsch

McDonough is often quite good at dramatizing the era’s major events. He provides solid reconstructions of the fevered Spartacist rising led by a reluctant Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, and 1920’s Kapp Putsch, an attempt by the Freikorps to impose a right wing dictatorship which was stopped not by Ebert’s hapless government or the military (“There can be no question of sending the Reichswehr to fight these people,” General Hans von Seeckt told Ebert), but a socialist-led general strike. He’s also effective when dramatizing acts of violence, like the June 1922 assassination of Foreign Minister Walter Rathenau by right wing terrorists. And if the accounts of Stresemann’s diplomatic achievements (notably the Treaty of Locarno, which solidified the postwar borders and eased reparations payments) and Heinrich Bruning’s futile efforts to relieve the Depression sometimes feel dry, they’re at least lucid, bringing clarity to understanding the often-dizzying collapse of governments and coalitions.

But McDonough’s approach has obvious downsides. The schematic structure sags between highlights, often reading like a box score of cabinet reshuffles and shifting political coalitions. He interjects occasional cultural asides (a mini-profile of sex researcher Magnus Hirschfeld here, an account of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis there) rather haphazardly into this narrative; such passages read like sidebars in a textbook. McDonough does not provide some of his more controversial assertions (that Weimar-era courts were not prejudiced towards the political right, for instance) room to breathe. And for all his scholarly pretense, McDonough often relies on secondary sources, such as outdated popular histories by John Toland and Joachim Fest; his reliance on Lothar Lachan’s The Hidden Hitler leads to a crass insinuation, repeated several times, that Hitler was a closeted homosexual.

Harald Jahner’s Vertigo is comparatively light on politics, providing a combination of cultural history and reconstruction of how individual Germans experienced the era. The opening chapter on the November Revolution focuses largely on the perspective of the Freikorps recruits who crushed the Spartacus movement. The latter were by no means wholly representative of Germany’s servicemen, many of whom returned from war maimed and demoralized; but they weren’t insignificant either. Sporting swastikas and recognizing only their own authority, the Freikorps combined a recognizable brew of nationalist pride and male rage; the Republic’s decision to commission such groups was fatally self-destructive. Once unleashed, these forces could scarcely be contained; the Freikorps engaged in semi-authorized free-booting expeditions to the new Baltic Republics, where they looted and killed as if emulating the old Teutonic Knights. No coincidence that many future Nazi leaders (Alfred Rosenberg, Ernst Rohm, Rudolf Hess) served in such units.

Jahner’s book is most engaging, though, in its cultural excursions. We’re reintroduced to the hurly-burly of ’20s Berlin, but offered a number of unique perspectives on it. German women celebrated an increased degree of independence, through self-expression and employment. Not only did more German women go to work during the Weimar era, but more worked in specifically professional secretarial and typing jobs of the sort that, in that era particularly, required skill and intellect. Thus the typewriter became a widely recognized symbol of women’s independence, as much as the era’s fashionable bob haircut. The androgynous dress, obsession with body culture and more tolerant sexual attitudes provided a useful shorthand for the period’s dizzying amount of personal freedom, experimentation and conscious forging of identities.

High times in Berlin

Similarly, Jahner discusses the era’s double-edged sword of sexual liberation, which encouraged experimentation and freedom while also enabling bad actors (a film producer presides over a bacchanalia which the author compares to Harvey Weinstein) and generating backlash among conservatives. Another passage discuss the emergence of a distinct Afro-German subculture, made up of both expatriates like Josephine Baker who preferred Weimar’s relative freedom to Jim Crow America, and immigrants from Germany’s former colonies seeking a proper home. The ability of Jews to mingle in such circles, tolerance of same-sex relationships, and even the semi-legitimization of sex work for both men and women marked Weimar as ahead of its time. While Jahner discusses the era’s artists (Otto Dix), architectural achievements (the Bauhaus school) and literature (Bertolt Brecht and Alfred Doblin), his chapters mostly keep an individual perspective. Not all Germans were bohemian by nature, but many found the rich culture scene a welcome distraction.

Of course, such sights and sounds were mostly found in the cities. Then as ever, conservatives easily contrast the debauchery of “Red Berlin” with the ideals of rural life: hardworking “real Germans” against the androgynous, amoral city dwellers, many Jewish or Black, in a painfully familiar refrain. Jahner discusses groups like the Wandervogel, a widespread phenomenon of young men and boys who organized hikes and nature retreats to escape urban congestion. Such groups celebrated traditional values, such as a connection to nature or emotional folk songs, which proved to have a cross-ideological appeal. Not only the Right found the bustle of modern life exhausting, and appeals to the pastoral proved a welcome tonic to those tired of city life. Still, it’s not hard to see how such attitudes contributed to a sense that life was better before the Republic.

Springtime with the Wandervogel

Though Jahner’s book isn’t as detailed as McDonough in probing politics, what insights he provides are often more incisive. One chapter explores a topic McDonough unaccountably slights: the bias of Weimar’s judiciary towards right wing criminals. Killers and putschists were given lenient sentences if their motives were deemed honorable (one scholar demonstrated that right wingers convicted of political crimes only served an average of four months in prison); many judges made clear their belief that the Republic was inherently illegitimate. This reached its zenith during a 1924 libel suit where President Ebert sued a far-right journalist for calling him a traitor. Astonishingly, the judge ruled in Ebert’s favor while also claiming that technically he had committed treason, by organizing a strike during the war. Under such stewardship, it’s little wonder that the edifice of Weimar proved so unstable.

Both authors evince an appreciation for Weimar’s leaders for trying to stabilize democracy in the face of such obstacles. That they’d celebrate Gustav Stresemann, the Foreign Minister and Chancellor, is no surprise; Stresemann’s economic and diplomatic achievements did much to stabilize Germany and restore its credibility on the world stage, even if his death in 1929 left the country’s fundamental issues unresolved. Wilhelm Marx’s two periods as chancellor oversaw the curbing of hyperinflation and Germany’s acceptance into the League of Nations; the disillusion of his “grand coalition” between various moderate parties did much to hasten democracy’s demise.

Gustav Stresemann: making the Republic work

Surprisingly, Jahner also defends Friedrich Ebert, the Republic’s beleaguered first president from November 1918 until his death in 1925. Ebert was despised by the Right as leader of the “November Criminals,” hated by the Left for crushing the Communists, still viewed today as an ineffectual bungler. Jahner argues rather that Ebert made the best of a bad hand, tamping down extremism while trying to create a functional republic. All three were reluctant republicans (Stresemann called himself a “monarchist at heart,” while Ebert said of the Kaiser’s abdication that “I hate it like sin”) and committed their share of mistakes, but once committed to the cause did everything within their power to make Weimar work. Both Jahner and McDonough argue that they deserve far more credit for their efforts; a reader might instead conclude that in a volatile climate like interwar Germany, moderation has its limits.

Friedrich Ebert: the despised moderate

Ultimately, Weimar needed more than pragmatic management to survive. McDonough takes the line that the Republic’s ever-shifting governments eroded popular faith in democracy before it had a chance to take root. In contrast, Jahner places blame squarely on President Paul von Hindenburg, the “wooden titan” who assumed office in 1925; far from the senile figurehead often depicted by historians, Vertigo makes him and his henchmen (the odious Franz von Papen and creepy Kurt von Schleicher) into villains whose habitual exercise of power turned Germany into a dictatorship in all but name, years before Hitler came anywhere near the Chancellorship. Then again, as McDonough notes, even Ebert regularly employed Article 48 of the Constitution (enabling the President to rule by decree in case of “emergency”) to override legislative deadlocks; one wonders, then, how stable democracy was in the first place.

Both books have unfortunate lacunae. McDonough, for all his exhaustive political coverage, provides only a scant overview of the hyperinflation crisis, and also downplays the impact of the Great Depression on Hitler’s rise to power. Jahner, despite his rich explorations of art and shifting gender politics, only briefly discusses queer sexuality, and only passing discussion of the golden age of German cinema (notably Marlene Dietrich’s early career, and Leni Riefenstahl’s The Blue Light). Neither author gives much shrift to communism, with Jahner particularly harsh towards the utopian dreams of Rosa Luxemburg and the unwillingness of communists to ally with Social Democrats. And both books’ overview structure prevents the fine grain detail of a more focused work: neither spends much time on Germany’s regional irruptions, notably Bavaria’s brief experiment with communism and its welter of far-right groups (from Greater German chauvinists to Bavarian separatists) that birthed the Nazis, which receive far better coverage in Volker Ullrich’s recent Germany 1923.

The Gravediggers

Reading about Weimar Germany is an edifying experience, but also a wearying one. While it’s hard to argue that history is inevitable, in hindsight Weimar appears a foredoomed interlude between the Second and Third Reichs. Both the Left and Right viewed the Republic as worthy of destruction; only a fragile coalition of centrist parties kept it functioning as long as it did. Yet the Far Left’s power was largely ephemeral and, after 1919, more of a minor disruption; while the Far Right became increasingly legitimized, finding common cause with mainstream conservatives even before the latter welcomed them into power. It only took the Nazis a few months to destroy everything that Ebert, Stresemann and others spent years working for; perhaps democracy was introduced too fast, or under too chaotic of circumstances to work. Then again, recent years have shown that countries with far stronger democratic systems are equally vulnerable to the forces that brought down Germany’s first Republic.