Historiography of Weimar Germany:

Doomed?  It doesn't matter!

“The Republic was brought from abroad by a wise man;  He didn't say what should be done with it: it was a republic without operating instructions." 

Comment by German novelist and essayist Alfred Döblin (1972)

A personal reflection (sorry)

When I was 16 or 17, I bought a book entitled Europe, Grandeur and Decline (1950) by AJP Taylor, and read the article: ‘Hitler’s Seizure of Power’.  Heaven knows why: at my traditional grammar school, ‘history’ ended at 1870 … at the latest!  But read it I did and, in the words we used in those days, it ‘blew my mind’. 

When I was at school, teachers told you the facts and told you the explanation; there was no ‘interpretation’.  By contrast, AJP Taylor’s essay showed me that explanations could and should be challenged – that History was about the clash of theories, and the over-turning of outdated or incorrect ideas by new, better interpretations … and why not maybe even one day by MY interpretations! 

It was a Damascene revelation and from that moment I became a questioning pain-in-the-butt to my teachers, who eventually gave up on me and left me to plough my own furrow. 

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After WWII

To historians just coming out of the horrors of WWII, there was only one question to answer about Weimar … WHY‽  How could Germany have let slip such a democratic constitution, such a vibrant social and cultural scene and such a powerful & technologically-advanced economy … to sacrifice it all on Hitler’s maniacal ambitions? 

Writing from the stability of a 300-year-old democracy, most British historians at that time tended to blame Weimar’s collapse on proportional representation, weak coalitions and backroom politicking – culminating in Hindenburg and Papen’s delusion that they could ‘use’ Hitler to keep themselves in power.  (And AJP Taylor’s idea that so inspired me?  It was the associated observation that Hitler did NOT seize power, but that “far from his hammering on a door which was closed against him, he was invited to enter by those within” – i.e.  that Weimar democracy was not defeated by Hitler’s evil genius, but was given away by weak, self-serving, stupid politicians.)

Across the Atlantic, American historians tended rather to go with a disdain that declared the German nation as a whole was ‘not ready for democracy’, but was still psychologically wedded to Wilhemine autocracy and militarism.  Many of the historians writing about Weimar in America were, in fact, German refugees who had fled there when the Nazis took over … and had lost their home, career, and future.  One historiographer summarises their depiction of the Weimar republic as a collection of ‘d’ words: doomed, degenerate, dreary, defeated and dystopic. 

For the émigré historian Fritz Stern:

"Born in defeat, humiliated by Versailles, mocked and violated by its irreconcilable enemies at home, the Weimar Republic never gained the popular acceptance which alone could have given its parliamentary system permanence, even in crisis."'

In Germany, historians had their own reasons to present a ‘doomed’ Weimar.  In West Germany, they were anxious to show that “Bonn is not Weimar” – that they had learned from the faults of the past.  In East Germany, communist writers represented the Republic as an example of how a liberal democracy betrays the workers – for the Hungarian Marxist writer György Lukács (1954), Weimar democracy was a false front imposed on the German Left in 1918 by the ‘parties standing for order’:

“… which meant in practice that as few changes as possible were made to the Wilhelmine social structure… In these circumstances it is not surprising that there very soon arose deep disappointment with democracy among the popular masses”

“A republic without republicans, a democracy without democrats” was how Lukács summed up Weimar and its demise. 

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The 1960s and 1970s ...  ish

In the 1960s and 1970s, these ideas congealed – together with Fritz Fischer’s and AJP Taylor’s ideas of a militaristic/expansionist continuity in German history, which could be traced back to the 19th century and beyond – into the idea of Sonderweg: the idea that Germany had followed a ‘special path’ which had its catastrophic outcome in Hitler. 

Such ideas were challenged by the German historian Gerhard Ritter.  Ritter had fought in the First World War, had lived in Weimar Germany, and had been involved in the bomb plot to assassinate Hitler, so he deserves to be listened to.  He interpreted the rise of Nazism, NOT as an outworking of past/old-established traditions, but as a result of the destruction of those traditions by WWI, along with the economic calamities of the 1920s which destroyed the financial independence of the educated middle classes.  For Ritter, the problem was that modern industrial individualism had supplanted the former bourgeois dominance, and the struggle for liberty and nationalism had been replaced by a struggle for a higher standard of living.  So liberalism was discarded for materialism, and proper politics for sensationalism and mass appeal – a development compounded by universal suffrage.  Ritter’s was still the narrative of a doomed Weimar, but it placed the blame on WWI and its consequences, rather than on a collective failing of the German psyche. 

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The 1980s and 1990s

The 1970s and 1980s were dominated by the ideas of the Marxist social-historians, who saw history as a consequence of underlying ‘structural’ developments.  For historians such as Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Weimar was struggling, not just with its immediate political and economic problems, but against inexorable social forces.  Wehler particularly blamed what he called the ‘elite groups’ – the powerful businessmen, estate-owners etc., whom he saw as stirring up nationalism, antisemitism and anti-democratic passions against the Republic in order to preserve their own position of influence … and in this he saw Weimar, not a a model demcracy, but as a mechanism to exclude the masses. 

Plus, on top of these broader interpretations we need to add a host of individual historians offering us up a wonderful 'ideas-bank' of their own explanations and prejudices … that Weimar Germany:

• was an “emergency construction”, a “disposable democracy”;

• suffered from “a fear of freedom” and naturally tended towards authoritarianism;

• suffered a combination of constitutional failings (notably Article 48), weak leadership, nested interest-groups and political recidivism;

• was “a gamble which stood virtually no chance of success”;

• was a hapless victim overwhelmed by extreme forces;

• was “a passive construct with little agency”;

• suffered from “a culture of defeat”;

• failed because it did not fulfil the promise of a new start for ordinary Germans;

• had a real chance of survival during the Stresemann period, but was destroyed by the Great Depression, which gave the anti-system forces their opportunity;

• was outraged and radicalised when it saw the old certainties of life undermined by big-city business and big-city morality. 

German historian Hans Mommsen (1989) regretted that Weimar Germany had ‘squandered freedom’; he blamed the middle classes who abandoned their traditional liberal attitudes, and the “extreme autism” (by which he seems to have meant lack-of-engagement) of the German public. 

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Detlev Peukert and Beyond...

A turning point in this unremitting focus on failure and weakness came in 1987, with Detlev Peukert’s book, The Crisis of Classical Modernity. 

Peukert still accepted that Weimar ‘failed’, but he saw it, not as a product of 'left-defeated-by-right' politics, but as the consequence of tensions created by the 1920s’ revolutions in technology, economics, democracy, business and management that were transforming Weimar society … and it was those transformations, he said, which historians should be focussing on. 

Peter Fritzsche (1996) summed up the significance of this for historians:

“As long as the fate of the Republic remains the emotional center of Weimar history, the widespread political mobilization of working- and middle-class Germans and the political dynamic that culminated in the Nazi victories of 1932 will remain misunderstood.  At issue in the 1920s was not simply the recovery of social stability or economic prosperity but questions of cultural value, political entitlement, and nationalist sentiment.”

Peukert’s analysis made historians realise that assessing Weimar in the shadow of 1933 simply to winkle out 'reasons-for-failure' was a hindsight-based approach which would have been alien to the people of the time, because they did not know how things would end – indeed, they did not even believe they would end badly.  In 2010 the German historian Rüdiger Graf showed how, although people in Weimar Germany used the word ‘crisis’, they did not use it in the sense that we use it today, as a presage of impending disaster, but in a much more optimistic way, as a hurdle to be overcome on the way to success. 

“Because of this use of ‘crisis’ in Weimar political discourse … Weimar's crises should be understood as the products of the people who diagnosed them and not as factors that can be used in explanations of Weimar's collapse.  In other words, historical analyses should not end by pointing at the crisis, but rather start from there.”

At the very least, explained Irish historian Anthony McElligott (2013), we now have:

“Two distinct histories which are fated to share the same space – a political contingency marred by crises and eventually deserted by its supporters; and a project which promoted at astonishing speed the modernization of Germany as a social state.”

One result of this has been a move away from over-arching monographs to specific detailed studies – the study of ‘history from below’ – which have uncovered a VERY complex set of social interactions, and some uncomfortable realisations:

• The reaction against women’s freedoms was particularly fierce because it was fuelled by misogyny;

• The Republic’s social and welfare policies were sometimes resented as an intrusion on personal freedom;

• The Weimar parliament was marked by cooperation and pragmatism, not by conflict and confrontation;

• The Army was much less opposed to the Republic than we have been led to believe;

• Article 48 has been misrepresented – it was a safety valve not a weakness;

• The Republic was not the passive victim which is often portrayed, but took vigorous actions to educate people about the benefits of democracy, and to inculcate pride in the republic;

• The Republic was not ‘liberal’ in the British sense of the word, and was in many ways ‘illiberal’;

• The cabarets were not so much a vanguard of social liberalism, as a refuge where people could be different safely;

• Far from being ‘autistically’ disengaged, people across Germany often actively engaged in politics when they felt their interests or values were in danger … which of course brought them into conflict with the government; in this sense the Republic’s political freedoms undermined the Republic;

• People – including many Social Democrats – voted Nazi, not because they were fooled by propaganda, or as a protest vote, but because they felt Nazi policies had more to offer than the Social Democrats’;

• The ‘social engineering’ of the Republic’s welfare policies, particularly in relation to women, were designed to make them conform to the Volkskörper (the good of German society) … and this prepared people for the much more socially-repressive policies of the Nazis. 

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Some Current Thinking

In 1994, American historian Mary Nolan suggested that Weimar was an experiment – that, when the 'country-they-knew' crashed and burned in 1918, Germans turned to America as a model for constructing a brand new nation … a hope which then itself crashed and burned with the Great Depression.  Other historians have seen Weimar as a period when different ‘narratives of empowerment’ competed to enrol individuals in an attempt to recreate the nation: “Class, nation, Volk … Weimar was the postwar workshop in which these more or less fierce versions of the future were constructed” (Fritzsche). 

And this approach has culminated in Sabina Becker’s book Experiment Weimar (2018), which argues that we need to reject the crisis-narrative of a descent into dictatorship, and instead appreciate the unique culture, explosive innovations and “Weimar’s central place in the development of modern culture in general”. 

Liberal democracy as a vision of the future disappeared in Germany for a while, but other notions sailed on through Nazi Germany, while yet others resurfaced after WWII, and Weimar's 'experiments' are perhaps more relevant than ever for us in our western democracies today. 

The question for historians is not: “Was Weimar doomed?”, but: “What did the Weimerians ever do for us?”