| Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy | 
 enlarge | Author: E. Weitz
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Category: Book
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Avg. Customer Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 84425
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 432
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.8
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 5.9 x 1.5
ISBN: 069101695X
Dewey Decimal Number: 943.085
EAN: 9780691016955
ASIN: 069101695X
Publication Date: October 1, 2007
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
Portrait of a fractured society. January 30, 2008
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
The theme of this book is that the shattering of the structure of Imperial Germany led to an explosion of innovation and creativity, an optimism that it was possible to create a better and freer world; but that the unbroken old elites in business, the churches, the judiciary and the army hated all these changes, blamed them on the Republic and consistently undermined it where they could. The rhetoric of the conservative Right was widespread long before the Nazis became significant, that indeed `the Nazis invented nothing ideologically or rhetorically'. The crisis of the Depression and the inability of the Reichstag to deal with it brought the conservative and the radical Right together. And although Weitz says a few times at the end that there was nothing inevitable about Hitler coming to power, that it was `the result of a small group of powerful men around the president who schemed to place Adolf Hitler in power', the impression left by the book as a whole is that the tensions inside the Weimar Republic between progress and reaction, tradition and modernity, was so intense that the Republic was doomed almost from the start. One baleful symptom was the militarization of the parties on the left and the right, always ready to march in demonstrations.
The two outside chapters are political. The opening chapter is good on analysis but amazingly sketchy in parts of the narrative: the Spartacist Revolt of 1919 receives the briefest of mentions; the upheavals in Bavaria (1918/1919) none at all; the Beer Hall Putsch and the Communist rebellions in Saxony and Thuringia (1923) are dismissed in two sentences (p.102): `Communists attempted a revolution; the Nazis attempted a march on Berlin to seize power. Both were fiascos.' The concluding chapter is a better narrative account of the death-throes of the Weimar Republic, although I think that Weitz is unduly harsh on Chancellor Brüning, who, he says, `happily deployed' Article 84 of the Constitution which enabled him to govern by emergency decree, because he `wanted to use his office to overthrow the Republic and create some kind of authoritarian political system.' With the Reichstag unable to agree on any measures to deal with the economic crisis, what else could he have done? Of course Brüning wanted a reform of the Constitution, but that is not the same as wanting to overthrow the Republic, and he was after all overthrown because he banned the SA and the SS when Schleicher and Papen wanted to negotiate with the Nazis.
The seven chapters in the middle deal with the social and cultural history of the period. The social history is well done. The role of women - the hardships they suffered during the three great crises (post-war hunger, inflation, and depression) but also their liberation is frequently underlined. The impact of radio, cinema, the gramophone and photography are described in great detail (though those chapters would have applied to most countries in Western Europe and the Soviet Union. The popularity of the Tiller Girls in Germany disturbed the journalist Siegfried Kracauer: `they joined together his two nightmare visions: Prussian militarism and the American factory'. No mention that the Tiller Girls originated in England.) The sexual liberation, though also not confined to Germany, was perhaps greater in Germany - or rather, in Berlin - than it was in other countries, and the cult of nudity and the Body Beautiful was also more pronounced in Germany than elsewhere. The conservative forces, especially the churches, hated all that and blamed the Republic.
The chapters devoted to the arts consist of sometimes rather long essays devoted to a handful of individuals whom Weitz considers representative of the wish to break completely with the traditions of the past. In architecture they are Walter Gropius and the Bauhaus, Erich Mendelsohn, and Bruno Taut; in the theatre Berthold Brecht, also breaking with the traditional forms of theatre and opera. In painting there is Hannah Höch's Dadaism: her collages represent `the cacophony of modern life' and her provocatively trans-gender and trans-racial images predictably caused outrage among conservatives; but there is very little on German expressionist artists apart from the comment that they expressed both the jagged anxiety of the period and also its frenetic joy. There are no examples given of the Neue Sachlichkeit, though the school is referred to. Only in literature is more attention given to conservatives: Thomas Mann is shown as nostalgic about the culture which existed before the age of the masses; Martin Heidegger as expressing his distaste for modernism, technology, the mass culture that stifled authenticity, and the frantic life of the cities by isolating himself in his hut in the forest. Oswald Spengler and Ernst Jünger are shown as using a vocabulary which the Nazis picked up.
I think the book is excessively repetitive, but it does bring out well that life in the Weimar Republic was more fractured and more damaged by the three monumental crises in its short life than were other societies in the West. But I think that, like so many other historians of the Weimar period, Weitz is in danger of reading history backwards from the Nazi period. Perhaps the judgment in 1926 of an outsider, a Harvard specialist on Germany called Kuno Francke, was superficial: `Germany is running with a smoothness as if it has been used to republican government for generations'. Not much awareness of a fractured society there!
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