#weimar-republic — Public Fediverse posts

I've just been writing about "Vertigo: The Rise and Fall of Weimar Germany" by Harald Jähnner.

One author discussed there is Helmuth Plessner, with a focus on his 1924 "Grenzen der Gemeinschaft" (Limits of Community).

Katja Haustein wrote about Plessner in a TLS review (24/4/20) of his "Political Anthropology":

>>In Political Anthropology (Macht und menschliche Natur), written in 1931, Plessner discusses the anthropological origins of the human tendency to give in to authoritarian forms of government. Closely linked to his earlier and more accessible essay, The Limits of Community (1924), the book reads as a passionate warning against the rise of social and political radicalism that so exhausted the Weimar Republic. Much of Plessner's argument is based on what Richard Sennett has called the "tyrannies of intimacy". Plessner claimed that the central problem of modern subjectivity was not a growing distance between individuals, but, on the contrary, its disappearance. He curbed widespread expectations that promote politicized conceptions of community (Gemeinschaft) as a space in which alienation would dissolve. He attacked the idealization of a "seamless togetherness" tainted by nationalist colours, and defended the idea of society (Gesellschaft) as a space in which distance affords man his dignity. <<

I've got to read some Plessner!

Image: Wikipedia

#HelmuthPlessner #Philosophy #SocialTheory #Germany #WeimarRepublic

I've recently read "Vertigo: The Rise and Fall of Weimar Germany" by Harald Jähner.

Specialists with a good knowledge of the political history of interwar Germany will probably agree with the criticisms of leading historian Richard Evans in his 29/11/ 24 TLS review, in which he notes the failure of the book to address important aspects of the republic's politics such as the nature of the constitution.

Evans goes on to criticise "Vertigo" as being overly focused on Berlin and its culture of modernity and its neglect of rural and small town Germany.

For a cultural history, though, this emphasis on Berlin is justified, because that metropolis was offering novel aspirations, norms, and ways of living for the country as a whole, even if the reaction to that agenda in much of rural Germany was one of suspicion, resentment, and finally hatred. One rural commentator Jähner quotes noted with bitterness the exodus of women to the city, "the mass grave of the German people", attracted as they were by "greed, by pleasure seeking, by hollow noise in every area of life, by noisy oriental Jewish nonsense in state politics, department stores and theatres."

I would guess that the these seductive possibilities were made known throughout the German speaking world by the mostly Berlin based media of cinema and the illustrated press. Even if the overwhelming majority of Germans neither actively participated in the new forms of art and entertainment flowering in Berlin nor experimented with new metropolitan practices and presentations in sex and gender, the very existence of this new culture could not do other than transform cultures beyond the metropolis, even if only by introducing within them a self-conscious note of antiurban antimodernity.

Jähner, a journalist, has a good feel for both aspects of everyday life that might pass unnoticed by too many historians, such as the yoyo craze of 1932, and also for the disparate and sometimes internally contradictory emotions, moods, and feelings underlying the republic's culture.

Although "Vertigo" is neither comprehensive nor unquestionable in its treatment of Weimar Germany , it is a rich and thoroughly readable resource for non-Germanists like me, and notable for its determination to treat the culture of the republic as worthy of examination and perhaps celebration in its own right, as opposed to being merely an interlude leading to the advent of the Third Reich.

#Books #History #Germany #WeimarRepublic #Vertigo #20thCentury #InterwarHistory #Modernity #HaraldJähner #CulturalHistory

George Grosz -- Pillars Of Society -- Oil on canvas -- 1926 -- Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie

I'm probably in the company of many here in being familiar with this pictorial indictment of the capitalist Germany of the mid twenties.

I can't make up my mind whether the unforgettable imagery is or was politically effective as a powerful agent and sustainer of radicalization, or whether, on the other hand, it is or was so overwhelmingly and indiscriminately polemical as to leave viewers in a state of general disgust about their society and ultimately in a state of demobilising despair about the possibility of change for the better.

#Art #Painting #PoliticalArt
#GeorgeGrosz #GermanArt #20thCenturyArt #NeueSachlichkeit
#WeimarRepublic

The Jeweller Karl Krall -- Otto Dix -- 1923 -- Oil on canvas -- Kunst und Museumsverien im Von der Heydt-Museum, Wuppertal.

According to the 2006 exhibition catalogue "Glitter and Doom: German Portraits from the 1920s", Krall was not only, as a chamber music amateur, musical, but was also "musical", to use the term used in 1920s British English to describe gay men.

The catalogue entry suggests that beneath Krall's jacket, "there must be a corset that is much too tight. Severe discomfort makes the blood rush to Krall's face, turning it purple-red with bluish accents. Veins on his forehead seem ready to pop."

As with so many of the other portraits, I find myself fascinated by this picture. Is Dix's depiction of the hour glass figured jeweller a frank depiction of Krall's style in foundation garments, or does it function as the painter's possibly contemptuous verdict on male homosexuality?

#Art #Painting #Portrait #OttoDix #GermanArt #20thCenturyArt #NeueSachlichkeit #KarlKrall #Gay #Homosexual #Homophobia #Corset #TightWaisting #WeimarRepublic

The archetypal image of the #WeimarRepublic is one of political instability, economic crisis and debauched hedonism.

The cliché is being challenged.

⌛️ Last chance to read this archive article for free

https://www.historytoday.com/archive/feature/was-weimar-republic-failed-state

I've recently finished Gabriele Tergit's 1931 "Käsebier Takes Berlin" (Käsebier erobert den Kurfürstendamm) in Sophie Duvernoy's translation.

I've got mixed feelings about the novel.

On the one hand, the organization of the narrative struck me as clumsy both on a large scale and in certain details. Overall, the journalistic satire that dominates the first half does not fit well with the property speculation plot salient in the second half. At times, the abundance of characters combines with some minimal attribution of dialogue to make parts of the novel difficult to follow. I can imagine impatient readers throwing the book aside.

Yet one should resist that impatient impulse, since the novel will reward the reader who perseveres. Anybody interested in Weimar Germany in general and Berlin in particular will profit from a reading. The flip side of the abundance of characters is Tergit's multiple snapshots of the cityscapes, media, interiors, outfits, and consumer goods as the 30s begin in Berlin. This aspect of the novel invites a contrast and compare exercise with "Berlin Alexanderplatz".

Tergit's background as a journalist helped her in both in the satire of the press and also in her acute observation of social climbing and pretension. This perspicacity coupled with her talent as a maker of fiction to create the loathsome Willi Frächter. This character will not only stick in the memory but, sadly, also be all too recognizable to observers of contemporary culture.

Readers today will inevitably have the coming of Hitler in mind as the novel unfolds. Of course, the journalists' mocking use of "Heil und Sieg und fette Beute", translated as "Heil and Sieg and catch a fat one", is now tinged with an irony that Tergit could not have grasped at the time of publication, although only two years later she fled Germany after a narrow escape from the thugs of the SA.

Today, we might do well to consider the parallels between the media of our own day and Frächter's gleeful transformation of the "Berliner Rundschau":

>> What you call dumbing down, Mr. Miermann, I call blooming. <<

I'm going to give Tergit's 1951 family saga "The Effingers" a try. The idea of a "Jewish 'Buddenbrooks' " I find hard to resist. I'm not expecting her to be another Thomas Mann, but it's not unreasonable to hope that her novelist's technique had developed in the two decades following "Käsebier Takes Berlin".

#Books #Bookstodon #GabrieleTergit #KäsebierTakesBerlin #KäsebierErobertDenKurfürstendamm
#Fiction #Novel #GermanLiterature #Berlin #20thCenturyLiterature #1930sLiterature #WeimarRepublic #Newspapers #Press #Media #Journalism

https://www.nyrb.com/products/kasebier-takes-berlin

The Weimar Republic Shaped the 20th Century. Can Today’s Leaders Avoid Its Fate? – The New York Times

Weimar Dispatch

A Failed State Shaped the 20th Century. Can Today’s Leaders Avoid Its Fate?

A fragile democracy, the Weimar Republic, briefly took hold in Germany before the Nazis seized power. Now, Weimar’s collapse is seen as a warning.

Listen to this article · 6:36 min Learn more

By Clay Risen, Clay Risen reported from Weimar, Germany, and spoke to historians about the Weimar Republic’s continued relevance.

• Jan. 12, 2026

In the winter of 1919, the leaders of the newly founded German Republic, having overthrown Emperor Wilhelm II at the end of World War I, went looking for a city to hold a constitutional convention. The delegates quickly settled on the small city of Weimar, which was centrally located and boasted a theater large enough to hold them all.

The resulting document, approved on Aug. 11, 1919, became the republic’s guidebook for over a decade, until Adolf Hitler dissolved the Constitution in 1933. The city, in turn, gave its name to the era: the Weimar Republic.

Today that brief stretch of time between an emperor and a dictator is memorialized by the House of the Weimar Republic, which sits across a wide plaza from the stately theater where the constitutional delegates met.

This small museum has an outsize mission: to tell the full story of the Weimar era, and to remind people that its lessons remain relevant — not only in Germany, where the far-right Alternative for Germany party, or A.f.D., is on the rise, but in a growing number of suddenly fragile democracies.

“We never have trouble raising funds,” said Michael Dreyer, the museum’s president and a political scientist at the nearby University of Jena. “Whenever the A.f.D. comes into the news, politicians call wanting to know if we are turning into Weimar.”

Birgit Witt, who works for her family’s driving school in Weimar, said she always encourages visitors to stop by the museum “because it’s so important right now to understand why people voted for the Nazi Party and Hitler back then.”

Weimar is a political touchstone in political circles in the United States, too. Critics of the Trump administration frequently invoke its precedent as an example of democratic backsliding. “Welcome to Weimar 2.0,” read a headline on an article in Foreign Policy last year by the historian Robert D. Kaplan.

Conservatives, in turn, have also found a different reason to dredge up Weimar — they use the era to give historical weight to its warnings about left-wing violence: At a White House meeting in October, the far-right activist Jack Posobiec claimed that the antifa movement had its roots in the Weimar Republic.

Coincidentally, even as Weimar has re-emerged in political debates, historians’ understanding of how it fell apart — and what that collapse means today — has changed.

After World War II, German politicians and academics, looking to absolve everyone except the Nazis for the country’s descent into tyranny, denounced the republic as a failure from the start because of what they said was a fatally flawed Constitution. For many, “Weimar” became a byword for disaster. Nothing, historians at the time concluded, could have saved Germany from Nazism.

Now a different consensus is emerging. A new book, translated into English last year as “Fateful Hours,” argues that Weimar was not brought down by some original flaw, but the determination of anti-democratic elites to destroy it — and the failure of the liberal establishment to stop them.

“The Republic’s failure was not predetermined from the outset,” said the book’s author, Volker Ullrich. “There was no automatic path to ruin.”

Constitution…

Dr. Dreyer agreed, adding that the Weimar Constitution was robust and progressive. It promised universal suffrage and comprehensive health insurance. It included tools that should in theory have blocked an authoritarian takeover, including the power to ban extremist parties.

Critics single out the Constitution’s Article 48, which gave the president power to rule by emergency decree. But the article also gave the German Parliament the power to veto such a declaration.

“The Constitution certainly had flaws,” said Kathleen Canning, a historian at Rice University in Texas. “But it survived a lot of crises,” she said, including hyperinflation and coup attempts.

Weimar was especially challenged by the onset of the Great Depression in 1929. When voters blamed their struggles on the left-wing Social Democrats, the largest party, conservatives took advantage.

And yet, Dr. Ullrich said, even economic catastrophe was in itself not enough to bring down the republic, which survived almost four more years.

“Many astute contemporaries were convinced that Hitler’s rise to power had been halted and his movement was in an unstoppable decline,” he said. “His eventual rise to power on Jan. 30, 1933, was the result of a sinister power struggle behind the scenes.”

Anti-democratic forces on both the right and the far left refused to work with the Social Democrats, and instead pushed through austerity measures that undermined the country’s safety net.

Editor’s Note: Featured image at top generated by WP AI. –DrWeb

Continue/Read Original Article Here: The Weimar Republic Shaped the 20th Century. Can Today’s Leaders Avoid Its Fate? – The New York Times

I'm certain the calm voices in the room were certain it would all blow over soon, and the glorious Weimar Republic would emerge from the rubble caused by their obviously stupid and incompetent opponents who were simply taking advantage of temporary public outrage.

"Until the end of World War II in Europe in 1945, the Nazis governed Germany under the pretense that all the extraordinary measures and laws they implemented were constitutional; notably, there was never an attempt to replace or substantially amend the Weimar Constitution. Nevertheless, Hitler's seizure of power (Machtergreifung) had effectively ended the republic, replacing its constitutional framework with Führerprinzip, the principle that 'the Führer's word is above all written law.' ". - Wikipedia

Point to it on a map today. The hashtags are paired, for your convenience.

I despise the 2-party system that set us up to knock us down for the billionaire class.

#Germany #America
#Nazis #Republicans
#Hitler #Trump
#WeimarRepublic #Democrats
#Yanks #Nobody

@SherBeareth

@SherBeareth

#USPol #History #US #Military
A🧵

#HistoryRhymes:

*Lessons from the #WeimarRepublic--#TheGreatPurge*:

(1/n)

👉I know that at this point in time, this might sound cracy, but having an emergency surgery or landing for these senior officers before reaching VA on Tuesday might be a good idea.👈

Why? B/C of what happened in #1933 in #Germany. Quickly after his power grab, #Hitler aligned all social strata, including, OFC, the #Military:..

@bpb

...In August of 1934, #Hitler officially had himself confirmed as "Führer and Reich Chancellor," 👉thereby dictatorially combining the offices of head of state, head of government, commander-in-chief, and supreme judge /sole chief justice.👈

More detailed information and descriptions of the transition from the
#WeimarRepublic to the #NationalSocialist #Dictatorship can be found here:

#ReinhardSturm: Destruction of #Democracy 1930-1933

#HansUlrichThamer: The...

@democratsabroad
@indivisibleteam

#USpol #Legal #Resist

*#5AlarmFire called by #LizOyer, former Pardon #Attorney 4the #DepartmentOfJustice*

What's been happening @ the #DOJ since the beginning of the #TrumpCoup sounds 2 me *exactly* line the #Alignment (#Gleichschaltung) of the #Justice System at the end of the #WeimarRepublic and the beginning of the 3rd Reich.

#Trump has almost every in place to start (mass) prosecutions of political opponents + personal enemies:
https://youtube.com/shorts/ZwC8BEUvvEA

@proscience @SaanichGuy

*The Unhealthy Alliances of Industry and #Fascism*

(1/n)

#History does not repeat itself, but it surely does rhyme:

In the #WeimarRepublic, it was the heavy-industry and media mogul #Hugenberg that did pave the way for #Hitler and the #NationalSocialists:

https://mastodon.social/@HistoPol/113987420992520717

Whereas the millionaires' involvement in national politics was quite haphazard in 1920s + '30s #Germany, it has been a a Chinese-style, really long-range...

@bitboxer @fenkt @MrLaCave

@jrredho
#WeimarRepublic #DEhistory #ThirdReich

a🧵

This is, in principle, correct, but the context is important:

1) In a (pluralistic) #ParliamentaryDemocracy, a #CoalitionGovernment is the norm, as they reflect society much better than #WinnerTakesAll/ #FirstPastThePost systems (e. g. US, UK.)

2.) At the beginning of the #GreatDepression, in 1930, the last such government collapsed on the vital question of unemployment-insurance reform:

@realSiegfried

@realSiegfried @jrredho

#DEhistory

As many either never knew or don't remember anymore how #Hitler and his party, the #NSDAP, came to lead the federal government, I've just written a "prequel" to my thread on the Death of Democracy in the #WeimarRepublic, based on an official document:

https://mastodon.social/@HistoPol/114868019006965247

@bpb

*#DEhistory The Rise of #Fascism in #Germany*

[My amended translation of the text by Germany’s Federal Agency for Political Education (#BPB) a 🧵 ]

👉 *#Hindenburg appoints #Hitler as Reich Chancellor
Editorial*
[How the first German Democracy was lost in the #WeimarRepublic]👈

https://www.bpb.de/kurz-knapp/hintergrund-aktuell/263635/hindenburg-ernennt-hitler-zum-reichskanzler/

On January 30, 1933, Reich President #PaulVonHindenburg appointed the then leader (“#Führer”) of the #NSDAP, #AdolfHitler as Reich Chancellor...

📰 🖥️ 📈 Excited to present at @dh2025 today with my talk “What is Democracy? Scalable Reading Newspapers of the Weimar Republic.”

My project combines digital methods and close reading to analyze how democracy was discussed in historical newspapers from Weimar Germany - a scalable-reading workflow. Looking forward to the discussion and the other talks in session "SP-34".

⏰ 4:00pm (GMT+1)
🔗 https://shorturl.at/4xZPv

**#DH2025 #DigitalHistory** **#DigitalHumanities** **#DH** **#WeimarRepublic**

#DEhistory

@jrredho
This is not quite correct:
As I've sumed up in my thread on the 1933 elections of the late #WeimarRepublic...

https://mastodon.social/@HistoPol/110097936019841276

...the #NSDAP did not *yet* achieve a majority in the final (somewhat) free elections of February, 1933.
They did so ever after abolishing #Democracy in the November elections: the electorate could only vote for a "unity list: "

Here is a chart of their election results:

https://mastodon.social/@HistoPol/113909298230713562

@realSiegfried

@xankarn
#Trumpism is the #US mutation of #Fascism
(1/n)

"The U.S. under MAGA has gone fascist."

I agree, which is why I wrote in my thread, *The Clear Shape of Things To Come During #Trump's 2nd Term In Office* in Nov. 2024,
"👉In short, this is a mostly legal coup..., the outcome can roughly be compared to the 1st #Reichstag election of 1933 in the #WeimarRepublic, but (rather skillfully in contrast, I must, alas, admit)...without the mass bullying and violence👈.."

https://mastodon.social/@HistoPol/113442326367464521

#antifa, #nazis, #weimar #history, #WeimarRepublic

Timely #review article:
Frank Biess, Weimar in the World: Transnational and Global Perspectives on Germany’s First Democracy, in: The Journal of Modern History 97 (2025) 2, https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/735412

Concluding that the “contradictory crosscurrents of Weimar’s
global situatedness sound rather familiar in the context of our own predicament at
the beginning of the twenty-first century.”

@histodons @historikerinnen

#histodons #GermanHistory #TransnationalHistory #WeimarRepublic #GlobalHistory

@Strandjunker

#MinesotaAssasinations
#USpol

(1/2)

It might look like political assassinations. That would take the US down an even darker path, as during the #WeimarRepublic.

But is it truly as it seems?

"“Law enforcement found a hit list in the #Minnesota suspect’s car that 👉contained nearly 70 names👈, a law enforcement official briefed on the matter told CNN.

The names included abortion👉 providers, pro-abortion rights advocates, and lawmakers in...

https://www.cnn.com/us/live-news/minnesota-shootings-manhunt-06-14-25?cid=ios_app