Even after Hitler seized power four weeks later, many of those at the coalface of German politics could not yet grasp the magnitude of what had happened. Kurt Schumacher, a Social Democratic (SPD) MP and future postwar leader of his party, dismissed the new chancellor as a merely “decorative” puppet of the reactionary media tycoon Alfred Hugenberg. Paul Dinichert, the Swiss ambassador, sent a cable home summarising the consensus at a luncheon with various Berlin dignitaries: “Well, it could have turned out worse.”
It is easy to poke fun at these misjudgments. It is a lot harder to admit that these days we often find ourselves in much the same boat. The point of rehearsing the story of the Weimar Republic in an era when the subject has already been taught to death on every school history syllabus is not just to sustain it as a cute morality tale. It is to strip away the clarity of hindsight and make us question what we think we know in the present.
Three years ago Volker Ullrich, a hugely successful German writer of popular history books, lost his wife, Gudrun, after 57 years of marriage. His latest work, Fateful Hours: The Collapse of the Weimar Republic, is dedicated to her memory. In the afterword Ullrich recounts how as a young law student in 1969 she wrote her final thesis on right-wing radicalism in West Germany, at a time when it was still possible to be shocked that the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party had only just missed the 5 per cent of the vote it needed to squeak into the Bundestag.
Today the right-wing populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party is leading in most national polls. It won the last regional election in Thuringia, where the Nazis had made their first real breakthrough in 1929, and next year is likely to win two more in Saxony-Anhalt and Mecklenburg-West Pomerania. The book is suffused with Ullrich’s sense of unsettling but elusive parallels with the present. “There is still time to prevent a slip into darkness,” he writes in the afterword. “It depends on us, how we act, how we protest and how we stand up to the authoritarian sirens that try to lure us into the abyss. Our time is now.”
In his hands, the death of the Weimar Republic is a parable of missed opportunities to save liberal democracy, right from the beginning. The first chapter of the book blames Friedrich Ebert, the state’s first president, and his mainstream SPD allies for failing to seize the momentum of the 1918 revolution and fully exorcise the old regime by breaking the power of the industrialists, Reichswehr generals, Junker landowners and the forces of reaction in the justice system. Then again, Ullrich slightly undermines his own case with a gripping account of how Ebert’s defence minister had to call in the military establishment to deploy grenade launchers, field artillery and fighter planes in a civil war-like conflict against Spartacist rebels in the spring of 1919.
Another early passage argues that the government’s disastrous mishandling of the 1923 hyperinflation crisis destroyed much of Germany’s moral and social capital as well as its financial order. The literary scholar Victor Klemperer recorded in his diary how his wife had seen the price of a cup of coffee double to 12,000 marks in the course of a single train journey from the Baltic coast. “Oh,” said the waiter, “you were here during the old price? Then give me 6,000.”
Ullrich thinks that watching the rules go out of the window was a trauma of enduring political significance. Many Germans, he writes, “turned unscrupulous, cynical and selfish” as their savings and livelihoods evaporated. As the writer Klaus Mann, who was 17 years old at the time, noted: “With everything around us crumbling and shaking, what were we supposed to cling to, what laws were we supposed to follow?”
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One of the more plausible pivots is the 1925 presidential election, held after Ebert’s sudden and premature death. In the first round the candidates from the democratic mainstream won a combined 49.3 per cent of the vote. Had they coalesced around Otto Braun, the popular SPD chief minister of Prussia, it is conceivable that he would have seen off the challenge from Paul Hindenburg, the authoritarian former general who made Hitler chancellor just as the Nazi party’s momentum appeared to be ebbing.
Even in January 1933, Ullrich insists, there would have been solid chances to prevent the emergence of the Third Reich if only Hindenburg and the principal actors had recognised what they were up against. The economy had tentatively turned a corner; the Nazi party was losing ground in elections. Perhaps they might have got away with installing a less apocalyptic right-wing dictator, like those in interwar Hungary and the Baltic republics.
Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. But the failure to take Hitler seriously and literally was the Weimar establishment’s most consistent and instructive mistake. Carl von Ossietzky, a prominent left-wing writer who was later awarded the Nobel peace prize for his opposition to Nazism, described Hitler in 1931 as a “cowardly, effeminate pajama creature, a trumped-up petty bourgeois rebel interested only in his own comfort”. The complacency was much more dangerous among the powerbrokers of the antidemocratic right, who tended to regard the Nazis as an annoying sideshow to the real business of owning the libs in the centre ground.
If none of this sounds particularly original, that is because not much of it is. Ullrich’s method is to cleave closely to the most reputable secondary sources and leaven his narrative with sprinklings from letters and memoirs. The result is an elegant and sober account of the orthodox historiography by a master storyteller.
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But to what end? Ullrich does not follow through on the counterfactuals to show how democracy might have been rescued had this or that decision not been taken. He does not draw much of a distinction between the tactical mistakes that gave the Nazis a minor leg up and the big structural failures that were preconditions for their success.
Most notably, he is shy of drawing specific inferences for the present, as though the history spoke for itself. That leaves the disanalogies with today looking more persuasive than the similarities: the routine extremity of Weimar Germany’s political violence, the deep political divisions along class lines, the rollercoaster economics, the brazenness of Nazi ideology in comparison to the AfD’s dog-whistle insinuations and pretensions to respectability, and above all the sheer strength and diversity of the enemies of Weimar democracy, from the hardcore reactionary forces in the universities to a potent and uncompromising radical left.
Frankly, readers who still remember a fair chunk of their history GCSEs will get more out of playing Matthias Cramer’s recent board game Weimar: The Fight for Democracy, in which four players take on the roles of the main political parties and have to manoeuvre against each other and the rise of Hitler. More vividly than any book, it drives home the realisation that selfishness was a necessary survival strategy and almost every political choice was cursed. I am still haunted by the triumphant glint of edgelordery that came into a friend’s eye when his communists pulled off a coup that also brought the first Nazi MPs into the Reichstag. Now that is how democracies die.
