A brief history of the left in Weimar Germany
When we think about the Weimar Republic, most likely we think about the time of right-wing power. Certainly, many authoritarian forces were at work in the republic, but this was also the time of a left government, one that shaped the social life of Germany profoundly.
The Weimar Republic was a relatively short experience in the history of Germany. It may even be true that the republic was too…
The Weimar Republic is often considered one of the most remarkably energetic periods in the artistic history of humanity, a roaring surge of modernism in all fields of arts, where experimentation was the norm. For a glorious, if all too short, period over the “Golden 1920s” and the first part of the 1930s, while Germany went through one of the most troubling political and economic times in her…
A brief history of Jews in the Weimar Republic
The Weimar Republic’s relation with Jews was contradictory at best. On the one hand, the republic was a first time of full citizenship for the German Jewish people, who became a driving force in the political and cultural life of Weimar. But on the other, it was during the republic’s time that antisemitism rose to upsetting levels.
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The time of the Weimar Republic turned out to be a mere interruption between world wars
In the first half of the twentieth century, two world wars ravaged Europe. The fact that two horrible conflicts on a world scale were crammed into such a short time has always blown my mind. One would think that humans should be smarter than that. I mean, didn’t anyone learn anything from World War I? Why did World War II break out so shortly after that?
Well, what if the interwar years were not…
How hyperinflation raised doubts about the Weimar Republic
When we hear about the Weimar Republic, most of us think to wheelbarrows of banknotes used to buy one loaf of bread or stakes of notes used to fuel stoves. In short, we think to the hyperinflation of the middle 1920s.
We might think hyperinflation was a specific German situation since we seldom heard of any other such. It wasn’t. In fact, most countries after World War I knew a period of…
Many welcomed the war in 1914. Few expected it would turn out so horribly.
It is normally quite easy to understand why war breaks out and who is pitted against whom. Not so for the Great War. And this is true to the point that it has been defined as one of the most enigmatic events in contemporary history.
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The Führerprinzip had its origins in pre-Weimar Prussian culture
It would be misleading to think that Germany was the only nation where authoritarian ideologies became popular after World War I. In fact, all European nations let themselves be fascinated with this kind of ideologies, spurred by the difficulties of emerging from the destruction of the war and by the necessity to deal with profound and unexpected social changes.
After the war, many old regimes…
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