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A short history of the Weimar Republic
It is impossible to understand the history of modern Europe without some knowledge of the Weimar Republic. The fourteen-year period of democracy was marked by unstable government, economic crisis and the rise of extremist politics. Yet at the same time a vibrant cultural scene flourished, which continues to influence the international art world.
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Weimar thought
During its short lifespan, the Weimar Republic (1918-33) witnessed an unprecedented flowering of achievements in many areas, including psychology, political theory, physics, philosophy, literary and cultural criticism, and the arts. Leading intellectuals, scholars, and critics--such as Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht, and Martin Heidegger--emerged during this time to become the foremost thinkers of the twentieth century. Even today, the Weimar era remains a vital resource for new intellectual movements. In this incomparable collection,Weimar Thoughtpresents both the specialist and the general reader a comprehensive guide and unified portrait of the most important innovators, themes, and trends of this fascinating period.
The book is divided into four thematic sections: law, politics, and society; philosophy, theology, and science; aesthetics, literature, and film; and general cultural and social themes of the Weimar period. The volume brings together established and emerging scholars from a remarkable array of fields, and each individual essay serves as an overview for a particular discipline while offering distinctive critical engagement with relevant problems and debates.
Whether used as an introductory companion or advanced scholarly resource,Weimar Thoughtprovides insight into the rich developments behind the intellectual foundations of modernity.
eBook
Germany 1923 : hyperinflation, Hitler's putsch, and democracy in crisis
\"As the great Austrian writer Stefan Zweig confided in his autobiography, written in exile, 'I have a pretty thorough knowledge of history, but never, to my recollection, has it produced such madness in such gigantic proportions.' He was referring to the situation in Germany in 1923. It was a 'year of lunacy,' defined by hyperinflation, a political system on the verge of collapse, and separatist movements that threatened Germany's territorial integrity. Most significantly, Adolf Hitler launched his infamous Beer Hall Putsch in Munich--a failed coup that nonetheless drew international attention and demonstrated the Nazis' ruthless determination to seize power. In Germany 1923, award-winning historian Volker Ullrich draws on letters, memoirs, newspaper articles, and other sources from the time to present a captivating new history of those explosive twelve months. The crisis began when the French invaded the Ruhr Valley in January to force Germany to pay the reparations it owed under the Treaty of Versailles, which had ended the Great War. For years, German leaders had embraced inflationary policies to finance the costs of defeat, and, as Ullrich demonstrates, the invasion utterly destroyed the value of the German mark. Before the war, the exchange rate was 4.2 marks to the dollar. By November 20, 1923, a dollar was worth an incomprehensible 4.2 trillion marks, and a loaf of bread cost 200 billion. Facing the abyss, many ordinary Germans called for a national messiah. Among the figures to vie for that role was Hitler, a thirty-four-year-old veteran who possessed a uniquely malevolent personal magnetism. Although the Nazi coup in November was put down and Hitler arrested, the putsch showed just how tenuous the first German democracy, the Weimar Republic, was at its core. As Ullrich's panoramic narrative reveals, other Germans responded to the successive crises by launching a cultural revolution: 1923 witnessed the emergence of a multitude of new movements, from Dada to Bauhaus, and of such iconoclasts as Bertolt Brecht, George Grosz, and Franz Kafka. Yet most observers were amazed that the Weimar Republic was able to survive, and the more astute realized that the feral undercurrents unleashed could lead to much worse. Publishing a century after that fateful year, Germany 1923 is a riveting chronicle of one of the most challenging times any modern democracy has faced, one with haunting parallels to our own political moment\"-- Provided by publisher.
BOOK
The Weimar moment
The Weimar Moment’s evocative assault on closure and political reaction, its offering of democracy against the politics of narrow self-interest cloaked in nationalist appeals to Volk and “community”—or, as would be the case in Nazi Germany, “race”—cannot but appeal to us today. This appeal—its historical grounding and content, its complexities and tensions, its variegated expressions across the networks of power and thought—is the essential context of the present volume, whose basic premise is unhappiness with Hegel’s remark that we learn no more from history than we cannot learn from it. The challenge of the papers in this volume is to provide the material to confront the present effectively drawing from what we can and do understand.
eBook
Dragonslayer
In this fascinating biography of the infamous ideologue
Erich Ludendorff, Jay Lockenour complicates the classic depiction
of this German World War I hero.
Erich Ludendorff created for himself a persona that secured his
place as one of the most prominent (and despicable) Germans of the
twentieth century. With boundless energy and an obsession with
detail, Ludendorff ascended to power and solidified a stable,
public position among Germany's most influential. Between 1914 and
his death in 1937, he was a war hero, a dictator, a right-wing
activist, a failed putschist, a presidential candidate, a
publisher, and a would-be prophet. He guided Germany's effort in
the Great War between 1916 and 1918 and, importantly, set the tone
for a politics of victimhood and revenge in the postwar era.
Dragonslayer explores Ludendorff's life after 1918,
arguing that the strange or unhinged personal traits most
historians attribute to mental collapse were, in fact, integral to
Ludendorff's political strategy. Lockenour asserts that Ludendorff
patterned himself, sometimes consciously and sometimes
unconsciously, on the dragonslayer of Germanic mythology,
Siegfried-hero of the epic poem The Niebelungenlied and
much admired by German nationalists. The symbolic power of this
myth allowed Ludendorff to embody many Germans' fantasies of
revenge after their defeat in 1918, keeping him relevant to
political discourse despite his failure to hold high office or
cultivate a mass following after World War I.
Lockenour reveals the influence that Ludendorff's postwar career
had on Germany's political culture and radical right during this
tumultuous era. Dragonslayer is a tale as fabulist as
fiction.
eBook
Takeover : Hitler's final rise to power
\"In the summer of 1932, the Weimar Republic was on the verge of collapse. One in three Germans was unemployed. Violence was rampant. Hitler's National Socialists surged at the polls. Paul von Hindenburg, an aging war hero and avowed monarchist, was a reluctant president bound by oath to uphold the constitution. The November elections offered Hitler the prospect of a Reichstag majority and the path to political power. But instead, the Nazis lost two million votes. As membership hemorrhaged and financial backers withdrew, the Nazi Party threatened to fracture. Hitler talked of suicide. The New York Times declared he was finished. Yet somehow, in a few brief weeks, he was chancellor of Germany. In facinating detail and with previously un-accessed archival materials, Timothy W. Ryback tells the remarkable story of Hitler's dismantling of democracy through democratic process. He provides fresh perspective and insights into Hitler's personal and professional lives in these months, in all their complexity and uncertainty--backroom deals, unlikely alliances, stunning betrayals, an ill-timed tax audit, and a fateful weekend that changed our world forever. Above all, Ryback details why a wearied Hindenburg, who disdained the \"Bohemian corporal,\" ultimately decided to appoint Hitler chancellor in January 1933. Within weeks, Germany was no longer a democracy.\"--Amazon.com.
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The stab-in-the-back myth and the fall of the Weimar Republic : a history in documents and visual sources
This unique sourcebook explores the Stab-in-the-Back myth that developed in Germany in the wake of World War One, analyzing its role in the end of the Weimar Republic and its impact on the Nazi regime that followed. A critical development in modern German and even European history that has received relatively little coverage until now, the Stab-in-the-Back Myth was an attempt by the German military, nationalists and anti-Semites to explain how the German war effort collapsed in November 1918 along with the German Empire. It purported that the German army did not lose the First World War but were betrayed by the civilians on the home front and the democratic politicians who had surrendered. The myth was one of the foundation myths of National Socialism, at times influencing Nazi behaviour in the 1930s and later their conduct in the Second World War.The Stab-in-the-Back Myth and the Fall of the Weimar Republicdraws on German government records, foreign and domestic newspaper accounts, diplomatic reports, diary entries and letters to provide different national and political perspectives on the issue. The sourcebook also includes chapter summaries, study questions, and further reading lists, in addition to numerous visual sources and a range of maps, charts, tables and graphs. This is a vital text for all students looking at the history of the Weimar Republic, the legacy of the First World War and Germany in the 20th century.
eBook
Founding Weimar : violence and the German Revolution of 1918-1919
The German Revolution of 1918-1919 was a transformative moment in modern European history. It was both the end of the German Empire and the First World War, as well as the birth of the Weimar Republic, the short-lived democracy that preceded the establishment of the Nazi dictatorship. A time of great political drama, the Revolution saw unprecedented levels of mass mobilisation and political violence, including the 'Spartacist Uprising' of January 1919, the murders of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, and the violent suppression of strikes and the Munich Councils' Republic. Drawing upon the historiography of the French Revolution, this study places crowds and the politics of the streets at the heart of the Revolution's history.
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Degeneration and revolution : radical cultural politics and the body in Weimar Germany
In Degeneration and Revolution Robert Heynen offers a reconceptualization of the impacts of ideas of degeneration in Weimar Germany (1914-33), in particular on the complex and often contradictory political and cultural responses of the radical left.
eBook