FT.com / Books / Non-Fiction - Germany’s Greek tragedy

FT.com / Books / Non-Fiction - Germany’s Greek tragedy

Germany’s Greek tragedy
Review by Michael Levitin

Published: November 3 2007 00:44 | Last updated: November 3 2007 00:44

Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy
By Eric D. Weitz
Princeton University Press £17.95 432 pages
FT bookshop price: £14.37

In the waning days of the first world war, with two million German soldiers dead and more than twice that many injured, a sailors’ mutiny in the northern port city of Kiel kicked off a revolution that would destroy imperial Germany and set the republic on a visionary, democratic course. As a result, striking miners won fewer working hours, factory hands got higher wages, and social improvements after the war ranged from universal healthcare to financial support for working mothers.

The early advances of the Weimar Republic, which was born in 1919 and died with the Nazi takeover in 1933, laid the foundations of the modern social safety net and, as Eric D. Weitz argues in Weimar Germany, there was nothing inevitable about its dissolution and Hitler’s rise to power.

“Weimar did not just collapse. It was pushed over the precipice,” Weitz argues, by an established right wing that had been usurping its democratic functions long before the Nazis arrived on the scene. And indeed, after probing into the creative spirit and modern pathos of Germany in the Golden Twenties, we see it as something much more.

It is impossible to talk about post-1918 Germany without focusing on its political and financial instability – from the early public backlash against Versailles reparations to the hyper-inflation and Depression years that dogged the country later. Weitz covers this ground clearly and in sharp detail, breaking down the complex tug-of-war between communists, democrats and conservatives into three parts: 1919-23 when the country was left of centre, 1924-29 when it moved to the centre-right, and 1929-33 when it became outright authoritarian.

But more gripping to Weitz (and to this reviewer) is the artistic and intellectual ferment that Weimar embodied – a cultural explosion he chronicles with a passionate, persuasive voice: “The hyperactive vitality of Weimar culture … derived its intensity from the act of revolution, from the psychological sense of engagement, the heady enthusiasm, the notion that barriers had been broken and all things were possible.”

To construct a bibliography of Weimar’s mythic cast of characters would be too great a task, so Weitz dedicates the middle portion of his book to revisiting a select group whose contributions represent perhaps the greatest genius in Weimar culture: from Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius, to Laszlo Moholy-Nagy in photography, Martin Heidegger in philosophy, Thomas Mann in literature, and Brecht and Weill in theatre.

Weitz might have broken Weimar Germany into bite-sized chapters, but he wins points for his no-frills language that transports us back to the racy, cosmopolitan atmosphere of 1920s Berlin – and for saving his best for last.

In the book’s resonant closure about the rise of authoritarianism, Weitz seems indirectly to hold a mirror up to America’s own political catastrophe in the post-9/11 Bush years: “The threats to democracy are not always from enemies abroad,” he writes. “They can come from those within who espouse the language of democracy.”

There’s a deep, almost pathological reason why we’re still fascinated with Weimar today. “We are drawn to the Greek tragedy of its history,” he says, “the star-crossed birth, the conflicted life, the utter disaster as the curtain falls.”

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007