Focusing on the fate of a Berlin-based newspaper during the 1920s and 1930s, Moderate Modernity: The Newspaper Tempo and the Transformation of Weimar Democracy chronicles the transformation of a vibrant and liberal society into an oppressive and authoritarian dictatorship. Tempo proclaimed itself as “Germany’s most modern newspaper” and attempted to capture the spirit of Weimar Berlin, giving a voice to a forward-looking generation that had grown up under the Weimar Republic’s new democratic order. The newspaper celebrated modern technology, spectator sports, and American consumer products, constructing an optimistic vision of Germany’s future as a liberal consumer society anchored in Western values.
Continue reading “Moderate Modernity: The Newspaper Tempo and the Transformation of Weimar Democracy”Tag: Political History
Britain’s Reichstag Fire moment
Richard Evans discusses the parallels between contemporary British politics and Weimar Germany in this article in Prospect magazine.
Exhibition of Revolutionary Posters in Berlin
To commemorate the centenary of the German Revolution, the Staatsbibliothek Berlin has opened its archive of flyers, posters and special newspaper editions from November 1918 to the “Kapp-Putsch” in 1920.
The exhibition Druckerschwärze Roter Stern: Revolution an der Litfaßsäule focuses on five topics: the revolution in Berlin from November 1918 to January 1919, the revolution in Braunschweig in November 1918, the elections to the constitutional assembly in January 1919, the Munich Soviet Republic in April 1919, and the Kapp-Lüttwitz coup in March 1920.
The exhibition runs from 9 November – 15 December and is opened on 8 November with a lecture by Mark Will Jones, author of Founding Weimar: Violence and the German Revolution of 1918-19.
New Book: Weimar-era students write about the German Revolution
Nadine Rossol has unearthed a treasure trove of student essays written between late November and early December 1918 and addressing their experiences of living through the end of WWI, the revolution and the collapse of the monarchy in Essen.
Kartoffeln, Frost und Spartakus. Weltkriegsende und Revolution 1918/19 in Essener Schüleraufsätzen is a collection of 35 of these essays, with comments and context. It provides a fascinating insight into young people’s view of the beginning of the Weimar Republic and a welcome contribution to the recent “rediscovery” of the German Revolution.
The media’s Weimar moment?
In 2016, before Trump was even sworn in as President, the Columbia Journalism Review compared the rise of “fake news” and the loss of conventional media’s authority to Weimar Germany. While the article is laced with stereotypical images of Weimar’s supposedly “decadent atmosphere”, there are some interesting insights: “The instruments of democracy were appropriated by anti-democratic forces and used to undermine the democratic institutions that had made them available.”
Rare audio material of Weimar parliamentary debates
Public broadcaster SWR has digitized debates in the Reichstag which had been recorded by the Berliner Rundfunk between 1931 and 1933, from budget debates to discussions about unemployment and Hitler’s speech after the burning of the Reichstag. The material runs 24 hours in total and documents the deteriorating political culture in the German parliament.
A backlash against liberalism? Weimar’s lessons for the Trump presidency
In the International Journal of History, Culture and Modernity (HCM), three distinguished scholars of Weimar’s sexual politics – Laurie Marhoefer, Julia Roos and Edward Ross Dickinson – discuss if the collapse of Germany’s first democracy and the rise of the Nazis can be partly explained by a “backlash” against the country’s progressive laws. They also address the question if we can learn anything for today’s politics and the apparent “backlash” against liberal identity politics, which was supposedly used by Donald Trump in his presidential campaign.
Invocating Weimar
When the coalition talks between Merkel’s CDU, the Greens and the liberal FDP collapsed recently, pundits immediately detected “echoes of Weimar“. The Guardian drew parallels between the strong showing of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland in the general election and the subsequent faltering of coalition talks with “the darkest days of the Weimar Republic, when short-lived minority governments ruled by emergency decrees.” Patrick Donahue (for Bloomberg Politics) claimed that the “Ghost of Weimar Looms Over German Politics”.
Stephen F. Szabo, Senior Fellow at AICGS, even argued that “Weimar now can be found in many places in eastern Germany and its impact is creating Weimar conditions for all of Germany.”
Charles S. Maier, in the NY Review of Books, provided some helpful historical context on the party-political spectrum in Germany in 2017 and the Weimar Republic. His conclusion – “no historical analogy can predict what outcome lies ahead, but the Weimar comparison reminds us that democratic institutions are not immune from resentments, demagogy, and polarization” – might be less eye-catching, but is probably the most useful invocation of Weimar to date.
New book: Conflict in Weimar and the Creation of Post-Nazi Germany
In Lions and Lambs. Conflict in Weimar and the Creation of Post-Nazi Germany Noah Strote analyses the generation that shaped the post-Nazi reconstruction to arrive at a “bold new interpretation of Germany’s democratic transformation in the twentieth century”: “Not long after the horrors of World War II and the Holocaust, Germans rebuilt their shattered country and emerged as one of the leading nations of the Western liberal world. In his debut work, Noah Strote analyzes this remarkable turnaround and challenges the widely held perception that the Western Allies—particularly the United States—were responsible for Germany’s transformation. Continue reading “New book: Conflict in Weimar and the Creation of Post-Nazi Germany”
New book: The “sick” Republic
Knut Langewand’s study on metaphors of bodies and sickness in Weimar’s political discourse shows how the discussion about the health of some of Weimar’s leading statesmen undermined the legitimacy of the new Republic itself. On the basis of the cases of Stresemann, Ebert, Braun, Müller, and Brüning, the book discusses the construction of terms such as “kranker Volkskörper” and their impact on the political culture of the time.
German Centre for Weimar Research
In August 2016, the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena established the Forschungsstelle Weimarer Republik, a “central platform for German and international Weimar research”. Funded by the Ministry of Economy, Science and Digital Society of Thuringia, the new research centre hosts a yearly conference, organises regular workshops for early career researchers, awards prizes for research publications (from BA theses to Habilitationen), and publishes a series on Weimar history.
Weimarer Verhältnisse?
The FAZ and regional broadcaster Bayerischer Rundfunk have teamed up for an essays series on the topic of “Weimarer Verhältnisse?” (Weimar conditions): a group of distinguished historians of the era, including Andreas Wirsching, Ute Daniel and Hélène Miard-Delacroix, consider the reasons for Weimar’s collapse and its lessons for today, from democratic breakdown to economic policy.
BBC on Rosa Luxemburg
The BBC has produced a programme on revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg, with input by historians Jacqueline Rose, Mark Jones, and Nadine Rossol: “Melvyn Bragg discusses the life and times of Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919), ‘Red Rosa’, who was born in Poland under the Russian Empire and became one of the leading revolutionaries in an age of revolution. She was jailed for agitation and for her campaign against the Great War which, she argued, pitted workers against each other for the sake of capitalism. Continue reading “BBC on Rosa Luxemburg”
New book on the history of Anarchism
This new volume edited by Matthew S. Adams and Ruth Kinna sheds some much-needed light on the history of the Anarchist movement and its response to WWI: “Considerable research has been inspired by the failure of the mainstream European socialist movement to prevent hostilities in 1914, but virtually no work has been done on the anarchist response. This is despite the fact that all of the belligerents hosted anarchist groups and dissidents, and that anarchism dominated what Benedict Anderson called the self-consciously internationalist radical Left in the years leading up to the war’s outbreak. Anarchism 1914-1918 takes a first step toward filling this gap. Continue reading “New book on the history of Anarchism”
Trump and Weimar Germany
The comparisons between Donald Trump’s political success and Hitler’s rise, so numerous even before the election, have intensified since the former won the electoral vote in November 2016. Historians have weighed in with differing opinions and analyses about the two phenomena. This is an on-going collection of articles on the topic, all suggestions welcome! Continue reading “Trump and Weimar Germany”