Short Oxford History of Weimar Germany

German Studies Review, 2015

The Weimar Republic was the coalition of political forces resulting from the post-Versailles compromise that became the mainstay of the new Republic. It came into effect on November 9, 1918 when Friedrich Ebert, leader of the Majority Social Democrats, succeeded Prince Maximilian of Baden as German Chancellor, formed a government of majority Socialists and Independent Socialists. The Weimar years are extremely crucial in our understanding and construction of German history. Weimar deserves proper analysis in its own standing and in terms of its own accomplishments and mistakes. This essay aims at understanding why the Weimar model, though heavenly praised, failed to deliver its promises. The paper argues that the Weimar Republic has been interpreted as a prelude to the Nazi epoch or as an interlude between imperial and Hitlerite Germany. In spite of reforms brought about, the downturn of the Weimar Republic was heavily influenced by the fallacy of Versailles, the economic disasters following the French occupation of the Ruhr (1923) and the subsequent rise of the National Socialist ideology. It follows that Weimar, as the heir of political liberalism of 1848 which, while inundated by the holocaust of the 1933 Nazi Revolution, is the area par excellence where the future development of a democratic Germany could be unveiled. The conclusion arrived at in this analysis suggests that the fourteen years of the Weimar Republic represents but a brief episode in a political history basically at variance with the trends current during these years. In other words, the success of post-Nazi Germany was mainly based on both the new ideological orientations and its experiences from the shortcomings of Weimar. The essay discusses the impacts of the Versailles Peace treaty, the constitutional " imperialism, " totalitarism, mass insurrections and economic disintegration, as evidenced by hyperinflation and unemployment.

Central European History, 2010

This chapter surveys the history of the middle classes in Weimar Germany from social, political , and cultural perspectives. Divisions-between industrialists and master artisans; conservatives, liberals, and left-wingers; Protestants, Catholics, and Jews; modernists and anti-modernists-were by no means new. But they were exacerbated during the First World War and in the subsequent period of rapid shifts and drastic ruptures. Occupational interests diverged, depending on how the respective groups were affected by the democratic transformation of 1918/19 and the hyperinflation that peaked in 1923. As a result , many members of the middle classes turned resentfully against the republic. Still, we should be wary of adopting the ubiquitous rhetoric of decline, for studies of associa-tional life have amounted to a rather different picture of confidence and renewal. This middle-class renewal was initially not anti-democratic per se. But it increasingly defined itself against the perceived threat of socialist revolution and, by the mid-1920s, began to fuel the rise of the extreme right. That said, the middle classes in Weimar Germany should not be seen solely in a political perspective. They exhibited remarkably diverse consumer choices and cultural activities, although it was precisely this diversity that the extreme right targeted with considerable success.

2020

The RESH Papers are intended to provide economic and social historians and other historians or economists at the University of Regensburg whose work is sufficiently intersecting with economic and social history with the possibility to circulate their work in an informal, easy-to-access way among the academic community. Economic and social historians from outside the University of Regensburg may also consider the RESH Papers as a means to publish informally as long as their work meets the academic standards of the discipline. Publishable in the RESH Papers is the following: Work in progress on which the author(s) wish to generate comments by their peers before formally publishing it in an academic journal or book; and English translations of already published, yet non-English works that may be of interest beyond the originally targeted (German, French, and so on) audience.