Ullrich Fateful Hours

The Collapse of the Weimar Republic
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-80533-280-0
Verlag: Pushkin Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 384 Seiten

Democracies are fragile. Freedoms that seem secure can be lost. Few historical events illustrate this as vividly as the failure of the Weimar Republic. Fateful Hours tells one of the greatest dramas in world history: the failure of Germany's first democracy, culminating in the horrific rise of the Third Reich. But this tragedy was not inevitable. In this gripping new book, celebrated historian Volker Ullrich charts the many failed alternatives and missed opportunities that contributed to German democracy's collapse. In an immersive style that takes us to the heart of political power, Ullrich argues that, right up until January 1933, history was open - just as in the present, it is up to us whether democracy lives or dies.

Volker Ullrich is a historian and journalist whose previous books include biographies of Bismarck and Napoleon, as well as a major study of Imperial Germany, The Nervous Superpower, 1871-1918. Ullrich was for many years editor of the political books review section of Die Zeit. His two-volume biography of Adolf Hitler was a German bestseller.Jefferson Chase is a writer, translator and journalist based in Berlin. He has translated more than a dozen German texts into English, including The Writers' Castle by Uwe Neumahr, also available from Pushkin.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Ullrich, Volker

Weitere Mitwirkende

Chase, Jefferson

Leseproben

Preface

Democracies are fragile. They can flip into dictatorships. Liberties that seemed won for all time can be squandered.

With the end of the Cold War, our awareness of the threats to democracy diminished. Francis Fukuyama’s thesis about the “end of history” held that the future would no longer see any serious challenges to liberal democracy. In his view, there was simply no longer any alternative. Although few observers may have advanced this view as radically as he did, Fukuyama’s faith in the triumph of democracy became the hallmark of an entire epoch. The only remaining question seemed to be how long it would take for the ideology to spread to the entire world and how stubbornly those dictatorships opposed to progress would resist.

Little remains of this certainty. Democracy is under internal and external pressure across the globe. Authoritarian states like China and Russia vie for power with the Western democracies on the world stage and attack them from within. In the United States, Donald Trump’s first presidency provided a preview of what his second term in office might bring. This time, he is better prepared, less constrained by advisers, and more determined to push his agenda through. The future of American democracy has never been so uncertain since the declaration of independence almost 250 years ago. But also in almost all European countries, right-wing populism is on the rise. In Germany, the Alternative for Germany, or AfD, an at least partially far-right extremist party, has attracted considerable support—and not just in the country’s formerly Communist east but also among West German bourgeois circles. It is telling that Elon Musk has advocated for voting AfD in the latest German election campaign. Right-wing populism is a global movement with worrying transnational ties. In short: Concern for democracy has become a defining feature of a new historical epoch.

The failure of the Weimar Republic led to the Third Reich. Germany’s first democracy ended in the transfer of power to Adolf Hitler. There is no overlooking Weimar when we ponder the question of how and why democracies die. The fate of the first German republic is both a warning and an object lesson not only in Germany but also globally. Prophecies that Germany or other Western democracies could return to the “conditions like Weimar” aren’t new.1 What is new is the actual global fragility of democracy, which recalls the period between the two world wars. That alone is reason enough to remind ourselves of what really happened in and to the Weimar Republic.

Weimar’s democracy is still fascinating, not least because of the astonishing contradictions this merely fourteen-year period encompassed. It was a time of new beginnings, experimentation, and a willingness to innovate. A laboratory of modernism full of vibrant culture, particularly—though not exclusively—in the metropolis of Berlin. A period when traditional gender roles loosened, and people were more sexually free. But it was also a time of seemingly endless crises and upheavals, including the hyperinflation of 1923 and the Great Depression starting in 1929. A time of political instability, of rapidly changing governments, violence, and militancy, which led to civil-war-like fighting in the system’s dying days.

It has rightly been demanded that Weimar history not be treated solely ex post facto as a prelude to the National Socialist dictatorship but as an epoch of its own, full of ambivalence and contradiction.2 Of course, given the catastrophe of Hitler’s ascent to power, there is no avoiding the question of why German democracy ultimately failed. “No one can think of the Weimar Republic without thinking about its demise,” wrote historian Hagen Schulze.3 Moreover, the current global crisis of democracy has given renewed urgency to the question of what caused the German disaster in 1933. But that’s precisely why it’s important to emphasize the open-endedness of the situation at the time. Otherwise, we ignore alternatives and spaces to maneuver—and risk overlooking something that is essential to answering the question of the demise of Weimar democracy.

Historians have advanced various explanations. Some point out the difficult legacy of Wilhelmine German authoritarianism: the continuing influence of pre-democratic elites in heavy industry, the large agricultural estates east of the Elbe River, the military, the government administration, and the justice system. Others emphasize the burden placed on the young democracy from the start by Germany’s military defeat in the First World War and the harsh terms of the Treaty of Versailles. Still others stress the structural shortcomings of the Weimar Constitution, which granted sweeping powers to the Reich president as a kind of ersatz kaiser—the constitution’s Article 48 gave him an instrument of rule by emergency decree that practically invited misuse in times of crisis. Another school of thought points the finger at Germany’s political parties’ confinement within ideological front lines and their refusal to compromise for chronically weakening the parliamentary democracy. But as heavy as the initial burdens and failings, resulting mainly from the foundation of the republic, may have been, Germany’s first democratic experiment was not destined to fail. There were alternatives—and reasons why they were disregarded or insufficiently pursued. The end of the story was far more open than those fixated on the Weimar Republic’s ultimate demise would have us believe.

There was no shortage of opportunities to change course and go in different directions. For instance, during the revolution of 1918–19, the governing Social Democrats could have pushed through greater societal change and retained less of the past. Or the suppression of the Kapp Putsch in March 1920 and the great wave of pro-democratic solidarity following the murder of Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau in June 1922 could have been the occasion for those in power to take the offensive against the anti-democratic camp. That opportunity remained unused.

During the hyperinflation of 1923, when the republic was teetering on the abyss, the forces of democratic self-preservation proved stronger than many people expected. But the election of the dyed-in-the-wool monarchist Paul von Hindenburg as Reich president in April 1925 represented a caesura. His rise could have been prevented, had the Communists been willing to go against their usual grain. Likewise, the collapse of the grand coalition in March 1930, which marked a de facto end to parliamentary democracy, could have been avoided had the political parties involved been more willing to compromise. No one forced the mainstream parties in the state of Thuringia to include the Nazis in the regional government in 1930. They did that of their own free will, granting the fascists the opportunity to rehearse their rise to power on the national level. There was no reason for Hindenburg to yield to his advisers and dismiss Reich Chancellor Heinrich Brüning in late May 1932, thereby terminating the moderate phase of presidentially appointed government. With Brüning in office, his successor Franz von Papen would not have been able to stage his coup d’état in Prussia in July 1932, removing one of the final bulwarks of the Weimar Republic.

Even Hitler’s triumph in January 1933 wasn’t unavoidable. There were still ways to keep him from power. One of the bitterest ironies of German history is that the leader, or Führer, of the Nazi Party assumed the office of chancellor thanks to a sinister game of intrigue—at a juncture when Hitler’s movement was in decline and many keen contemporary observers had already, and prematurely, written him off.

History is always open. The only thing a historian can say for certain about the future is that it will turn out differently than people at any given time imagine. The decisive factor is how individual people behave in concrete situations. That was true during the Weimar Republic, and it still is today. It’s in our hands to decide whether democracy fails or survives. The true goal of this book is to illustrate that point.

We should constantly recall that the Weimar Republic didn’t go out with a bang. It was gradually undermined by the erosion of the constitution and democratic practices. This “quiet death” should serve as a negative example of how Western democracies like the United States, whose stability has long seemed unshakable, could fail despite their long and storied tradition.4 The failure of the Weimar Republic remains a lesson of how fragile democracy is and how quickly freedom can be squandered, if democratic institutions cease to function and civil society is too weak to keep the anti-democratic wolves from the door.

Notes

1. See Sebastian Ullrich, “Stabilitätsanker oder Hysterisierungsagentur: Der Weimar-Komplex in der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik,” in Weimars Wirkung: Das Nachleben der ersten deutschen Republik, ed. Hanno Hochmuth et al. (Göttingen, 2020), 182–96 (here...