The German Weimar Republic lasted a mere fifteen years, from the end of the First World War to Hitler’s dictatorship in 1933. It nevertheless became the paradigmatic historical event shaping political thinking about fragility and robustness in the postwar West. Weimar is routinely invoked in scholarly writings, op-eds, and political commentary to make sense of rise of far-right populism, acute political polarization , and the erosion of the liberal democratic institutions. The assumption motivating many of those who invoke the Weimar analogy is that the Western democracies, like those in the 1930s, are at risk, even at the brink, of possible collapse.
Weimar represents more than a failure of democracy. It has long served as a synecdoche for modernity and its tensions. Modernity’s cultural and political consequences are hotly contested, and Weimar then, as now, is regarded as the quintessential expression of its evils and promises. Our contributors highlight the multiple ways in which Weimar has served as a focal point for competing understandings of the conditions characterizing modern society and the implications for politics.
We ask when and how these multiple political and cultural lessons arose, who invoked them, under what circumstances, and for what purposes, and how they played out in particular contexts. Weimar and its lessons offer a cautionary tale and like many historical analogies, they resemble a Rorschach Test that is likely to tell us more about the people mobilizing the analogy and the political culture in which they function than about the former German republic. Our authors demonstrate that the supposed lessons of Weimar are highly questionable, but have been mobilized to support a broad range of political and cultural projects, most of them conservative in nature.
DEMOCRACY
Historical analysis and lesson construction began in the immediate aftermath of the Republic’s collapse. These lessons were propagated by historians, politicians, and jurists, many of them refugees, traumatized by the Nazis. Some of them would play important roles in the political and intellectual life of postwar Germany, where their understanding of Weimar and its collapse shaped their efforts to design a successor republic. In later decades, their lessons were used to assess the Bundesrepublik’s political health. Even when the Republic came to be regarded as robust, Weimar remained a preoccupation. Analogies were now deployed to show the many differences between it and its predecessor. With the re-emergence of a nationalist right in the aftermath of reunification, the focus for many has swung back toward similarities. Weimar is not alone in suggesting that the rise and fall of analogies and changes in their use says a lot about the degree to which elites perceive their political orders as robust or fragile.
At the heart of the competing analyses of Weimar and the structural conditions of modernity is the so-called problem of the masses and the belief that they are easily manipulated by opportunistic politicians. For democrats, this phenomenon necessitated efforts to reduce the potential for irresponsible and power-hungry politicians to exploit voters. Belief in the perils of mass democracy came to shape perceptions of the conditions of possibility for democratic politics in many national settings, and also informed the design of international cooperative arrangements put in place after the war. Weimar was mobilized to support of a narrow Schumpeterian model of democracy, intended to reduce the power of the left by minimizing the possibility of mass mobilization and participation. This model of democracy found traction among postwar American intellectuals and officials because it offered justification for their Cold War strategy of support for anti-Soviet conservative and right-wing governments. Government was reframed as an institution to allow and moderate elite competition. In a more fundamental sense, it reflected a particular view of modernity, one in which capitalism was regarded as triumphant but still threatened by demagogues capable of mobilizing the discontented.
Historical lessons, and Weimar’s demise in particular, tend to be based on interpretations of events that are considered overdetermined. There is a strong incentive to frame lessons this way because they would not have much weight if based on events recognized as contingent. Our contributors make the case that Weimar’s collapse was highly contingent. It was due to the failure of the political class to check extremism, and decisions made by a few men behind closed doors that allowed Hitler to come to power. Even as chancellor, some of our contributors argue, Hitler’s dictatorship was far from ordained. This transformation occurred during his first one-hundred days when the Nazi’s succeeded in uniting a previously divided public. It would not have occurred in the face of outspoken opposition. But those on the left, most notably the socialists, mistakenly trusted in law and the bureaucracy to restrain authoritarianism.
MODERNITY
Our contributors describe the Weimar Republic as important reference point for political thinking, associated with manifold meanings and tied to competing visions of modernity. These meanings also extend outside politics and inform Weimar as a symbol and a source of interpretations of modern culture in broader society. For Leo Strauss and his American acolytes, Weimar gives evidence of the dangers of liberalism. Cultural and political decline for Strauss is inevitable once natural right gives way to relativism, and Weimar is the dramatic, exemplar of this process.. Weimar showcased modern, relativistic values, undermining the ethical, social, and political commitments essential to any political order. Its collapse was inevitable. Modernity, understood as the switch from natural right to relativism, was the problem, and Weimar was the paradigmatic case for its untenability.
The film Cabaret, produced in 1972, echoes in part this understanding. It highlights Berlin nightlife, but also the rise of fascism and its ever-present threat to the culture industry, artistic life, and individual freedom. At the outset, we see a Nazi expelled from the Kit Kat Klub, but the final scene the cabaret’s audience is dominated by uniformed Nazis. The more contemporary blockbuster German television series, Babylon Berlin, which premiered in 2017, has been distributed to a global audience via diverse streaming platforms like Netflix It portrays Weimar Berlin as a center for hedonistic nightlife, sexual experimentation, and social freedom and offer the Weimar Republic as a cautionary tale regarding the fragility of western democracies.
Babylon Berlin offers another distorted portrayal of Weimar politics, with its unrelieved focus is on communists and the nationalist right. There is only one scene in which identifiable Social Democrats appear despite the fact that Berlin remained an SPD stronghold throughout the Republic. Babylon Berlin is a land of extremes. Such decadence and radical politics certainly existed, but the space between them, where most people lived and functioned, is largely ignored. Babylon Berlin remains squeamish when it comes to sex work and ambivalent when it comes to gender parity. It has no interest in presenting sexuality as a form of liberation, especially not for women. Rather, sexuality is more often presented as a cause for shame and political vulnerability. Our contributors not only regard these Babylon Berlin offers more support to the critics of Weimar than those who see it as a courageous effort to free human potential from conservative and self-serving constraints.
AGENCY
One of the lessons of Weimar that has found considerable traction in contemporary debates concerns political elites making light of far-right challenges to democratic institutions. Examples include the willingness of center-right parties in Europe to form governing coalitions with parties recently seen as political pariahs. In the US, the failure of Republicans to publicly denounce Trump’s assault on the electoral system has triggered similar analyses. For liberals, this kind of behavior puts democracy at risk. Their opponents accuse them of fear mongering.
Our contributors contend that fascists only came to power with the support of liberal democratic elites. This happened in large part because of liberal fears of communism. Today’s far-right invokes the threat of Islam as well as their own victimhood. It is a different kind of victimhood than that associated with Versailles but has similar psychological appeal. Democratic parties have lost confidence in themselves and have not hesitated to mimic the right when it comes to immigrants and Islam. Some have gone into coalition with right-wing parties, as in Austria, Italy, and Sweden. They have made right-wing authoritarianism a more visible and pronounced threat. Mainstreaming the far-right is currently the greatest threat to democracy.
CONCLUSION
Let us close by returning to Germany. For decades, Weimar had overwhelmingly negative connotations in that country. Nowadays, Germans have rediscovered the positive political side of Weimar, notably the progressive character of its constitution. It remains to be seen if foreign references to Weimar will undergo such a transition.
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