Book review: Peering into the black hole and dirty soul of the Weimar Republic

The peace at the end of the First World War damaged the people of Germany more than the conflict had done. Many Germans had died over the past four years in France and Belgium but within Germany there had been no fighting; within their borders Germans lived safely and securely. Now with the armistice came revolution, economic turmoil, social and political chaos. The King of Bavaria was deposed and his monarchy was replaced, briefly, by the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic, led by the Jewish Kurt Eisner and Gustav Landauer. The Kaiser fled to Holland and Germany became a republic under the leadership of the unassuming Social Democrat Friedrich Ebert. The fiery, indomitable Rosa Luxemburg, a socialist from an affluent Jewish-Polish family, led an unsuccessful Marxist rebellion against Ebert: she was murdered and her corpse thrown into a canal. One week later Ebert’s parliament assembled for the first time in the city of Weimar. The Weimar Republic was born.

The soldiers returning from the war felt betrayed; they’d had no idea that defeat was looming. Those who found jobs came out on strike, but their protests were brutally put down by uniformed mobs of Freikorps volunteers. Swastikas appeared in Berlin for the first time. Nobody yet knew what they symbolised. Conspiracy theories abounded, word went round that the Elders of Zion had gathered together in a Prague cemetery to plan the fall of the monarchy and the military surrender. The Jews, not for the first or last time, were accused of plotting world domination.

The following years were characterised by madness. The Allies’ demand for reparations and the government’s urgent attempts to fund a social welfare programme led to hyperinflation, the bankrupting of ordinary people and the passing of vast wealth to speculators. In his new book Vertigo: The Rise and Fall of Weimar Germany, 1918-1933 Harald Jãhner characterises it as the death of money. “In the end the 98 billion marks of debt that the state had incurred among its citizens weren’t worth much more than a sack of potatoes.”

The people responded with unfettered, unrealistic hyper-enthusiasm. As Germany broke away from the fustiness of the past, a cult of the “New Human Being” emerged: hedonistic, and obsessed by ascetic purity, the glorification of the body and by living life to the full. The boxer was held up to be the supreme athlete of the age, exhibiting a speed of response necessary to keep up with the velocity of change. The Bauhaus movement, with its clean, functional minimalism symbolised a desire for renewal, for a total recalibration of the aesthetics of the environment. Motorcars satisfied the thrill for speed, plans were laid for new car-only roads.

And then, of course, came a backlash. A new demographic emerged, in the shape of those who would took pride in their paunches, their shaved heads, their creased bulging necks. The pristine, fashionable young person about town and the coarse Nazi thug became the two physical stereotypes of Weimar Germany.

Jewish readers looking for clues as to how the evils of Nazism emerged from this insanity are likely to be disappointed. There are lots of Jews in Jãhner’s book: Walter Benjamin, Stefan Zweig, Leon Feuchtwanger, Einstein, Otto Warburg, plenty of Joseph Roth. We hear how Ebert’s successor as president, Paul von Hindenburg, opened the door to Hitler’s rule by repeatedly appointing minority governments. We learn how, shortly after the economy was stabilised, the global Great Depression once more destroyed any hope of prosperity. But other than the antisemitic conspiracy theories after the First World War, we are little wiser as to why virulent antisemitism struck such a chord with the German people, or why the imperative of a pure Aryan race assumed such proportions. The Weimar Republic was the crucible in which the Nazi obscenity gestated. The psychological causes remain something of a mystery.

Sandwiched between the pointless futility of the Great War and the slaughter of the Second World War, the Weimar Republic has always been a black hole in the annals of 20th- century history. Harald Jãhner’s readable and comprehensive survey has done much to fill that hole. Even if some big questions remain unanswered.