![]() Along the way the reader is treated to a plethora of fascinating insights drawn from the primary sources, making this more than the standard general study of the republic. The author skilfully blends a discussion of developments at a national (or international) level with a consideration of local politics and what the familiar crises and contentions of the Weimar period meant for ordinary people to present a rounded picture of the first German democratic state in which the narrative of the republic ‘as a passive construct with little agency’ (p. 181) Yet the focus is not merely on high politics, high finance or high art. As the author puts it, ‘the question of authority underwrote the legitimacy of the Weimar Republic, whether in the spheres of economy, foreign policy, culture and law where it was frequently challenged.’ (p. The central thesis is that the defining problem of the period was the question of authority and the search for a ‘ total solution’ to the inherent contradictions of ‘classical modernity’ as outlined by Peukert (p. This fragmentation of Weimar historiography has led to calls to ‘rethink and rewrite the actual development of this crucial period in twentieth-century European history’ (2), and such an ambitious undertaking is precisely what is promised by the title of Anthony McElligott’s wide-ranging and scholarly new examination of Germany’s first democratic republic.Īs Eric Weitz has pointed out, ‘to grasp Weimar’s history in a broader fashion requires going beyond the cultural perspective’ to look at ‘formal politics and economics … and the lived experiences of a variety of social groups’ (3), and this is precisely what the present volume sets out to do. (1) But while much of this scholarship has been generated as a critical response to the thesis presented in Detlev Peukert’s seminal work Die Weimarer Republik: Krisenjahre der Klassischen Moderne (1987) there have been few, if any, attempts to replace Peukert’s assessment of Weimar’s story as a struggle to manage the problems inherent in ‘classical modernity’ with an new overarching grand narrative to replace it. These studies have revealed the complex and fragmented nature of German politics, culture and society in this period, and in doing so made ‘the traditional dichotomous image of cultural boom and political chaos’, once seen as so important to understanding the period, unsustainable. Instead more and more studies have given their attention to an increasingly wide range of different aspects of German society and culture in the 1920s, leading to an interdisciplinary reshaping of the debate on the history of the republic in which the lines that once delineated political, cultural and social history have been broken or at least blurred. Yet as Weimar studies have taken a more ‘cultural turn’ in the past 30 years or so, historians have increasingly questioned the old deterministic view of the history of the first German democracy that all too often reduced it to a mere prelude to the Nazi regime. The republic is often seen to have displayed an unusual tolerance for avant-garde art and architecture, literature and music, which was mirrored by liberal and enlightened attitudes towards sex and sexuality. ![]() This political unrest was off-set to some extent by extraordinary cultural ferment that took place during the 15 short years of democracy between the Kaiserreich and the Third Reich. For generations of students and scholars the first German republic was seen as an ill-fated experiment in parliamentary democracy, an inherently flawed polity unloved by its citizens, fatally undermined from the outset by the circumstances in which it had come into being and beset by almost perpetual political and economic crises. For a long time the historiography of Germany’s Weimar Republic has been stuck in a simple dichotomy of cultural experimentation and political and economic crisis.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |