The Weimar Republic Shaped the 20th Century. Can Today’s Leaders Avoid Its Fate?
Weimar Dispatch
A Failed State Shaped the 20th Century. Can Today’s Leaders Avoid Its Fate?
A fragile democracy, the Weimar Republic, briefly took hold in Germany before the Nazis seized power. Now, Weimar’s collapse is seen as a warning.
By Clay Risen
Clay Risen reported from Weimar, Germany, and spoke to historians about the Weimar Republic’s continued relevance.
In the winter of 1919, the leaders of the newly founded German Republic, having overthrown Emperor Wilhelm II at the end of World War I, went looking for a city to hold a constitutional convention. The delegates quickly settled on the small city of Weimar, which was centrally located and boasted a theater large enough to hold them all.
The resulting document, approved on Aug. 11, 1919, became the republic’s guidebook for over a decade, until Adolf Hitler dissolved the Constitution in 1933. The city, in turn, gave its name to the era: the Weimar Republic.
Today that brief stretch of time between an emperor and a dictator is memorialized by the House of the Weimar Republic, which sits across a wide plaza from the stately theater where the constitutional delegates met.
This small museum has an outsize mission: to tell the full story of the Weimar era, and to remind people that its lessons remain relevant — not only in Germany, where the far-right Alternative for Germany party, or A.f.D., is on the rise, but in a growing number of suddenly fragile democracies.
“We never have trouble raising funds,” said Michael Dreyer, the museum’s president and a political scientist at the nearby University of Jena. “Whenever the A.f.D. comes into the news, politicians call wanting to know if we are turning into Weimar.”
Birgit Witt, who works for her family’s driving school in Weimar, said she always encourages visitors to stop by the museum “because it’s so important right now to understand why people voted for the Nazi Party and Hitler back then.”
Weimar is a political touchstone in political circles in the United States, too. Critics of the Trump administration frequently invoke its precedent as an example of democratic backsliding. “Welcome to Weimar 2.0,” read a headline on an article in Foreign Policy last year by the historian Robert D. Kaplan.
Conservatives, in turn, have also found a different reason to dredge up Weimar — they use the era to give historical weight to its warnings about left-wing violence: At a White House meeting in October, the far-right activist Jack Posobiec claimed that the antifa movement had its roots in the Weimar Republic.
Coincidentally, even as Weimar has re-emerged in political debates, historians’ understanding of how it fell apart — and what that collapse means today — has changed.
After World War II, German politicians and academics, looking to absolve everyone except the Nazis for the country’s descent into tyranny, denounced the republic as a failure from the start because of what they said was a fatally flawed Constitution. For many, “Weimar” became a byword for disaster. Nothing, historians at the time concluded, could have saved Germany from Nazism.
Now a different consensus is emerging. A new book, translated into English last year as “Fateful Hours,” argues that Weimar was not brought down by some original flaw, but the determination of anti-democratic elites to destroy it — and the failure of the liberal establishment to stop them.
“The Republic’s failure was not predetermined from the outset,” said the book’s author, Volker Ullrich. “There was no automatic path to ruin.”
Dr. Dreyer agreed, adding that the Weimar Constitution was robust and progressive. It promised universal suffrage and comprehensive health insurance. It included tools that should in theory have blocked an authoritarian takeover, including the power to ban extremist parties.
Critics single out the Constitution’s Article 48, which gave the president power to rule by emergency decree. But the article also gave the German Parliament the power to veto such a declaration.
“The Constitution certainly had flaws,” said Kathleen Canning, a historian at Rice University in Texas. “But it survived a lot of crises,” she said, including hyperinflation and coup attempts.
Weimar was especially challenged by the onset of the Great Depression in 1929. When voters blamed their struggles on the left-wing Social Democrats, the largest party, conservatives took advantage.
And yet, Dr. Ullrich said, even economic catastrophe was in itself not enough to bring down the republic, which survived almost four more years.
“Many astute contemporaries were convinced that Hitler’s rise to power had been halted and his movement was in an unstoppable decline,” he said. “His eventual rise to power on Jan. 30, 1933, was the result of a sinister power struggle behind the scenes.”
Anti-democratic forces on both the right and the far left refused to work with the Social Democrats, and instead pushed through austerity measures that undermined the country’s safety net.
Such naked partisanship enabled the archconservative president, Paul von Hindenburg, to expand his power through emergency decrees, which the deadlocked Parliament failed to overturn. And it was this anti-democratic coalition, not the depression itself, that enabled Hitler’s rise, Dr. Ullrich said.
Other parallels abound between then and now. Weimar had its own media bubbles, with newspapers promoting partisan talking points as fact. It was wracked by culture wars. And it was governed by an establishment that insisted on playing by the rules, Dr. Dreyer said, while its opponents did not.
In 1932, Mr. Hindenburg, claiming emergency powers, dissolved the elected government of Prussia, one of Germany’s largest states, and replaced its governor with the right-winger Franz von Papen.
Prussia’s leaders sued, and won. But by then, von Papen had replaced Prussia’s top officials with his allies. The court, fearing further crisis, refused to order them out.
“What happened was not the Titanic meeting an iceberg,” Dr. Dreyer said. “It was a deliberate attack by those in power.” And, he added, drawing comparisons between leaders past and present, “It is a bad thing when you have a president who is hellbent on destroying democracy at the top of your government.”
Historians caution that the differences between then and now are as important as the similarities. Modern republics have deep democratic cultures that make the power grabs of Weimar almost unthinkable.
The ultimate lesson of the era, historians say, lies not in any particular parallel, but in a point that is both obvious and often overlooked: Democracies are imperfect institutions that need to be constantly defended, because they can be torn down from within.
Clay Risen is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.