Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy (review)

Weimar Germany still speaks to us, as Eric Weitz puts it at the outset of his book. Can he make it speak in a voice not yet heard? We are offered nine clearly structured, effectively linked, well illustrated chapters. But in the end, what is said that we have not heard before from the likes of Peukert, Laqueur, Hermand and Trommler, Willett, Mommsen, and Gay?

In the opening chapter, "A Troubled Beginning," Weitz provides a concentrated, insightful version of the Weimar birth narrative. He ranges from Woodrow Wilson and Ludendorff through Luxemburg and Liebknecht, and he also offers snapshots of Alltagsgeschichte that provide pertinent points of reference from below. There's nothing earth-shattering here, but the reader benefits from the author's range and depth of knowledge, and especially from his choices. Geopolitics intertwine with the street, and by bringing in the likes of Alfred Döblin, Stefan Zweig, and Oswald Spengler, Weitz makes a point to signal that arts and letters will provide further foci for his study.

In Chapter Two, Weitz invites us to walk the city with him, and we do the time warp. I need not mention that the city is Berlin, but I wonder whether those who would insist on a reason why would be satisfied with Weitz's maxim: "Weimar was Berlin, Berlin Weimar" (41). Why this exercise in scholarly flanerie? Weitz, with Franz Hessel, speaks of "reading the street," arguing inherently that the living city is its own best archive, exposing surfaces to today's stroller that can catalyze and direct forays into the past. At times these surfaces are the actual superfices of still-extant structures (the New Synagogue, the Onkel Toms Siedlung apartments), at times they are voids filled with period photographs and Weitz's words (Haus Vaterland, Erich Mendelsohn's Columbus Haus, and for that matter, everything else on Potsdamer Platz). It is an intriguing exercise in localization of points within an expanse that cannot be visually, aurally, tactilely commanded as a whole, a material trait that Weitz reinforces with a historical observation: "No one dominated Berlin, and no consensus reigned" (79).

Getting into the politics of that absent consensus is the business of Chapter Three, and here the reader benefits from Weitz's expert rendering of the broad sweep and pertinent details of Germany's struggle to govern itself during the Weimar period. There are no radical challenges to conventional wisdom—the republic had three periods, the constitutional design was flawed, splits across the ideological spectrum undermined democracy, the Depression crippled it, the extreme right killed it off—but Weitz's ability to render Weimar's political worlds in a multiperspectival way is impressive. We have concise characterizations of the official parties, alongside discussion of the mass actions and paramilitary organizations that created a "new form of politics that was modern and combative" (113), all illustrated with illuminating period quotations and images. In this chapter, Weitz amplifies a core point about the absence of consensus and control in Weimar, the paramilitaries (which included the Left but were much more widespread among the Right) being only the most pointed illustration of the pitched battle to seize and wield power by naked force, not via the force-blunting mechanisms of a constitutional democracy. Weitz also initiates an examination of the broad, multifaceted problem of tradition vs. modernity, singling out the Prussian and German military as an example of how old ways of thought, organization, action refused to bend to the new liberty and equity envisioned in the constitution.

After a concise fourth chapter that elaborates on, but does not belabor, important economic points made in Chapter Three, Weitz crosses the divide between the stuff of traditional historiography and that of culture. He starts with territory already probed in the walking chapter: architecture. We come to know Bruno Taut as a modernist who, though introducing Taylorism to the home, always retained a "humane element"; Mendelsohn as visionary whose fixation on the relationship of building and place and...