Weimar Germany: Death of a Democracy by Victor Sebestyen
In his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon suggested history is “little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind”.
Victor Sebestyen’s outstanding account of the decline and fall of the Weimar Republic is subtitled Death of a Democracy, but might equally well have been called A Study in Crime, Folly and Misfortune.
He reminds us of the appalling level of political violence, including numerous assassinations, between November 1918, when Kaiser Wilhelm abdicated, and January 1933, when Hitler was made Chancellor.
The judiciary, which remained monarchist by conviction, imposed negligible sentences on right-wing assassins and thugs, or often no sentence at all. Democracy went unprotected by the rule of law.
The Social Democrats and the Jews were blamed for Germany’s defeat in the First World War, for which it would have been much more just to blame the Kaiser and the German high command, notably Hindenburg and Ludendorff.
The idea took hold that the army had not been defeated in 1918, but had been stabbed in the back. This refusal to admit defeat made another war more likely.
Sebestyen observes that Hindenburg was a coward, who dodged moral responsibility. On running in 1925 for the office of President of the Weimar Republic, which he won, Hindenburg took to wearing once more the Pickelhaube, or spiked helmet, and “looked like a substitute Kaiser”, as the novelist and journalist Joseph Roth remarked.
Hindenburg paved the way for Hitler by seeking to rule by decree, which unfortunately was allowed under the Weimar Constitution. In 1933 he made Hitler Chancellor.
But one of the merits of this book is that it is not dominated by the despicable Austrian corporal. Weimar is studied for its own sake, rather than as a mere prelude to the Nazi period, 1933-45.
Sebestyen is a witty and sardonic impresario, presenting star after star, showing us what is astonishing about each one of them, but allowing none to hog the limelight for too long.
Albert Einstein, George Grosz, Bertolt Brecht, Max Liebermann, Kurt Tucholsky, Marlene Dietrich, Billy Wilder, Thomas Mann and Erich Maria Remarque are among the geniuses who adorned Weimar.
Friedrich Ebert, the Social Democrat who became the first President of the Republic, serving from 1919 until his death in 1925, was not a genius, but an honest, stolid pragmatist who unfortunately reckoned it was necessary to defend the Republic by making a pact with the impenitent army.
Liebermann, a brilliant portrait artist, said of Ebert that he was a “decent, honourable and patriotic German…but one can’t paint him”, for the President was without colour.
The gravest threat to the Republic appeared in its first years to come from Soviet Russia, which strove to foment revolution in Germany by issuing inept instructions to the German Communist Party, kept in a condition of abject subservience to Moscow.
The German Left was from the first deeply split between the Social Democrats and the Communists, and in the crisis of the early 1930s the two parties were unable to reunite in order to check the surging power of the Nazis.
Walter Rathenau, the brilliant and cultivated Jewish industrialist who had ensured that until a late point in the First World War the German army got the supplies it needed, was one of the honourable, intelligent, principled figures who devoted themselves to the service of the new Republic.
In February 1922 he accepted the post of Foreign Minister, well knowing the risks of doing so. As Sebestyen records, a century before the invention of social media Rathenau received vast quantities of hate mail.
When asked why people hated him so much, he replied:
“The reason is simple: if you are Jewish and conduct a foreign policy that is good for Germany, you’re the living proof that the anti-Semitic theory that Jews are bad for Germany is nonsense.”
In June 1922 Rathenau was assassinated while riding in an open-topped car to work. Sebastian Haffner, at that point a student and later a brilliant journalist and historian in both Britain and Germany, recalled: “One felt the ground shift under one’s feet.”
Huge spontaneous demonstrations broke out in Berlin, Hamburg, Leipzig, Munich and Cologne. The loss of Rathenau was felt as an irreparable blow.
So too the loss in October 1929, from natural causes, of Gustav Stresemann, the pre-eminent statesman of the Weimar Republic, one of the architects in 1925 of the Locarno Treaty, by which Germany’s pariah status was ended and friendship with France and other European powers restored.
In 1925 it seemed things were set fair. The great inflation which had wiped out German savings was over, and so was the French occupation of the Ruhr. American investment was now flooding into German industry, which was reviving by leaps and bounds.
The Wall Street Crash of October 1929 brought an end to all that. Foreign investment dried up, so did foreign trade, and Germany was soon beset by monstrous levels of unemployment, desperate hunger, malnourished children, sufferings which the state could not relieve, the hollowing out of constitutional politics, a flight to the extremes.
Thomas Mann was among those who witnessed with horror the Nazi electoral breakthrough in 1930. He called for the formation of “a common front of decency“, with
“sane intellectuals to unite against the ultra-nationalists and their pseudo-intellectual quackery…This fantastic state of mind, of a humanity that has outrun its ideas, is matched by a political scene in the grotesque style…of hallelujahs, bell ringing and dervish-like repetition of catchwords, until everybody foams at the mouth.”
Sane intellectuals were unfortunately no match, in the unfolding economic disaster, for unscrupulous propagandists peddling lies and impossibilities in which millions of people wished to believe.
The 400 pages of this book are divided into 36 short chapters. Our guide conducts us through the cabarets for which Berlin was famous, the Babelsberg film studios from which so many directors and actors fled to Hollywood, the diaries in which Count Harry Kessler and Victor Klemperer recorded the vivid life of Weimar.
While working as a journalist in Berlin in the 1990s, I could never work out how one might write a vivid book about Germany after 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell, or indeed about Germany after the Second World War.
Sebestyen with great good sense ends his account on 30th January 1933, the day Hitler became Chancellor. But to read about Weimar, the jokes, the modernity, the decadent excesses, the reactionary longings, the divisions, the collapse, is in a sense also to read about West Germany after 1949.
The Bonn Republic was motivated by a prudent, unadventurous, admirable determination to avoid repeating the dreadful errors which had led to the fall of the Weimar Republic.