Thoroughly Modern Milieux

The Weimar Republic is considered by some to be a “gay” period in history, based largely on Christopher Isherwood and The Berlin Stories, as filtered through the movie version of Cabaret. Or if we’re honest, what we actually think of is Michael York, and we speculate just how he “earned” that sky-blue sweater. A cabaret, indeed.

On the hunch that reality is somewhat less titillating than the movies, we take up The Weimar Republic by Detlev J. K. Peukert. This volume presents two challenges to the reader. First, the author assumes we already know the timeline of events during the Republic, a flattering assumption which leads to a great deal of googling. More significantly, and distinctly out of pattern for this publication, Peukert provides a consideration of causes, of why the Weimar unfolded the way it did, rather than focusing on events and people. His is the analysis rather than the news story, the concordance rather than the scripture. The result is a volume we recommend only conditionally…more on that toward the end.

As to scope, the author focuses on the nominal Weimar years (the constitution was signed on August 11, 1919; it ceased to function in practice on January 30, 1933), but he traces the Republic’s origins to the beginning of the twentieth century, and to a lesser extent, anticipates the Second World War. All in the context of Germany’s response to “Modernism.”

Modernism is central to understanding Peukert. You may have encountered the term before in conjunction with art, or with architecture. Modernism did influence those fields, as well as most other academic realms, from criticism to typography. The Bauhaus may be its most concrete expression, and Modernism has, in fact, been defined by some as “a way of thinking,” a way of understanding the world. The world needed it. For the Germans, the end of World War I was attended by the fall of the Hohenzollern dynasty, who had been ruling Prussia in one form or another beginning sometime before A.D. 1061; new government was required. The twentieth century brought its own baggage in the form of new technologies to which people were adapting (electricity comes to mind…electrically amplified speech made mass political rallies possible), and the war brought unfamiliar economic conditions. Peukert asserts that economic inflation was unknown in Germany in the nineteenth century, but during the pre-war and war years of 1913-1918 wholesale prices slightly more than doubled. (Inflation was to run rampant after the war.) Various political and social factions saw the fall of the Hohenzollerns as an opportunity to improve their lot, and so they agitated for their own causes. These forces were very modern, and the Weimar Republic sought to incorporate all of them.

This plurality left Weimar building on a weak foundation. Countries, especially successful ones, often have an inspiring creation story of one sort or another to bind the populace together. The Americans and French have revolutions as their birthright, while the British can point to the Norman Conquest...or Æthelstan’s expulsion of the Danes, depending on your point of view. The Weimar Republic lacked an equivalent moment of drama and heroism: the Germans lost the war and then negotiated a compromise government. Like most compromises, it came down to all parties saying, “I don’t like it, but I can live with it.” It was that lack of enthusiasm for the Republic that clouded its governance from the start.

Unusually for us, Peukert is an author with a definite political viewpoint, in his case Marxist. Labor and capital get particular attention in the book, and it is true that labor associations had been growing through the early twentieth century in Germany. The Weimar constitution promised elements of a social financial safety net, and our author deems the Republic a “welfare state,” due to its promises. (Hey, he said it, I didn’t.) However grand the promises of social support, reality interfered. The German economy was tattered by the war, and its heavy industry was restricted by the Treaty of Versailles. Versailles also imposed financial reparations on Germany, discussed below, which reduced its ability to pay for social programs. And of course there was the world financial crisis we know as the Great Depression. Germany simply did not have the capacity for a welfare state, and the programs became too much bureaucracy administering too few benefit dollars. The effort was finally abandoned in the early 1930s. Peukert sees a direct link between abandoning the welfare state and the Nazi racial persecutions. Speaking of the Nazi “final solution,” the mass extermination of Jews and other undesirables (which would include us), he writes, “…by starting the process of dismantling the welfare state…they had undoubtedly helped pave the way for it.”

A position that seems extreme to a non-Marxist, but plenty of other factors were working toward the Republic’s end.

War reparations are a big topic for the period, and another point on which our author has an idiosyncratic view. Most commentators report that the post-war reparations were entirely too burdensome for Germany to pay, and with the Depression, hastened Weimar’s downfall. Peukert believes that the actual level of reparations was manageable, but their rollout was badly handled. Versailles called for reparations in 1919 but delayed setting their level until 1921. This timing left the Germans with two years of anxiety, knowing the financial burden was coming, but not knowing its extent. During this period, a German mindset developed that any level of reparation was unacceptable, that payments of any sort represented oppression of the German people. When the level of payment was announced, two factions emerged. The first advocated for non-payment out of the gate, in an effort to renegotiate terms; the second, led by foreign minister Gustav Stresemann, sought to fulfill the first payments on time to garner good will, then demonstrate the huge gash they took from the German economy to press for reduction. The second option was pursued first, but ultimately lack of cash made the discussion moot, and payments stopped in the summer of 1931.

The rise of Hitler and the National Socialists gets fairly little airplay in the book…it is a book about the Weimar Republic, after all, not the Third Reich. National Socialism was a small party, polling only 2.63% of the vote in the 1928 elections, rising to 18.25% by the 1930 election. However small initially, their strength was growing. In the latter 1920s, the government had become more conservative and began looking to invest more power in a strong President. Field Marshall Paul von Hindenburg, who rose to power in imperial times, took office and ruled in a decidedly nineteenth century, authoritative fashion. On January 30, 1933, a new government was announced with Hitler as chancellor…it was felt that with Hindenburg as president and reliable conservatives holding the majority of cabinet positions, the established leaders could leverage Hitler’s popularity while constraining him politically.

Wrong, as it turns out.

Which begs the question: since Hitler and the Nazis proved to be uniquely evil, was there something unique about Germany’s historic arc, and more specifically something unique to the nation’s response to modernist pressures? It is an idea called deutscher Sondeweg, which our author translates as “special path of German development.” After a great deal of consideration, Peukert comes down on the side of “no,” deciding that the German response to Modernism was no different in kind than other industrializing nations. Weimar, he finds, fell for much more mundane reasons. He even finds that authoritarianism succeeded, just with Hitler and the Nazis running the show, rather than Hindenburg and the former bourgeoise.

To be very clear: Peukert is no fan of Hitler, the Nazis, or all that came after.

But he does represent a particular moment in academia. The book was published in German in 1989, translated by Richard Deveson, and published in English in 1992. (Peukert died in 1990, of AIDS.) In it, a reader who lived through those years can see the 1960s view of academia as a “marketplace of ideas” turning to the twenty-first century’s codified political correctness. It is, in fact, the sort of book we normally avoid like the plague around here, since its topic is the author’s ideas about facts, rather than the facts themselves. The work is redeemed by two qualities: first, the author is honest that he is expressing opinion, he does not purport it to be otherwise; and second, he bases many of his ideas on solid economic data. The Curmudgeon learned a good bit from the book, and in that sense can recommend it. It is not, however, for all tastes or even most purposes. Having walked on the intellectual wild side of interpretive history, we shall return to the factual lanes of study hereafter.

Mostly.

As to the Weimar Republic, Peukert lays blame for its fall ultimately to (a) the economic and social crisis of the 1920s-1930s; (b) the collapse of the compromises that founded Weimar; and (c) the reversion to authority…led, in Peukert’s view, by “old anti-republican élites.” (I did warn you about the Marxist thing.) Some readers will find parallels between the Republic’s last days and current events, but we shall leave those comparisons to the individual…you don’t live to be as old as the Curmudgeon by deliberately stepping on land mines. But it is worth observing that the Weimar Republic ultimately collapsed when the country lost faith in both the constitution and the laws that it created.

When they ceased to believe in the fundamental social contract that underlaid the Republic, chaos ensued.