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Tuesday 2 December 2008

Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy

Daring to defy the myth

Justin Cartwright reviews Eric D. Weitz's book

Weimar lasted 14 years, the Third Reich only 12. Yet Weimar is always seen as a prelude to the Third Reich, which appears to have been created by Weimar’s failures.

Actually, as Eric Weitz argues, the Weimar Republic (1919-1933) was not responsible for the Reich; it was a democratic, socially aware and progressive government, way ahead of many other European governments in its introduction of workers’ rights, public housing, unemployment benefit and suffrage for women. However, Weimar was, from the beginning, the target of the anti-democratic forces of the established Right — as Weitz describes the disparate forces which could be found in the nobility, the army, business, the churches and in the civil service. They, long before Hitler, were responsible for propagating the myth of the Dolschstoss, the stab in the back, and they were the people who would never accept that the first world war was the product of German militarism. In fact it suited all parties, even those who had signed the Treaty of Versailles, to pretend that Germany had fought a just and successful war before being betrayed.

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