Reading History and a Century Ago

For some number of years, I've been reading a variety of history books that either caught my immediate interest or were meant to deepen my understanding after a previous history read. I grasped a practitioner's considerable viewpoints on Cold War diplomacy by reading John Lewis Gaddis' excellent biography of George Kennan, following it up with Zara Steiner's monumental history in two volumes of diplomacy in the interwar period of 1919 to 1939. Gerhard Weinberg's A World At Arms, A Global History of World War II, was the first comprehensive history of that conflict that I read, back in the 1990s. Since then, Churchill's multi-volume memoir of the war, and a couple of biographies of the Third Reich and Hitler, rounded out some of my understanding of the war that ended just eleven years before I was born.

The histories of the interwar period are my most recent reads of the past. You could say I became somewhat obsessed with the Weimar Republic era, 1919 to 1933. My interest comes from a desire to understand more about the German people and the unusual flourishing of the Weimar culture, which was pushed aside for the totalitarian control of the Nazis. The militant drive of the Prussians, whose history goes back to at least the Renaissance, arose as a popular reason for the German peoples' acceptance of Hitler and his followers. How close to the mark is this point of view? That's a question I think I wanted to find an answer to, when I started exploring the Weimar period.

There has been a renewal of interest in 1920s Germany because of the rise of authoritarianism in the past decade of our own time, as well as the centennial of that short-lived democracy. Following the most hellish wartime experience of 1914 to 1918, Europeans were hungry for peace and order. The abdication of power by the Germany emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm II, opened a power vacuum that both the Communists and the Social Democrats hurried to fill, with the latter winning the day, partly because they represented more of the German populace, and partly because they entreated the old guard, the military and the civil service, to help them stabilize the regime. Thus, the Weimar Republic was born.

It's been said that the republic should not have sought the help of the military, and should have replaced the old bureaucracy with a newer, fresher republic. This would have included new magistrates and judges throughout the land. Yet the republic, once it solved it's currency crisis in 1924, was in a position to use democratic principles to strengthen it's acceptance in the country, not just among the urban population, where most of their support was found.

Germany during the latter half of the 1920s was becoming more prosperous, but its central government was still under attack from both the left and the right political extremists. The inability of the government to be build on a stable coalition of parties became a reason for the extremists to persist in their demands. The Communists, flush with zeal from the 1917 Russian Revolution, were intent on establishing a Communist government, while the Nazis and various other right-wing parties, wanted a return to the old monarchy. The Nazis, in fact, wanted far more, as we were to find out.

The effects of the Great Depression on Germany ultimately led to a desperation by the people for solutions to the economic crisis. A nation used to leadership from an elite few, in the form of the monarchy, did not have confidence that the republic would solve the crisis. It's easy for us in the 21st century to forget how information was disseminated a century ago. It's even worse that we thought in Germany, because most newspapers were not sold on the street corner, on a stand next to a. variety of other newspapers. Germans subscribed to papers which were then mailed to them. This resulted in the creation of an echo chamber where most people believed what they were reading and continued to subscribe to the same biased beliefs. I learned this from some of my reading of the Weimar period, and it shocked me. This was the creation of a form of information bubble that we find in today's world of social media.

The combination of economic crisis, fighting in the streets between left and right wing gangs and the creation of information bubbles, are some of the aspects of life in the late 1920s that led to the fall of the Weimar Republic.