"Vertigo
By Harald Jahner
Basic, 480 pages, $35
The Weimar Years
By Frank McDonough
Apollo, 592 pages, $45
Any account of Germany's economically embattled, politically fractured and culturally avant-garde Weimar Republic is haunted by the same, insistent question: How could Weimar fail and Hitler happen?
Harald Jahner's "Vertigo: The Rise and Fall of Weimar Germany" and Frank McDonough's "The Weimar Years: Rise and Fall 1918-1933" examine the era through different lenses.
But both emphasize Germany's yearning for national unity after years of chaos and disruption.
Mr. Jahner highlights the "dizzying, vertiginous excitement" of interwar Germany. A German cultural journalist and the former editor of the Berliner Zeitung, he explores the country's "emotional manifestations such as unease, confidence, anxiety, ennui, self-reliance, a desire to consume, a desire to dance, a hunger for experience, pride and hatred" -- an even tougher and more inchoate task than chronicling the rapid succession of governments that alternately stabilized and threatened German democracy.
Not that Mr. Jahner ignores that tumultuous history. But, as in his excellent 2022 book, "Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, 1945-1955," he unearths lesser-known stories as well. So we learn, for example, that Billy Wilder, the Oscar-winning director of such films as "Sunset Boulevard" (1950) and "Some Like It Hot" (1959), was not only a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany but, at one point, a gigolo in a Berlin dance hall.
Mr. McDonough, a British historian whose previous books include the two-volume history "The Hitler Years" (2021), mentions some enduring cultural touchstones: Fritz Lang's 1927 Expressionist film, "Metropolis"; Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's "The Threepenny Opera" (1928); and Erich Maria Remarque's 1929 novel, "All Quiet on the Western Front." He also nods to the cabaret scene, the Bauhaus and other artistic movements, and the pioneering work of Magnus Hirschfeld and his Institute of Sexual Science.
But Mr. McDonough's focus and passion lie elsewhere. He delineates in unrelenting chronological detail the parliamentary scuffles, cabinet maneuverings, economic upheavals, diplomatic logjams, violent street battles, assassinations and political dysfunction that led, finally, to Hitler's disastrous chancellorship.
The Germany he depicts is "a crisis-ridden society that gradually became politically ungovernable."
While Mr. Jahner's narrative seems at times disjointed and idiosyncratic, Mr. McDonough's, with its exhaustively repetitive listing of election results and cabinet reshuffles, can be impenetrably dense. But each is a serious, deeply researched addition to the literature, and they complement each other nicely.
Mr. Jahner sees Weimar as "surprisingly contemporary at one moment, weirdly alien the next," even at times "almost more modern than we are." He draws on newspaper advertisements, photographs, manifestos, diaries, songs, novels and films to survey a jumble of topics: among others, the absurdities of hyperinflation, the rise of prostitution, the influx of female office workers, the blurring of gender roles and the primacy of leisure. Weimar culture thrived, he suggests, even when everything else seemed to be falling apart. "The light-entertainment muse of 1920s Germany, like popular culture today," Mr. Jahner writes, "did not skirt around suffering, but helped to process and endure it."
Mr. Jahner instructively quotes the diary of Luise Solmitz, a teacher married to a Jewish convert to Protestantism. Solmitz was aware of Hitler's dangerous racial theories, but nevertheless praised him as embodying "the soul of our people." The National Socialists turned "an economic depression into a mental crisis," Mr. Jahner writes.
And it was, ultimately, "not economic hardship, nor humiliation by the Versailles Treaty" that made Solmitz and others "sink into Hitler's arms, but an intoxicating sense of unity."
Hitler figures far more prominently in Mr. McDonough's account. It credits the future dictator's uneven but seemingly inexorable rise to his unifying emotional appeal, his oratorical abilities, and such campaign innovations as targeted direct mail and cross-country rallies enabled by charter flights.
One of the main threads of "The Weimar Years" is Germany's efforts to lighten the burden of the reparations imposed after World War I by the Treaty of Versailles. Weimar diplomats repeatedly negotiated with the Allies over payments as well as the occupation of Germany's industrial Ruhr region.
Too often, Mr. McDonough suggests, premature deaths robbed the country of its best leaders: Walther Rathenau, the foreign minister assassinated by right-wing nationalists in 1922; Friedrich Ebert, the Social Democratic president who died in 1925 after an appendectomy; and Gustav Stresemann, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning chancellor and foreign minister felled by a stroke in 1929. Mr. McDonough describes Stresemann as the one Weimar politician who might have saved German democracy.
The book's most fascinating section is its chronicle of the complex web of events that led to Hitler's chancellorship. The German people were not blameless, having given Hitler's party a plurality -- never a majority -- of the vote in two 1932 elections. Proportional representation and other constitutional weaknesses, including the ability of the president to skirt the Reichstag and suspend civil rights, already had impaired Weimar democracy. In the face of mass unemployment, the Social Democrats and Communists failed to find common ground; the political center all but disappeared and power became concentrated in "a small circle" of antidemocratic individuals around President Paul von Hindenburg.
Hindenburg kept juggling chancellors in pursuit of economic and political stability. Finally he turned to Hitler, an avowed dictator-in-waiting empowered by his electoral popularity. It was a crucial miscalculation. Mr. McDonough lambasts Hindenburg as "the gravedigger and the undertaker" of Weimar democracy.
Both authors extrapolate contemporary lessons. Weimar shows "how a democracy under poor leadership" can drift toward "a form of authoritarian rule that ultimately destroys it," Mr. McDonough writes. Mr. Jahner argues that the people of Weimar "felt that their society was torn, split into irreconcilably opposed worlds that would never be mutually comprehensible." Even so, they could have rebuffed Hitler's inflammatory rhetoric at the ballot box. "At the time," Mr. Jahner writes, "they couldn't see exactly how important that choice was."" [1]
1. REVIEW --- Books: A Decade on the Edge. Klein, Julia M. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 28 Sep 2024: C.12.
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