Hitler's Rise, Through One Man's Eyes

“Weimar

 

By Katja Hoyer

 

Basic, 496 pages, $35

 

Founded amid Germany's defeat in World War I, the Weimar Republic ended in 1933 when Adolf Hitler took power. Nearly a century later, the short-lived state is a warning about the failures of liberal democracy and the values in which we locate our strength.

 

The Weimar Republic is named for the quaint, cobbled city that hosted the new state's constituent assembly in 1919. The same year, Walter Gropius opened the Bauhaus school of art and design in Weimar, making the city synonymous with modernity. Yet Weimar was also the site of a milestone Nazi Party rally in 1926. It was the capital of Thuringia, which in 1930 became the first German state to appoint a Nazi minister. In 1937 the Nazis opened the Buchenwald concentration camp on a hill 5 miles from the city.

 

Katja Hoyer's "Weimar" is a powerful and detailed reconstruction of a "stark and terrifying example of a collapsed democracy" and how that collapse consumed the conscience of a particular city. Ms. Hoyer, a German-British historian and journalist, chooses as her protagonist not Hitler, a frequent Weimar visitor, but Carl Weirich, a hardworking bookbinder, stationer and diarist.

 

"Faced with the great developments of world history," Weirich wrote in 1925, "the individual is powerless." A Protestant born in 1885, Weirich opened his shop in Weimar shortly before the outbreak of World War I in 1914. He and his wife, Friedel, lost their daughter, Wilfriede, to an "inflammation of the brain" in 1918. Friedel died of tuberculosis in 1920, a year of price inflation that drove Weimar's suicide rate to double the national average. Weirich rebuilt his life. In 1923, when the Allies discussed Germany's default on its reparations payments and the Bauhaus held its debut exhibition, Weirich bought a bicycle for his new wife, Marie. Their son, Wilhelm, was born in 1926.

 

Weimar in the early 1920s was a bohemia where a young Marlene Dietrich, studying violin in the city, could meet Alma Mahler, the widow of Gustav and former wife of Gropius. But in Thuringia's 1924 state elections, the Social Democrats lost to a conservative-nationalist alliance. Not much for art or politics, Weirich, Ms. Hoyer writes, was "unperturbed by the seismic historical shifts underneath the surface of German society." He seems to have missed the Bauhaus's forced departure from Weimar in 1925, and the arrival that year of Hitler, recently out of prison after the failed Beer Hall Putsch in Munich. The agitator lodged at the Hotel Hohenzollern, run by Arthur Schmidt (a war veteran) and his wife, Rosa (who was Jewish). On later visits, Hitler stayed at the Hotel Elephant, which, located by the market square, was more convenient for haranguing the public.

 

On July 3, 1926, Marie Weirich celebrated her 40th birthday at the family apartment. In the hotel next door, Joseph Goebbels was resting after a long train journey. In the afternoon, Goebbels and Heinrich Himmler toured Weimar by motorcycle. They would join some 8,000 attendees outside the Elephant for a rally that weekend. Hitler debuted a Roman-style public salute, and a policeman was shot. "The Third Reich is coming," Goebbels wrote in his diary.

 

Weirich and Goebbels weren't the only diarists in town. The year after the Nazi rally, Elisabeth Forster-Nietzsche, who ran Weimar's Nietzsche Archive, hosted a conference devoted to her philosopher-brother, Friedrich, who had died in 1900. One of the attendees was Harry Graf Kessler, an Anglo-German count of liberal politics. "I stayed silent out of politeness," Kessler wrote about Forster-Nietzsche's admiration of Benito Mussolini. To avoid offending her, he went to a lecture by Oswald Spengler, the author of "The Decline of the West," published in two volumes in 1918 and 1922.

 

Kessler thought Spengler a "fat priest with a fat chin and brutal mouth" and his theories "the most hackneyed, trivial stuff," but Kessler sensed the ominous turn in Germany's cultural politics. Down at the Hohenzollern, Hitler denounced Jews and jazz to a "full and raucous" crowd while Arthur and Rosa served beer.

 

The Nazis won only 2.6% of the votes in the 1928 German elections. Across Thuringia, their support was 3.7%. But 11% of Weimarers voted for the party. The economic crisis of 1929 exacerbated the constitutional weaknesses of the Weimar Republic. Weirich expected a "better future" after Hitler became chancellor in 1933. Thuringia, Ms. Hoyer writes, "had a head start in the Nazification of society." By January 1935 Thuringia had nearly 100,000 Nazi Party members. The Nazis had the "tacit support of much of the population," and no one bothered Hitler while he relaxed at Weimar's Kaiser Cafe.

 

After 1937, Weimar's businessmen supplied Buchenwald with electricity, water, meat and timber. Bookbinders, Ms. Hoyer notes, "made the cardboard boxes in which the urns with the ashes of victims were sent to their families," provided the families paid a small administration fee. Town authorities received "frequent complaints" about the "black, foul-smelling fumes" from the city's crematorium. Yet residents looked the other way as corpses fell off the vehicles traveling to the cemetery.

 

Weirich must have known about the book burnings and anti-Jewish laws, but he was at first largely silent about them in his diary. He celebrated a good year in 1937 because, as Germany militarized, everyone needed paper for their windows to conduct blackout exercises. Weirich only started to wonder whether Germany had gone irreversibly wrong in May 1938, when he learned that his house was scheduled for leveling for Weimar's remodeling on Nazi lines, and in November, when the Kristallnacht pogrom confirmed what he privately called the "increasing persecution of Jews" that "blasphemed against God Himself."

 

"Hitler's Germany unleashed the Furies of war," Weirich observed after the Nazi invasion of Poland in September 1939. Ms. Hoyer consigns Weirich's wartime experiences to an epilogue. American bombers damaged his shop and home in early 1945. When the Americans reached Weimar in April, Weirich was ordered to march through the hellish debris of Buchenwald to clear up the camp on a work detail. By then Rosa Schmidt had died at Auschwitz after the Gestapo identified her as Jewish. Weirich described his shame at the "atrocious crimes committed by us." His son, Wilhelm, survived his service in the Wehrmacht, only to be arrested after Weimar changed from American to Soviet control. Wilhelm would die in the erstwhile Nazi camp at Sachsenhausen in 1947.

 

His life ruined for a second time, Weirich didn't dwell on "his own responsibility," Ms. Hoyer writes, but rebuilt again. The shop owner who stocked pens and books for schoolchildren was, a neighbor tells her, the "kindest man." Not all of Weimar's residents were monsters. But as Ms. Hoyer's book makes clear, the city showed as much cowardice as kindness.

 

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Mr. Green is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a Free Expression columnist at WSJ Opinion.” [1]

 

1. REVIEW --- Books: Hitler's Rise, Through One Man's Eyes. Green, Dominic.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 17 Oct 2026: C7.