Germany between the world wars in the popular imagination is often considered a peculiar combination of louche debauchery and jackbooted dictatorship, millions of Neros fiddling while the fatherland burns (books). German/British historian Katja Hoyer, however, paints a far more nuanced account of the country via Weimar, the spiritual and cultural heart of Germany.
The focal point of the German enlightenment, Weimar had been home to Goethe, Schiller, Liszt and Nietzsche, and was the birthplace of the innovative Bauhaus art movement. It was in Weimar that Germany’s first democratic constitution was created and signed, lending its name to the ill-fated Weimar Republic (1918-1933).
However, Weimar was also beloved of the Nazi leadership. Adolf Hitler spent a lot of time in the Thuringian town, which was also a favourite of Joseph Goebbels, who wrote of “glorious Weimar ... a place of the blessed culture of a more beautiful time”. Hitler even briefly toyed with the idea of moving the Nazi Party headquarters to Weimar, where the blueprint for all Nazi rallies was developed.
Hoyer uses Weimar as a microcosm, to explain how Germany lurched “from one of the most liberal democracies in the world to a genocidal dictatorship” in just a few short years. She brilliantly recounts the interwar years through the eyes of its citizens, using diaries and first-hand accounts to narrate the slide into Nazism. Bookbinder Carl Weirich initially welcomes Hitler’s rise, as the charismatic Austrian drags a teetering Germany up by its bootstraps, while hoteliers Arthur and Rosa Schmidt, whose venue regularly hosted Nazi conventions, spend years hoping Rosa’s Jewish heritage will remain undiscovered.
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We also meet aristocrat, diplomat and libertarian Harry Graf Kessler, the son of a Hamburg banker and an Anglo-Irish noblewoman, and Elisabeth-Forster Nietzsche, sister of the late philosopher. Elisabeth initially rejects the Nazis as uncultured and boorish, but subsequently embraces the regime as the best hope for the preservation of her brother’s archive. Harry alone seems to glimpse just how bad things might get.
Even when recounting infamous events like Kristallnacht and the horrors of the nearby Buchenwald concentration camp, Hoyer serves up history with a human heart. In doing so, she helps us understand “the most stark and terrifying example of a collapsed democracy in Western history” in a bid to ensure it doesn’t happen again.
John Walshe is a freelance reviewer
