Germany Had A Working Vibrant Republic, The Wrong Votes Brought An Autocrat

 

For nearly a century, the Weimar Republic has served as the West’s compact mirror, pundits compulsively checking it for ominous signs of resemblance. Is society more polarized? Is the press increasingly in the hands of bombastic billionaires? Do monopolists seem eager to work with demagogues to protect their interests? Are new technologies threatening to make the world unrecognizable? Weimar Germany, those 14 fateful years between the Kaiserreich’s defeat in World War I and Hitler’s ascent to power, has something for everyone, a bountiful supply of déjà vu and I-told-you-so.

Our public life is rife with professional apocalypticians ready to lay out the doomsday parallels and declare that we are living in 1929 or 1931 or 1933. As with the poster that popped up on billboards around interwar Berlin commanding “Pause, Berlin! Reflect. Your dance partner is death,” there’s an element of maximal stakes in the macabre cris de coeur.

This illustration shows a poster, printed in black ink on a beige background, featuring a skeleton dancing with a woman in a crown and flowing dress. To the left of the couple appear the words, in German, in a Gothic script: “Pause, Berlin! Reflect. Your dance partner is dead.” 
This poster, which appeared on billboards in Berlin during the Weimar Republic, states: “Pause, Berlin! Reflect. Your dance partner is dead.”Credit...Library of Congress

In “Vertigo: The Rise and Fall of Weimar Germany,” Harald Jähner, a former editor at the Berliner Zeitung, one of the country’s finer dailies, and the author of “Aftermath,” a dexterous survey of Germany in the decade after 1945, sets out to tell a more coolheaded story of the country’s fleeting experiment with democracy. For the most part, he is admirably restrained about drawing neat historical lessons. But the trouble with writing about Weimar, as the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk once noted, is that it “stands before us as the most self-aware epoch of history.” There are few things left to be said about the Germans in this period that they were not already thinking about themselves — often on a more elevated, interesting plane than their epigones. At times it can seem as if everyone in the country were keeping a febrile diary and cogitating in grand essays about the crisis unfolding around them. 

Named for the town in Thuringia where Germany’s postwar constitution was signed in 1919, the Weimar Republic was an embattled project from the beginning. But it was not, Jähner contends, one predestined to fail. The two principal ways of understanding Weimar have been to look at it as a kind of last station — or even paradise — of cultural and social experimentation that never recovered from the fascism that followed, or as a source of moral instruction for what modern democracies should avoid.

In “Vertigo,” Jähner tries to have it both ways, blending secondhand nostalgia with a mild didacticism. He has no trouble showing that Weimar produced, as he claims, “the most exciting social tableaux that Germany has ever seen.” It was a time when Berlin liked to think of itself as the world capital of modernity’s contradictions, where the seeds of catastrophe were located in the striving for normalcy. He takes Lotte Laserstein’s 1930 painting “Evening Over Potsdam” as the age’s presiding artwork: an exhausted group of people settling after dinner — a Jazz Age last supper — into the anxiety of what’s to come.

Two generations experienced the sort of turbulence in which, as Walter Benjamin wrote, “nothing remained unchanged but the clouds.” The Bauhaus reinvented architecture, and dance hall patrons fused modern American rhythms with classical forms, while Bertolt Brecht and Erwin Piscator fashioned a new political theater, and Fritz Lang revolutionized film.

Jähner takes us behind the received stories of these movements to show us less familiar figures: the textile designer Gunta Stölzl, who, condescended to by better-known members of the Bauhaus, ran one of the group’s most successful commercial ventures; Billy Wilder, then a struggling journalist who worked as a gigolo at the Hotel Eden, getting paid to fox-trot and Charleston women around the dance floor. We join the writer Joseph Roth on a bender across the capital (“I step inside one of the usual Berlin nightspots, not to cheer myself up, but to enjoy the schadenfreude that the sight of industrialized frivolity gives me”).

 

The cover of “Vertigo,” by Harald Jähner, is a black-and-white photo showing, silhouetted against a background of large Art Deco windows, five lightly attired women performing a modern dance number on the rungs of, beneath and around a step ladder. 

But if Jähner makes some piquant additions to the cultural lore of Weimar, his political history is more dubious. His book is a softly delivered defense of the “thankless reputation” of the Social Democratic leader Friedrich Ebert, who led the republic for six years after Germany’s loss in World War I. (Jähner chides the Weimar painter George Grosz for being too hard on the fledgling republic; he depicted Ebert, for example, as a luxuriant ogre of the German middle class.) Ebert himself saw stability in moving toward the conservatives and crushing critics to his left. Along with his bloodthirsty defense minister Gustav Noske, he oversaw the massacre of workers protesting his government’s compromises with the right. 

For Jähner, however, the greater crime was committed by the communists, who refused to get with the government’s program. The revolutionary socialist Rosa Luxemburg, he writes, “was not, whatever people think, an ardent democrat who wanted to persuade people rather than fight them.” Such a verdict depends on whether you believe democracy is more about having the means to participate in the decisions of society, or about following parliamentary procedure.

On foreign policy, Jähner, too, takes the decidedly centrist view that the republic could have kept going indefinitely had its government listened to the wise minister Gustav Stresemann, who wanted to fulfill the demands of the Versailles Treaty by reorganizing the debt payments. This, even though, as Jähner acknowledges, “Many people felt as if they were in a branch of America, remote controlled by the victorious power that held Germany in a stranglehold.”

“Vertigo,” capably translated by Shaun Whiteside, is at its most astute regarding Nazi ideology. Jähner explains how the “grand opera of Nazi economic theory” functioned by making the dignity of labor a central theme. Instead of pitting the new class of industrial workers against the business class, as the communists did, the Nazis cleverly invoked the idea of a unified Volk as a way to cover any difference in material interests. The Volk ideology cast its spell by promising a form of “equality for which neither side had to pay.”

As Jähner shows, the old German elites who thought they could use Hitler and his hooligans to drum up popular support for an authoritarian state ultimately got things backward: It was Hitler who had much more use for the way they had whittled Weimar democracy down to its authoritarian core, though, unlike some other early Nazis, he offered a version of National Socialism that was thoroughly friendly to capital.

 

It’s perhaps no accident that the two greatest German books on Weimar in the past decades — Detlev Peukert’s “The Weimar Republic” (for politics) and Sloterdijk’s “Critique of Cynical Reason” (for culture) — appeared in the 1980s, when Western societies were openly disenchanted with their governments, decolonization movements had disappointed them and the postwar welfare settlement was breaking down. “Vertigo” is also a book of its moment, but one that hazards far fewer provocations, in this way seeming firmly to belong to the Angela Merkel-Olaf Scholz era: It is the story of a delicate democratic organism that was done in by too many radical demands being put on it.

The trouble is less the passion for stability that Jähner evinces or his belief that the end of Weimar was a tragedy. It was, not only for Hitler’s victims but also for the future Federal Republic, which has, for instance, never reclaimed the Weimar-era ambition to eradicate hierarchy from education. But a book about Weimar should tell us less about ourselves than about German consciousness on the other side of 1933. The period is so encrusted in caricature that it requires a harder hammer to expose what stumbling through modern life for the first time felt like.

Vertigo, New York Times

VERTIGO: The Rise and Fall of Weimar Germany | By Harald Jähner | Translated by Shaun Whiteside | Basic Books | 454 pp. | $35