William Tyler
The Weimar Republic
Summary
Democracy finally arrived in Germany in the wake of a Civil War that immediately followed the breakdown after World War One. It arrived in the form of The Weimar Republic (named after the city where a new constitution was hammered out as Berlin fell into chaos). The Republic lasted for but a brief period from 1919 until 1933, when Hitler came to power.
In its first years the Republic was faced politically with both a Far Right and a Far Left, and economically by soaring inflation.
Finally, in the humiliation of both defeat and the loss of life during the war, many Germans sought to replace that reality with a mythology of German strength and to find excuses for the defeat. The Nazis developed this into their theory of ‘the stab in the back’, accusing Socialists and, especially, Jews for the 1918 disaster.
Rather surprisingly in many ways the Weimar Government established a degree of stability and international respectability by 1925. Yet four years later Germany, along with the rest of the leading nations, suffered from the Great Depression, and a mere two years later Weimar fell and Hitler and Nazism came to power.
In the last analysis Weimar failed. Was this inevitable, or could it have saved Germany and the wider world from the horrors of Nazism, notably The Shoah, and the catastrophe of a Second World War?
William Tyler
William Tyler has spent his entire professional life in adult education, beginning at Kingsgate College in 1969. He has lectured widely for many public bodies, including the University of Cambridge and the WEA, in addition to speaking to many clubs and societies. In 2009, William was awarded the MBE for services to adult education, and he has previously been a scholar in residence at the London Jewish Cultural Centre.
Of course I don’t, only west Germany was a democracy, East Germany is Marxist, that’s the point. It has to reunite in the 1990s. Half of Germany is not a democracy. Between 1945 and pretty well the end of the century, that’s the point.
He died really before the holocaust took off in its final form. He was deeply antisemitic so he wouldn’t have disapproved I don’t think.