Review: The Weimar Years is a monumental recreation of life in Germany | Canada Voices

• Title: The Weimar Years: Rise and Fall 1918-1933
• Author: Frank McDonough
• Genre: Non-fiction
• Publisher: Bloomsbury
• Pages: 796

It was a period of inflation and confrontation, of failed coups and armed uprisings, of assassinations and reparations, of repression and the Great Depression, of reaction and reform. There was an explosion of cultural innovation and sexual experimentation. It was a time when antisemitism, Communism and National Socialism spread, when chaos flourished and government cabinets floundered, when Hitler loomed and democratic government seemed doomed.

There never was a time – there never was a government – there never was a continuing crisis – remotely like the period known as Weimar Germany.

From the end of 1918 to the beginning of 1933, Germany marked several ends and beginnings. The country, which before the First World War produced two-thirds of Europe’s steel and half its coal, was defeated and devastated – and it was sent into ruins more by the Versailles treaty, which created peace, than by the four years of conflict that comprised the Great War. Financially destroyed and morally humiliated, there was a great hunger – for food, to be sure, but also for hope. What Germany got instead was recrimination and revolution.

All these things – all the items on this menu of mortification – are recounted, year by depressing year, by Frank McDonough in The Weimar Years, a monumental re-creation of life in Germany when the guns were silenced on the battlefields but when gunfire shattered the peace of the nation’s cities and countryside.

McDonough’s subject is what we might call the Years Between. Between the First World War and the Second. Between Kaiser Wilhelm and Adolf Hitler. Between the economic domination of the prewar years and the rapid industrialization and militarization that led to Germany’s near conquest of Europe and the catastrophe that followed.

McDonough walks us through the period, from the jubilation that followed the departure of the Kaiser (to the Netherlands) and the bright skies of the notion of a fresh, idealistic democracy and then onto the the debate – socialist councils or a republic? – over the future of the country, all conducted while Germany seethed about how it was treated as a defeated country even though the war ended with the Allies holding none of its European terrain. Schisms seemed to multiply by the week, then by the day, the fighting over the character of the country spilling into the streets, with fiery exchanges and bloody confrontations, even on Christmas Eve of 1919.

“Given all the cumulative problems it faced,” McDonough writes, “it is surprising Weimar Germany lasted as long as it did, but we need to remember that it endured longer than Hitler’s Third Reich.”

The result, McDonough shows us, was a republic dependent on the army for stability, with violence a constant presence. In 1920, workers staged the largest general strike in history. One chancellor lasted four days. There was a left hopelessly divided, a resurgent right and a fragmented middle class that ultimately made its choice:

“Solid middle-class groups, usually the cement that holds together democratic government, decided to support a party openly promising to destroy democracy,” McDonough writes, explaining, “Hitler’s party grew because millions of Germans felt democratic government had been a monumental failed experiment. To these voters, Hitler offered the utopian vision of creating an authoritarian ‘national community’ that would sweep away the seeming chaos and instability of democratic government, and provide strong leadership.”

And hanging over the entire period, even before the failed Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, was the shadow of Hitler. From the start, he was identified as a speaker of unusual gifts; as early as 1919, Anton Dexter, founder of the German Workers Party (which provided the base of the future Nazi party), said of Hitler, “He has a mouth on him, he’ll be useful.” It was that very skill, McDonough writes, “that rescued him from the graveyard of under-achievers.” It was in this period that Hitler’s antisemitism ripened. To him, Jews were a “racial tuberculosis.”

The reparations and restrictions of the Versailles treaty were tinder for the right. The country was in crisis. Reparations swiftly went unpaid, inflation mounted unchecked. In this national wreckage, Hitler saw his moment, and seized it. McDonough says that Hitler “no longer was … the buffoon who had botched a coup in a beer hall, but instead [appeared to be] a true patriot, who had tried to rescue Germany from democratic chaos.”

Along with the chaos came cultural improvisation. This was the period of the cabaret – 899 of them in Munich alone in 1930! – and of daring new initiatives, in the theatre as well as in the bedroom. The first gay film appeared in Germany in 1919. It wasn’t until 1961 that the first film about gay love appeared in Great Britain.

This volume is suffused with great detail. No cabinet change goes unmentioned, no small domestic contretemps goes unexplored, no subtle shift in the culture goes untold. But the great virtue of this book – basically a chronology of life in Weimar Germany – is also its great flaw. McDonough organizes his account chronologically, a chapter for each year between the armistice and the Hitler takeover. Thus the reader gets a sense of the sweep of events. But this structure also leaves characters, and episodes, abandoned in great separations of pages.

McDonough believes there is a bracing lesson for our time in the story he tells. “The history of the Weimar Years is … a warning sign of how a democracy under poor leadership can drift towards a form of authoritarian crisis and unrelenting political stability,” he writes. “This is a question that continues to engage us today.” It surely does.