World War Two
Published 16 Nov 2024In June 1930, the Weimar Republic faces escalating tensions as Nazi uniforms are banned in three states to curb political violence. The French withdrawal from the Rhineland marks a major milestone while Saxony’s elections leave the state in political deadlock. Meanwhile, Chancellor Brüning battles to save his government amidst growing financial turmoil and party divisions.
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November 17, 2024
Nazi Uniforms banned across three States – Rise of Hitler 06, June 1930
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November 3, 2024
Unholy Alliance topples Saxony – Rise of Hitler 05, May 1930
World War Two
Published 2 Nov 2024May 1930 brings political upheaval to the Weimar Republic, with the French deciding to leave the Rhineland, violent clashes between Communists and Nazis, and a surprising alliance that dissolves Saxony’s government. See how these events unfold and shape Germany’s current political landscape.
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October 20, 2024
Nazi Conspiracies Everywhere – Rise of Hitler, April 1930
World War Two
Published 19 Oct 2024Join us for the May 1930 edition of the Weimar Wire, where we cover violent communist Youth Day demonstrations, a tough first month for new German chancellor Bruning, crazy Nazi conspiracy theories, and a whole lot more.
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October 6, 2024
Will the President Abolish Democracy? – Rise of Hitler 03, March 1930
World War Two
Published 5 Oct 2024In the March 1930 Issue of the Weimar Wire Chancellor Muller resigns, the coalition government collapses, and Heinrich Brüning tries to build a new cabinet amidst street violence and political chaos. With the Nazis and Communists gaining strength, will Brüning succeed, or is the Weimar Republic heading for disaster?
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September 22, 2024
How to Make a Nazi Martyr – Rise of Hitler 02, February 1930
World War Two
Published 21 Sep 2024In this issue of the Weimar Wire, we dive deep into the critical events of February 1930. Political violence continues to claim victims on the streets, the future Polish-German relationship is up in the air, the other powers bicker at the London Naval conference, all the while, the current government struggles to fill a ginormous budget hole.
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September 8, 2024
Hitler’s Victory in Thüringen – Rise of Hitler 01
World War Two
Published 7 Sep 2024In this issue of the Weimar Wire, we dive deep into the critical events of January 1930. Political violence in the streets, uncertainty over the nation’s very character and Nazis entering a governing coalition provide a veritable treasure trove of political intrigue, hidden aspirations, and grand schemes.
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November 9, 2023
Remembering Weimar
In The Critic, Darren O’Byrne reviews some recent books on German society between the Armistice of 1918 and the rise of Hitler, including Frank McDonough’s The Weimar Years: Rise and Fall 1918–1933.
One of the latest additions to the canon is Frank McDonough’s The Weimar Years (1918–33). A prequel to his two-volume narrative history of the Third Reich, The Hitler Years, it sets out to explain the Nazis’ rise to power by examining the reasons why democracy failed in Germany. Like the earliest histories of the period, the Republic is not examined on its own terms but rather as a kind of backstory to what followed, the numerous crises that befell it being used to explain the ultimate catastrophe.
Structured chronologically, the book provides a devastating, play-by-play account of why, for McDonough, democracy stood little chance in Germany. Defeat in World War I, the Kaiser’s abdication and the humiliating terms of the Versailles treaties challenged the legitimacy of the Republic from the start, as did its failure to contain political violence. Crippling inflation and mounting government debt, exacerbated by the obligation to pay reparations to the Allies, hampered German economic recovery from the start and threatened to wipe out the middle classes.
A degree of economic stability did return in the mid-1920s, but the country experienced its second “once-in-a-lifetime” economic crisis in the early 1930s, causing further instability and ultimately paving the way for Hitler. It’s a well-known story, skilfully retold for a contemporary audience by one of the foremost authorities on modern German history.
Does McDonough tell us anything we didn’t already know? The answer, in short, is no. In comparison to other recent histories of the period, more attention is paid here to high politics than Weimar’s cultural achievements, which are mentioned, but this tends to disrupt the flow of what is otherwise a high-paced, edge-of-the-seat political history of Germany’s first democracy. Despite being nearly 600 pages in length, the book’s focus is quite narrow, with little attention paid to what was happening below the national level in the federal states.
This may seem like an inane criticism. Who, after all, would demand to read more about Buckinghamshire in a political history of interwar Britain? However, the Weimar Republic, like Germany today, was a federation. Understanding what was happening in states like Prussia, which contained three-fifths of Germany’s population, is crucial to understanding the country as a whole.
Indeed, McDonough places some of the blame for Weimar’s collapse on the Social Democrats, who he argues should have participated in more national governments. Prussia was governed by an SPD-led coalition for most of the Weimar years, though, yet the Republic still fell. McDonough sees another reason for this fall in the failure to purge the military and civil service of hostile elements.
Again, Prussia replaced a considerable number of these officials with others loyal to the new democratic order, yet the Republic still fell. The book’s rigid focus on high politics, in short, obscures an understanding of the more structural reasons why democracy failed.
Unlike most history books, however, The Weimar Years is a genuine page-turner, full of lessons for those who want to learn something about the present from the past. It’s also a beautiful book to hold, full of period photos that help bring the story alive. This all makes the book worth reading, even if there’s not much in it that can’t be found in other histories of the period.
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November 6, 2023
QotD: The “German Catastrophe”
The obvious frame for this book is what has been fittingly termed the German Catastrophe: the fate of Germany in the late 19th and early 20th century, as viewed from the perspective of German nationalists who were not Nazis — the perspective of people like Ernst Jünger.
Germany had entered modernity without democracy. The Kaiserreich (German Empire) had united the many small German states, aggressively worked to catch up with industrialization, built a state to rival France and Great Britain, and remained authoritarian throughout. Commoners had negligible political influence. They did get social insurance, but not through their own political power but granted top-down, as an appeasement to undermine socialist movements. Civil marriage, secularized state education, prospering state universities and a long series of modernizing laws kept increasing state power. And that meant executive power. There were parties, a parliament and a newly homogenized judiciary, but they had little power to check the executive.
And this entire development was accompanied by a lot of theorizing about this new German nation. Much of this theorizing ended up justifying authoritarianism, by making quickly-spreading myths about how obedience to authority, respect for aristocracy and love for tradition were uniquely German traits that set Germans apart from the French and the Jews and other dubious foreigners. Such myths, and opposition to them, colored the German population’s hard work to get accustomed to industrialization, urbanization, education, rapid population growth, militarization, national media and various culture wars.
This had seemed to work okay-ish while Bismarck, wielding both enormous ruthlessness and enormous political acumen, had navigated Germany through the trials and tribulations of the late 19th century, largely at the expense of France. But in 1890, Emperor Wilhelm II had taken over authority with less ruthlessness and much less political acumen. While his populace remained nearly unable to influence politics, Wilhelm II made critical political mistakes, especially in dealing with other European powers.
These mistakes culminated in the first World War. You know how that one went.
Germany’s defeat led into Germany’s first real democracy. Everyone was very obviously new to this. The right attacked the new state, falsely claiming it had needlessly capitulated. The left also attacked the new state, because it wasn’t Soviet-Union-like enough. There was a lot of political violence. The massive damage incurred in the war, and the restrictions and reparations Germany had accepted in the peace settlement, put massive strains on an already fragile political system. Elections were tumultuous and frequent. Hyperinflation caused a huge crisis in 1923, and the Great Depression of 1929 was another huge disaster for Germany. Overall, the abolition of authoritarianism was widely felt to be a mistake.
This seeming mistake was fixed when Hitler stepped in. And you know how that one went.
Anonymous, “Your Book Review: On the Marble Cliffs”, Astral Codex Ten, 2023-07-28.
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August 8, 2023
How the Battle of Amiens Influenced the “Stab in the Back” Myth
OTD Military History
Published 7 Aug 2023The Battle of Amiens started on August 8 1918. It started the process that caused the final defeat of the German Army on the battlefield during World War 1. Many people falsely claimed that the German Army was not defeated on the battlefield but at home by groups that wished to see German fall. One person who helped to create this myth was German General Erich Ludendorff. He called August 8 “the black day of the German Army”.
See how this statement connects to the stab in the back myth connects to Amiens and the National Socialists in Germany.
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June 19, 2022
Why Hate Speech Laws Backfire
ReasonTV
Published 26 Feb 2022Here’s a brutal irony about regulating hate speech: Such laws often end up hurting the very people they are supposed to protect.
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That’s one of the central lessons in Jacob Mchangama’s important new book, Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media. Mchangama heads up the Danish think tank Justitia. He’s worried about a proposal that would make hate speech a crime under European Union (EU) law and give bureaucrats in Brussels sweeping powers to prosecute people spewing venom at religious and ethnic minorities, members of the LGBT+ community, women, and others.Europe’s history with such laws argues against them. In the 1920s, Germany’s Weimar Republic strictly regulated the press and invoked emergency powers to crack down on Nazi speech. It censored and prosecuted the editor of the anti-Semitic Nazi paper Der Stürmer, Julius Streicher, who used his trial as a platform for spreading his views and his imprisonment as a way of turning himself into a martyr and his cause into a crusade. When the Nazis took power in the early ’30s, Mchangama stresses, they expanded existing laws and precedents to shut down dissent and freedom of assembly.
Contemporary scholarship suggests that there can be a “backlash effect” when governments shut down speech, leading otherwise moderate people to embrace fringe beliefs. Mchangama points to a 2017 study published in the European Journal of Political Research that concluded extremism in Western Europe was fueled in part by “extensive public repression of radical right actors and opinions.”
In 1965, the United Kingdom passed a law banning “incitement to racial hatred,” but one of the very first people prosecuted under it was a black Briton who called whites “vicious and nasty people” in a speech. More recently, Mchangama notes that radical feminists in England “have been charged with offending LGBT+ people because they insist there are biological differences between the sexes. In France, ‘an LGBT+ rights organization was fined for calling an opponent of same-sex marriage a ‘homophobe.'”
“Once the principle of free speech is abandoned,” warns Mchangama, “any minority can end up being targeted rather than protected by laws against hatred and offense.”
That’s what happened in Canada in the 1990s after the Supreme Court there ruled that words and images that “degrade” women should be banned. The decision was based in part on the legal theories of feminist author Andrea Dworkin, whose books on why pornography should be banned were briefly seized by Canadian customs agents under the laws she helped to inspire.
First Amendment rights are still popular in the United States, with 91 percent of us in a recent survey agreeing that “protecting free speech is an important part of American democracy.” But 60 percent of us also said that the government should prohibit people from sharing a racist or bigoted idea.
Hearing hateful words and ideas outrages and discomforts most of us, but Mchangama’s history of free speech underscores that state suppression can grant those words and ideas more power and influence. And that the best antidote to hate in a free and open society is not to hide from it but to openly—and persuasively—confront it.
Listen to my Reason Interview podcast with Jacob Mchangama at https://reason.com/podcast/2022/02/16….
Written by Nick Gillespie. Edited by Regan Taylor.
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November 17, 2021
QotD: From Theda Bara to Lady Gaga
In 1933, the critic I.A. Richards, writing about “The Waste Land”, spoke of T.S. Eliot’s “persistent concern with sex, the problem of our generation, as religion was a problem of the last.” After the first world war, sexual experimentation and titillating smart talk became the hallmark of the emancipated new woman, who smoked, drank, bobbed her hair and danced the antic Charleston. Hollywood discovered that sex was great box office — leading to pressure from civic and religious groups for a production code, which movie-makers found ingenious ways to evade.
We are approaching the 100-year anniversary of Hollywood sex: Theda Bara’s incarnation as The Vamp in A Fool There Was (1915), a lurid femme fatale who slew overnight the lingering Victorian ideal of the pure, saintly woman-child, portrayed on screen by Mary Pickford and Dorothy and Lilian Gish. Theda Bara, like Lady Gaga, was a manufactured personality; although the studio publicity department claimed she was born in the Sahara to a French artist and Arabian princess, she was actually Theodosia Goodman, the daughter of a Jewish tailor in Cincinnati.
The sexual icon of 1920s Hollywood was Clara Bow, a madcap flapper who was probably falsely rumoured to have bedded the entire University of Southern California football team. Lithe Louise Brooks, with her signature bobbed hair, made landmark films of decadent eroticism in Germany. Wicked Mae West and lushly buxom Jean Harlow began the tradition of the sex bomb, which continued through Hedy Lamarr to Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe, whose influence endures around the globe. But the cardinal sexual pioneer was Marlene Dietrich, who exploded on the international scene in 1930 as the heartless cabaret singer of The Blue Angel. In her subsequent films with the director Josef von Sternberg, Marlene toyed with transvestism (based on the drag balls of Weimar Berlin) and created the sophisticated look of hard glamour that remains a staple of fashion magazines.
Marlene was Madonna Louise Ciccione’s idol; the seductive, commanding Marlene permeates Madonna’s brilliant videos of the 1980s and the early ’90s, with their dominatrix, transvestite and bisexual motifs. Madonna wanted to play Marlene on film, but the idea was overruled by Marlene herself, who (as the proud daughter of a Prussian officer) decreed Madonna “too vulgar”.
Weimar cabaret was recreated in the 1972 film Cabaret, based on Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin stories. Bob Fosse’s dazzlingly aggressive choreography in that blockbuster film was adopted by Madonna for her videos and stage shows — all of which have been doggedly imitated by Lady Gaga. Gaga has borrowed so heavily from Madonna (as in her latest “Alejandro” video) that it must be asked, at what point does homage become theft? But the main point is that the young Madonna was on fire. She was indeed the imperious Marlene Dietrich’s true heir. Madonna’s incandescence is still on view in videos like “Open Your Heart”, “Vogue” and “Express Yourself”. However, for Gaga, sex is mainly decor and surface; she’s like a laminated piece of ersatz rococo furniture. Alarmingly, Generation Gaga can’t tell the difference. Is it the death of sex? Perhaps the symbolic status that sex had for a century has gone kaput; that blazing trajectory is over.
Camille Paglia, “Lady Gaga: The Death of Sex”, Sunday Times, 2010-09-12.
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October 12, 2021
Worthless Paper Money – German Hyper-Inflation Starts After WW1 I THE GREAT WAR 1921
The Great War
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The German post-WW1 economy was under pressure: the loss of territory, the war bonds issued during the war and the reparations under the Treaty of Versailles. All this lead to a downward spiral of rising inflation and living costs for German citizens.
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Feldman, Gerald: Vom Weltkrieg zur Weltwirtschaftskrise. Studien zur deutschen Wirtschafts-und Sozialgeschichte 1914-1932. 1984.Fergusson, Adam: Das Ende des Geldes. Hyperinflation und ihre Folgen für die Menschen am Beispiel der Weimarer Republik, 1975.
Grosch, Waldemar: Deutsche und polnische Propaganda während der Volksabstimmung in Oberschlesien 1919-1921. 2002.
Lewek, Peter: Arbeitslosigkeit und Arbeitslosenversicherung in der Weimarer republik 1918-1927. 1989.
Michalczyk, Andrezej: Celebrating the nation: the case of Upper Silesia after the plebiscite in 1921.
Neubach, Helmut: Die Abstimmung in Oberschlesien am 20. März 1921. 2002.
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September 2, 2021
Road to WWII: A Basic Causal Analysis
Thersites the Historian
Published 19 Nov 2019This video is a primer for undergraduates in broad history survey courses that will hopefully help make sense of the interwar years between World War I and World War II.
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August 7, 2021
QotD: “The English spoke of the ‘German custom’, the French referred to the vice allemande, and Italians called gay men and women ‘Berlinese'”
The Weimar Republic, the zenith of modernism, witnessed new social liberalization and experimentation. Fritz Lang premiered his Expressionist film Metropolis in 1927, Alfred Döblin published his dizzyingly innovative novel Berlin Alexanderplatz in 1929, and the following year Hannah Höch unveiled her Dadaist photomontage Marlene. And alongside reinventing traditional forms of artistic expression, Germans began interrogating gender roles and sexual identities. As the historian Clayton Whisnant observes, “Perhaps more than anywhere else, Weimar Germany became associated with experimentation in sexuality.” Berlin was the undisputed queer capital of Europe. By 1900, over fifty thousand gay men and lesbians lived there, and countless more visited, looking for friendship, love, and sex. By 1923, some hundred gay bars in Berlin catered to diverse groups: men and women, the old and the young, the affluent and the working class. Nightclubs like the Mikado, the Zauberflöte, and the Dorian Gray became international hot spots, and the city’s elaborate queer balls attracted worldwide attention. Associations offered opportunities for socializing and political organization. Crucially, relaxed rules of censorship allowed for the publication of dozens of pulpy gay novels, queer periodicals, and even personal ads. The British writer Christopher Isherwood, whose account of his thirties stay in Germany inspired the musical Cabaret, put it simply: “Berlin meant boys.” In 1928, the poet W. H. Auden similarly described the German capital as “the bugger’s daydream.” In her famous guide to the Berlin lesbian scene from the same year, Ruth Margarete Roellig concluded, “Here each one can find their own happiness, for they make a point of satisfying every taste.”
The experience was different for trans people. The Third Sex [likely the world’s first magazine devoted to trans issues] bore the subtitle “The Transvestites”, but at the time, the historian Laurie Marhoefer notes, the term meant different things to different people. German speakers were in the middle of developing a critical vocabulary to describe the expansion of recognized identities. Karl-Maria Kertbeny coined the word homosexual in 1869, and in 1910 Magnus Hirschfeld invented the term transvestite. It described both cross-dressers and transgender people. According to contemporary self-reports, some transvestites considered themselves homosexual, but most did not. Many wore clothes traditionally associated with the opposite sex only on special occasions. Others lived fully as a gender different from their sex at birth. A majority seemed interested in passing and adhering to expectations of respectability, while a minority sought to challenge the normative order. Gender affirmation surgeries were available — the first such operation was conducted in 1920 by, no surprise, a German doctor — but uncommon. From today’s perspective, it is therefore unclear whether an individual who identified as a transvestite in thirties Germany, including Hans Hannah Berg, was what we would today consider transgender, nonbinary, a cross-dresser, or something else altogether. In the very first issue of The Third Sex, an essay by Dr. Wegner acknowledges the richness of the term. “Just as people are all different in their outward appearance and inner attitudes, so are the characteristics of transvestites.” Many queer activists in the Weimar Republic were concerned that the population of gender variant people was too fragmented. Trans people were not as visible or as organized as gays and lesbians. Friedrich Radszuweit, the leader of the Federation for Human Rights and the publisher of several queer periodicals, saw a solution. To foster a trans community, he produced The Third Sex.
Matthew H. Birkhold, “A Lost Piece of Trans History”, The Paris Review, 2019-01-15.
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July 21, 2021
The Abwehr: The Trojan Horse in Nazi Germany – WW2 – Spies & Ties 06
World War Two
Published 20 Jul 2021The Abwehr was the German military intelligence agency during World War Two. At the same time, it was the home of some high-ranking anti-Nazi resistance members.
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