The German Right in the Weimar Republic

The Weimar Republic has long been synonymous in the public mind with political instability, economic crisis and cultural ferment. In recent years this image has been cemented as Weimar has been co-opted by many commentators in the United States and Europe as a benchmark for ‘crisis’, an exemplar of failure against which the political and economic uncertainties of our times are measured in order to judge the level of their calamity. But the persistence of this image of Weimar as ‘the mother of all political failures’ in the 21st century is curious given that over the past 20 years historians have convincingly challenged the view of the republic as a doomed democratic experiment. Inspired by Peter Fritzsche’s seminal 1996 review article in the Journal of Contemporary History (1) a generation of scholars have argued persuasively that rather than being ‘weak’, ‘unloved’ or ‘doomed’, the Weimar Republic was in fact the home to a vibrant, if fractious, political culture with levels of political engagement that most western liberal democracies today can only dream of.