Germany 1923: Hyperinflation, Hitler’s Putsch, and Democracy in Crisis
by Volker Ullrich, translated from the German by Jefferson Chase.
Liveright, 432 pp., $35.00
1923: The Crisis of German Democracy in the Year of Hitler’s Putsch
by Mark William Jones.
Basic Books, 398 pp., $32.00
In Hitler’s Munich: Jews, the Revolution, and the Rise of Nazism
by Michael Brenner, translated from the German by Jeremiah Riemer.
Princeton University Press, 378 pp., $37.00
The magnitude of the German catastrophe in the twelve years of Hitler’s rule (1933–1945) casts such a dark shadow that it is difficult to see the preceding fourteen years of Weimar democracy (1919–1933) as a historical era in its own right rather than as a prelude to the dictatorship that followed. The Weimar Republic was certainly burdened by severe systemic flaws, and a strong case can be made that it was doomed from birth. However, Volker Ullrich’s Germany 1923 and Mark William Jones’s 1923, published on the centennial of that crisis year, analyze instead the resilience of German democracy in the face of multiple challenges of staggering dimension, perhaps the most easily thwarted of which was Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch. Understanding how Weimar survived the crises of 1923 also helps illuminate factors that contributed to its demise ten years later. In another shift of perspective, Michael Brenner’s In Hitler’s Munich looks at the experience of the city’s Jews in the years 1919–1923 from the perspective not of 1933 but rather of the Bavarian revolution of 1918–1919.
Following Germany’s defeat in World War I and acceptance of armistice terms as well as the flight of the kaiser and the collapse of the monarchy in November 1918, the new provisional government was dominated by Social Democrats, and in Berlin a move by the Communist-linked Spartacists in January 1919 to replace it with a more revolutionary regime—as had occurred in the fall of 1917 in Russia—was repressed with much bloodshed, including the summary execution of the Spartacist leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht at the hands of right-wing paramilitary units. In nationwide elections held later the same month, a coalition of middle-class liberals (German Democratic Party, or DDP), moderate socialists (German Social Democratic Party, or SPD), and Catholics (Center Party) won a clear majority, drew up the constitution for a parliamentary democracy known as the Weimar Republic, and formed the governing majority in its first legislature, or Reichstag.
However, even if not doomed, the republic was a “burdened” democracy from the beginning. The terms of the Versailles Treaty that the new government had to sign were reviled by the vast majority of Germans, so nationalism thereafter was an issue effectively monopolized by the right to attack the republic, never an issue to rally
