3 - Bonn’s Weimar

Summary

Caldwell focuses on how the experience of the Weimar Republic’s failure influenced the formation of Germany’s second democracy, the Federal Republic of Germany. It highlights how the actors who shaped the Bonn Republic actively compared Weimar and Bonn: The “Weimar analogy” here was not an abstraction, but highly present both as a lesson and as a trauma. “Bonn’s Weimar” demonstrates how a historical analogy may work in practice and it proceeds to make several general arguments about the way the analogies work. In particular, the chapter shows that there was never one Weimar analogy but that it is mobilized in different ways, by different actors, to make sense of democracy’s failure.