This chapter tells the tragic tale of the Weimar Republic. It begins with a description of the political violence that was typical of its early years, based on the half-forgotten book by the socialist statistician Emil Julius Gumbel. It then moves on to observe the double message of the new republic to the Jews. As everyone was suffering the consequences of one economic or political crisis after another, and the endless social strife and political disagreements, Jews had to confront antisemitism too, and that just as they learned to enjoy their final and complete equality. From the tale of the “stab in the back” till the rise of the Nazi Party, Jews were targets of hate and repeated public attacks. Three women represent here three generations of Jews living under these conditions: the social activist Bertha Pappenheim, the socialist physician Käte Frankenthal, and the young Hannah Arendt. Their life-stories allow us to glimpse the social-work efforts of the older Jewish community, the attraction of the socialist vision for Jewish men and women of the middle generation, and the creative intellectual work of some members of the younger generation.

Ludwig Erhard was a severely injured WW I veteran. I present data on his vita. Erhard’s education ended with a doctorate at the University of Frankfurt/Main with Franz Oppenheimer, the “liberal socialist,” in 1925. After some unsuccessful years in his father’s textile business at his hometown Fürth, he was employed by the Institute for Economic Observation of German Manufactured Goods in 1929 in Nuremberg. In 1943, Erhard founded his own Institute for Industrial Research. I provide evidence that he had twice shown political turncoat behavior: from a liberal in the European sense during the Weimar Republic to Nazi economic-policy doctrines until German military defeat in 1943 became a foregone conclusion, and thereafter to the American conception of market instead of government-controlled economic conditions. I discuss Erhard’s qualifications for public office as well as the strengths and weaknesses of Erhard’s character.

Norman analyzes Swedish social democratic thinking in the 1930s and the form that Weimar lessons took there. Focusing on the writings of Alva and Gunnar Myrdal, both enormously influential intellectual figures for social democracy during this period, it traces how the re-evaluation of democratic politics informed by Weimar’s collapse that occurred elsewhere shaped Swedish social democracy. From the analysis of social democratic thought in Sweden emerges a more general point regarding analogical reasoning and lesson-drawing in politics. The Swedish self-image as an avant-garde in rational social reform provided a degree of blindness that reduced the scope for critical self-reflection. Its unique position in Europe during the 1930s and 1940s allowed social democracy to play out unbounded in its self-perceived rationality in what could be achieved through state intervention, allowing for both highly progressive reforms and more troubling and intrusive aspects of social programs.

Scheuerman engages with the right-wing mobilization of “Weimar lessons” in the context of the contemporary US political landscape. The chapter focuses specifically on how the political thought of German Jewish émigré political philosopher Leo Strauss was used by supporters of the Trump Administration in academic circles, based primarily at the Claremont Institute. The Weimar analogy has often been mobilized to highlight the dangers of antidemocratic political forces. The chapter, however, serves as a reminder that the redeployment of Weimar and stories about its legacy can be instrumentalized to serve authoritarian as well as anti-authoritarian purposes.

The Framers failed to anticipate universal suffrage and the American two-party system, let alone how these developments would change their system. Instead of letting Congress debate and decide policy, voters can now decide many issues directly. The chapter describes Americans grudging recognition that partisanship can lead to stable, responsible government. It then describes how 20th Century scholars developed rational voter models to formalize these ideas. It also asks how social voting, party leadership, identity politics, candidate charisma, and deep-pocketed donors change these results. Finally, it also argues that the existence of legislative deadlock lets comparatively small minorities take centrist compromises off the table. This forces the party system into presenting extreme choices that most voters oppose. The ensuing standoffs can last for years years and sometimes decades.

This chapter briefly reviews the books main arguments and offers limited reforms to improve the Framers design. The deepest challenges involve the characteristically 21st Century debates over COVID, global warming, and the Black Lives Matter movement. Given that even the experts disagree, neither side is likely to persuade the other any time soon. The challenge for the Constitution is to manage the debate for years and even decades. Here the best option is to promote a pragmatic politics that encourages politicians to try different solutions, and just as promptly discard them when they fail. Obvious reforms include safeguards to ensure that key research is never blocked to defend political arguments, and sunset laws that automatically eliminate statutes that fail to show results.

Histories of monism have generally ended with the First World War and placed it within the context of the technocratic fantasies of liberal supporters of antipolitical Kultur in late Wilhelmine Germany. This article argues instead that monism achieved its widest practical dispersal during the Weimar Republic in the socialist milieu. It follows the path of liberal intellectuals from opposition to war and monarchy into the socialist movements, where they took leading positions in local government, union educational institutions, and the expanding universe of socialist cultural associations. There they sought to revise Marxism to bring it in line with their theories of biological and sociological evolution. The article follows key four areas of the socialist workers’ culture movement and examines how monism shaped the theories and practices of sex reform, free body culture, festival culture and educational innovation. It thereby demonstrates for the first time the central role of secularist dissent and monist worldview in some of the iconic utopian projects of interwar socialism.

This chapter shows the persistence of the imperial imagination in Baeck’s thought during the First World War, and his later critique of theological colonization during the Weimar Republic. When the Great War broke out, Baeck volunteered to serve as an army chaplain (Feldrabbiner), a position he held for almost the entire war period. Baeck’s sermons and writing from the front exemplify his view of the East as a space for colonization as well as his reading of the German military predicament as paralleling Jewish history. Baeck’s stature as a public intellectual rose during the Weimar Republic, but he also recognized a growing danger in the resurgence of the figure of second-century heretic Marcion, among others in the work of Adolf von Harnack, who called for a de-canonization of the Hebrew Bible. Baeck identified this tendency as central in the German theological and political imagination of the time. Against neo-Marcionite attempts to detach Christianity and Germany from Judaism and the Jews, Baeck offered a presentation of Judaism that stressed its place as the ethical foundation of Christianity. Only Judaism, Baeck insisted, could save Christianity from itself.

Chapter 3 looks at Plessner’s Limits of Community (1924) and Adorno’s Minima Moralia (1951) to show that, despite their conflicting theoretical assumptions, both thinkers arrive at surprisingly similar conclusions. Both fundamentally disagree on various key concepts that shape their theories of tact: alienation, for example, is for Adorno a temporary state of human existence that we need to overcome. For Plessner, by contrast, it is what makes us human in the first place, setting us apart from animals and plants. And yet, both share a suspicion of certain forms of intimacy and touch, and a preference for individual difference over communal identification. In my close analysis of their writing, I argue that Plessner’s and Adorno’s theories of tact contribute to an ethic of indirectness that defies any strategies of incorporation. On a hermeneutic level, they allow us to develop new modes of non-violent contemplation. On a social level, they find their literal realisation in times of a pandemic, when keeping your distance and wearing a mask can be interpreted as a dystopic sign of isolation, while it can also be seen as an expression of cooperation (not fusion), solicitude, and care.

This book on Berlin’s grand hotels is a cultural and business history of the fate of liberalism in Germany. Board members of the corporations that owned the grand hotels, as well as hotel managers and hotel experts, through their daily efforts to keep the industry afloat amid the vicissitudes of modern German history, ultimately abandoned liberalism and acquiesced to Nazi rule. Their correspondence among each other and with staff, the authorities, and the public, reveal how and why this multi-generational group of German businessmen, many of them involved in heavy industry and finance, too, embraced and then rejected liberal politics and culture in Germany. Weaknesses in the business model, present since the 1870s, had converged with a tendency toward anti-republicanism after the hyperinflation of 1923, resulting in the belief among most hoteliers that democracy was bad for business.

The aim of this book is to explore the impact of the First World War on German philosophy through a series of analyses of the paths taken by central figures of the German 20th-century philosophical tradition in such a way that recognizes the complexity of the philosophical issues that animated their thinking, as well as the demands of wartime and its aftermath to which these thinkers responded: Hermann Cohen, Max Scheler, Martin Buber, Georg Simmel, Ernst Bloch, Gyorgy Lukacs, Franz Rosenzweig, Ernst Cassirer, Martin Heidegger, and Edmund Husserl

In a succinct and highly readable text, Alan E. Steinweis presents a synthesis of classic and recent research on the origins, development, and downfall of Nazi Germany. Rooted in nationalism and racism, and commanded by a charismatic leader, the Nazi movement created a populist and authoritarian alternative to a democratic republic plagued by unemployment and political fragmentation. A one-party dictatorship was achieved quickly after Hitler became chancellor in January 1933. In the years before World War II, the Nazi regime achieved popularity by restoring Germany to great-power status and by presiding over an economic recovery fueled by rearmament. Simultaneously the regime set in place an apparatus of coercion to marginalize Jews and other groups deemed objectionable by Nazi ideology, as well as to quell domestic opposition to the declared goals of the German “People’s Community.” Nazi ideology formed the basis for Germany’s goals and actions in World War II, which aimed at German hegemony and a racial transformation of Europe. Despite considerable internal dissent and some active resistance, the Nazi regime mobilized German society behind the war effort. In the end, Nazism was defeated from the outside by a superior military alliance.

Chapter 2 analyzes the origins and growth of the Nazi movement against the general background of the history of the Weimar Republic, 1918–33. Weimar had to overcome numerous challenges: a lack of German experience with parliamentary democracy; an association with the hated Treaty of Versailles; the fragmentation of the German polity; the monetary inflation of the early 1920s; and the massive levels of unemployment during the Great Depression. The last of these factors fueled the popularity of the forces at the ideological extremes – the Nazi Party and the Communist Party – which rejected the Republic altogether, making the formation of parliamentary majorities more difficult, in turn resulting in the use of presidential emergency powers to govern the country. The Nazi Party (NSDAP) began as a revolutionary organization but turned to an electoral strategy after its failed coup (putsch) of 1923. Although its electoral support remained low before 1930, it developed under Hitler into a movement of highly motivated members and activists. After an electoral breakthrough in 1930, the NSDAP became Germany’s largest party in the July 1932 election. It did not enjoy a parliamentary majority, however, and Hitler’s appointment to the chancellorship was ultimately made possible by support from German conservatives who saw the NSDAP as an anti-Communist bulwark.

In a succinct and highly readable text, Alan E. Steinweis presents a synthesis of classic and recent research on the origins, development, and downfall of Nazi Germany. Rooted in nationalism and racism, and commanded by a charismatic leader, the Nazi movement created a populist and authoritarian alternative to a democratic republic plagued by unemployment and political fragmentation. A one-party dictatorship was achieved quickly after Hitler became chancellor in January 1933. In the years before World War II, the Nazi regime achieved popularity by restoring Germany to great-power status and by presiding over an economic recovery fueled by rearmament. Simultaneously the regime set in place an apparatus of coercion to marginalize Jews and other groups deemed objectionable by Nazi ideology, as well as to quell domestic opposition to the declared goals of the German “People’s Community.” Nazi ideology formed the basis for Germany’s goals and actions in World War II, which aimed at German hegemony and a racial transformation of Europe. Despite considerable internal dissent and some active resistance, the Nazi regime mobilized German society behind the war effort. In the end, Nazism was defeated from the outside by a superior military alliance.

The collapse of the Weimar Republic and the ensuing rise of the Nazi dictatorship in Germany serve to this day as a “warning from history.” The precise lessons to be drawn from this episode remain controversial. Did the first German republic collapse from a lack of popular support or from institutional weakness? These questions were far from the minds of Republican elites. Arnold Brecht and Hans Staudinger regarded problems of stability as primarily administrative. Territorial reform and the creation of public–private partnerships were their creative attempts creating some much-needed breathing space for the young Republic. These initiatives tell us much about the reasons why elites overestimated the robustness of their own institutions. At the same time this ill-founded confidence was necessary for such administrative experiments. Paradoxically, assuming stability can be important in encouraging elites in new democracies to engage in necessary reforms. The administrative rationale also had a dark side, however. It led to a myopic focus on technical detail while ignoring the larger political context and in particular, underestimating the systemic threat from political extremism.

Chapter 2 provides an overview of the development of Norway’s and Germany’s national school systems up to the 1950s, with the aim of setting the scene for the analysis of the postwar reform period. The narrative focuses on comprehensive school reforms, but also on other much-debated reforms of primary and secondary schooling. The chapter sheds light on how dominant cleavages came to expression in school politics over time and on how political playing fields developed, forming the school as an institution. It provides the necessary context to understand the conditions actors faced during the postwar reform period.

The Weimar Republic, established in Germany at the end of World War I, was not a success and led to the rise of radical politics and the birth of the Nazi party. The racial antisemitism of Nazi ideology is discussed, as is Hitler’s control of Germany and his quest for a “Final Solution” to the so-called Jewish problem, leading to the creation of ghettos, Einsatzgruppen (killing squads), concentration camps, and the killing centers of the Holocaust.