The Weimar Republic, which governed Germany from 1918 until the rise to power of Adolf Hitler in 1933, gets some of history’s worst press. It is generally written off as a disaster since it ended in Hitler and with him, the Holocaust and World War II. Critics have focused especially on Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution, which gave the Reichspräsident (federal president) power to rule by emergency decree in the name of “public security and order” and led to the July 1932 dissolution of the elected government of Prussia, one of Germany’s largest states, which in turn paved the way for the transfer of power to Adolf Hitler and the rise of his Third Reich.
Volker Ullrich, the distinguished German historian and journalist, challenges this interpretation. He argues that Weimar’s collapse was not the predetermined result of some original flaw, but rather came about because post–World War I Germany’s governing elites consistently underestimated Hitler’s craving for power, and were negligent in the face of the threat that he and his National Socialist movement posed. Ullrich vividly describes the sinister power struggle behind the scenes that brought Hitler to power and lists the opportunities to change course while suggesting alternative possibilities that might have prevented Weimar’s demise.
Ullrich provides a list of fateful actions and inactions: The Social Democrats did not do enough during the revolution of 1918–19 to change German society, opting misguidedly to play it safe and preserve more of the past. When ultranationalists murdered Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau in June 1922, a wave of prodemocratic solidarity came in response, but those in power failed to use this momentum to challenge antidemocratic forces. The hyperinflation in 1923 and the Great Depression in 1929 were not by themselves enough to bring down the republic, which proved more resilient than many people expected and survived almost four more years.
Moreover, the inner circle surrounding President Paul von Hindenburg—comprising State Secretary Otto Meissner, Reichskanzler (chancellor) Franz von Papen and his successor Kurt von Schleicher, and Hindenburg’s son Oskar—manipulated the political landscape to secure Hitler’s appointment as chancellor even though the Nazis had lost 34 seats in the 584-member Reichstag during the November 1932 federal election. In January 1933, the Junker class of Prussia (its hereditary landowners and a key source of German military officers) pressed the elderly federal president to dismiss Chancellor Schleicher (ironically himself a Prussian general) and appoint Hitler, the leader of the Reichstag’s single largest party.
The prodemocratic parties, consumed by petty and selfish differences, underestimated the danger and reacted too slowly. Even more damagingly, they failed to work together to stop the republic’s demise. Had liberal parties such as the Catholic Center (forerunners of the Christian Democrats), the German People’s Party, and the German Democratic Party been willing to compromise and form an alliance with the Social Democrats (SPD), both the ultraconservative Hindenburg’s victory in the 1925 presidential runoff and the grand-coalition collapse of March 1930 could have been prevented.
Instead, these parties in the prodemocratic space but to the SPD’s right chose to push through austerity measures—their preferred response to the Great Depression—that undermined the social safety net and people’s support for the republic in a country with six million (close to a tenth of the total populace) out of work. Ullrich explains as well how the German Communists (KPD) contributed to Hindenburg’s 1925 win by insisting on running their own candidate, Ernst Thälmann, and ignoring all coalition prospects. The KPD viewed the Social Democrats (or “social fascists” in KPD parlance) as the real enemy. Hitler was an afterthought. A splintered left could not effectively resist the Nazis’ drive toward rule.
Nothing about the story that Ullrich tells is inevitable. On the contrary, he shows convincingly that history is open and decided by individual people. In the end, it was the actions of German governing elites—many of whom shared Hitler’s goals of blocking parliamentary democracy, massively rearming, eviscerating the Treaty of Versailles, and again trying to make Germany into Europe’s top power—that set up the Weimar Republic’s collapse and the terrible consequences which followed.
At a time of global fragility for democracy, the Weimar Republic’s fate serves as both a lesson and a warning, and not just for Germany where the far-right Alternative for Germany has been on the rise. Weimar’s collapse charts the road map to authoritarian disaster. The underlying problem, as one would-be savior of a republic tells another in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, “is not in our stars, but in ourselves.” It was no external force or structural fault that did in Weimar. On the contrary, the enemy was inside the gates. Weimar was brought down by the actions of antidemocratic elites determined to destroy it and the failure of prodemocratic forces to stop them.
The world is now experiencing a “Weimar moment.” In actions that will resonate today, naked partisanship and societal polarization enabled the ultraconservative Hindenburg to expand his powers using Article 48, while the Reichstag, despite having the authority under that same constitutional provision to demand the revocation of presidential emergency decrees, put up little resistance. Squabbling prodemocratic parties lost their sense of the big picture and abandoned the field while antidemocratic forces exploited their divisions.
The left had its own sizeable segment (the Stalinist KPD) that hated parliamentary democracy, and more generally dismissed Hitler as a mere rightist stooge. To be fair, Franz von Papen, an inveterate schemer who ended up outsmarting himself, made the same mistake. As he told worried colleagues while he was persuading the 85-year-old Reichspräsident to name Hitler chancellor, “I have the confidence of Hindenburg! In two months, we’ll have pushed Hitler so far into the corner that he’ll squeal.”
Prodemocratic parties played by the rules while the antidemocratic forces used every possible instrument to undermine the democratic regime. Not only politicians but the media enabled Hitler. Deeply divided and absorbed with promoting various partisan views, newspapers offered their German readers false reassurance while foreign diplomats mostly took a wait-and-see attitude that bred complacency within their own governments.
Weimar is a textbook example of how fragile democracies can be. As Ullrich reminds us, while today’s liberal-democratic institutions are proving resilient (at least so far), democratic culture is more deeply entrenched, civil society is stronger and better organized, and there is no mass social and economic misery to compare with that of the 1930s, we still ignore Weimar’s lessons only at our peril. Democracy when weak and unstable is no guarantee against tyranny. It is wisest, therefore, never to take democracy’s strength for granted.
Ullrich shows that the main lesson from Weimar’s collapse is how nothing is written in advance and nothing is preordained. Democracies are fragile and need to be constantly defended. It is our duty to do so. Moreover, he reminds us that we should recall the extent to which Weimar’s collapse resulted from the deliberate efforts of those in power. Disagreement is common and normal in democracies, but “antisystem” attitudes toward democracy comparable to those nursed by both the left and the right in Weimar Germany should never be.
In a defeated Germany still coping with the trauma of World War I, a small, ambitious, selfish, and narrow-minded elite used democratic institutions for the pursuit of antidemocratic ends. Many of these goals had to do with settling what large numbers of Germans saw as “unfinished business” left over from that terrible conflict, which they had a hard time believing their country had really lost. Pondering their experience, it is incumbent upon us to decide how we shall act, and whether and how we shall confront antidemocratic forces in our own day. We cannot afford to fail. Too much is at stake.
Sebastián Royo is professor of political science at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. His books include Bank Failure and Resolution in the EU: Lessons for the Crisis Management and Deposit Insurance Framework (coedited with Giovanni Ferri and Ewa Miklaszewska, 2026) and Why Banks Fail: The Political Roots of Banking Crises in Spain (2020).
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