No one ever understood history by starting with how things ended, yet that is how many still view 20th-century Germany thanks to the dark matter at its heart: Adolf Hitler.
Working backwards — from the dictator’s defeat and suicide in 1945 back to his rise to absolute power a dozen years earlier — is to travel in the wrong direction.
UCD historian Mark Jones makes a convincing case, in his refreshing and readable new book, that 1923 is the place to start. This is the year of Hitler’s first putsch, one of many turbulent events that year faced down successfully by Germany’s first democracy, the so-called Weimar Republic.
Maligned for decades as doomed to failure — simply because we know how it turned out — is not good enough. Germany’s first attempt at representative government was progressive for its time, Jones argues, and did not collapse because it was fatally flawed or simply because the fascists became too strong.
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Alongside familiar factors — the great depression, eye-watering reparation payments and hyperinflation — Jones highlights the less familiar pressures often reduced to footnotes. Particularly important: the French invasion and eight-month occupation of the Ruhr industrial area from January 1923 during which 130 people were killed.
This radicalised still further German public opinion, often drowning in self-pity and blame-shifting conspiracy theories over the first World War defeat and its consequences. The knock-out blow for Weimar democracy, Jones argues, came from the democratically elected politicians who gave up on it to do deals with fascist enemies of democracy.
With his fresh perspective and sometimes uncomfortable analyses of 1923, Jones has attracted attention — and raised some historian hackles — in Germany. History doesn’t repeat itself, but mistakes do. Correcting a century of lazy thinking, Jones gives Weimar back some belated credit as, with apologies to Harry Potter, the democracy that lived.
- Derek Scally is Berlin Correspondent of The Irish Times
