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- [00:00]
Katja Heuer
Yeah, and I think people often see this as a zero sum game. It can't be, you know, that there are several threats to a community. It has to be either or, you know, there's competition around which is the biggest threat. I mean, if there are far right threats, then that doesn't mean that the Islamist threat isn't real.
- [00:18]
Jasia Monk
And now the good fight with Jasia Monk. A medium sized country once had a political system that lasted for 13, 14 years. And nevertheless, that political system is a constant metaphor when people are trying to think through the challenges of their own societies and sometimes trying to tell people what to do or what not to do in response to the rise of extremist political parties. I'm talking, of course, about the Weimar Republic and to think about what the Weimar Republic was actually like and the ways in which it is or is not a useful metaphor for thinking through societies today. From the United States too, of course, Germany. I invited back onto the podcast Katja Heue. Katja is a historian living in the United Kingdom. I've had her on in the past to talk about East Germany when she wrote beyond the Wall and her latest book is Life on the Edge of Catastrophe. We talked about whether the headline thinks that Americans know about Weimar Republic, an accurate description of of it, why it is that that period was so politically unstable, why the Weimar Republic actually failed, to what extent there was change or continuity in Weimar culture, how people in Weimar lived through that time period and how they saw the rise of the Nazis, and then finally, and perhaps most importantly, what all of that tells us about contemporary Germany. Contemporary Germany seems in a much, much better condition than the Weimar Republic was. It is much more affluent and much more stable, much more successful in many ways. And yet some of the attributes of the Weimar Republic seem to apply today. From deep party fragmentation, sense that there is constant chaos and dysfunction in the political system, the idea that the country is somehow declining in status and importance in the world, and of course, the fact that a very different far right party is once again rising in the polls. Now, in the part of the conversation that is behind the paywall for this episode, we talk about one specific inference that a lot of people want to draw from the Weimar Republic. It was a huge mistake for Weimar elites, and particularly conservative elites to ally themselves with Adolf Hitler, thinking that they could make him Reich Chancellor but keep him under control. That obviously turned into one of the great disasters, perhaps the greatest disaster in human history. Some people want to apply this to somewhat different circumstances, to say, any cooperation with the far right anywhere in Europe, anywhere in the world, but particularly in Germany, is a similar mistake. The idea is that Weimar teaches us that we should not do that. Well, is that the case? Why is it that Germany is so dysfunctional? And how can German politicians deal with a seemingly inexorable rise of the AfD that is a part of a conversation that is behind a paywall today. To listen to that part of the conversation, to become a paying subscriber, please go to writing.yashamunk.com and support what we do here. That's writing.jashermonk.com. As most of you know, there was a terrible terrorist attack on gay pride parade in Berlin this past weekend. So after recording this conversation, I asked Katja to come back and take a little bit of time to explain to us the events of this weekend. Give us a little bit of background about why German authorities failed to identify this perpetrator as a threat, or at least to stop him from carrying out the attack, and what wider political and social implications that might have. So we're starting with that part of the conversation. Katja, we recorded a really interesting episode about the long run of German history. A few weeks ago, you kindly agreed to come back for an extra little chat given the horrible events in Berlin this past weekend. Tell us what happened.
- [04:55]
Katja Heuer
So there was a terrorist attack from what we know now on a pride event in Berlin at the weekend. So a man drove a van into crowds. At the moment we have one victim that was killed and several dozens that were injured, injured. And he's also supposed to have got out of the car and basically conducted a knife attack on the crowds as well. Police have since found out who it was and chased him down. And the man was shot dead in the process of the police confronting him. So that's where we currently are with this. And now obviously all sorts of questions are being asked about how this was allowed to happen, what we already know about the perpetrator and what Germany should do now if there should be any political consequences to this.
- [05:48]
Jasia Monk
And so obviously there's been a series of Islamist attacks in all of Europe, but including in Germany, a large number of them over the last 10 or 15 years. One of the things that makes this story quite remarkable is that this wasn't an unknown perpetrator. His radicalism, his extremism wasn't unknown to the German authorities. In fact, the German authorities brought him back from Lebanon because he had try to join isis. What do we know about the history of this particular perpetrator and any potential failings of the German state in averting this attack.
- [06:24]
Katja Heuer
He is an interesting case in that he actually holds German citizenship, was born in Germany to Lebanese parents, and therefore is perhaps a little bit different in his background. So he didn't come to Germany himself as, say, a refugee or as an immigrant, but actually grew up in Germany himself. And therefore, this begs all sorts of questions about, you know, kind of spotting radicalism early. He would have grown up in Germany, gone to school there, would have seen, I don't know, gps, people around him, teachers and so on. And he was, as you say, he was known to the authorities as a radicalized young person for a long time in that he already tried to make his way to Syria to join isis and then was also convicted of planning an attack against the state and against people in Germany and got a very light sentence, many people feel. And that sentence was actually suspended and he was allowed to go about his daily life again and therefore was in a position to conduct this attack rather than being in prison or being under the very careful watch of the authorities.
- [07:34]
Jasia Monk
Yeah, some of the details about this are really quite striking and honestly horrifying. He had traveled to Lebanon to try and join ISIS in Syria. He was in jail in Lebanon when German authorities decided to bring him back to Germany in order to put him on trial. Somewhat understandable, but that trial then resulted in him being sentenced under youth guidelines, even though he was older than 18 years old. And all he got was a suspended sentence, which meant that he wouldn't see a day in jail. A couple of days after the attack today, as we're recording, he was meant to have a chat with some German social workers about his extremism, and that was the extent of a punishment that he was facing. And then you add some of the kind of really absurd details to how the German authorities are treating these kind of circumstances. Like the fact that I at first thought this must be fake news, but I looked at the actual Twitter account that the police in Berlin shared a link to the photograph of the perpetrator, but not a photograph directly on the platform, because that, they explained, was not permissible according to German data protection laws.
- [08:48]
Katja Heuer
Yeah, I think it is tricky because all of these laws and rules and regulations have got their purpose. You can always explain where they came from, why people introduced them in the first place. So, say, for example, the fact that youth sentences are quite light in Germany. That comes from the whole idea of the fact that you don't want to sort of mess up a young person's life forever for them, you know, just because they made a mistake when they were still relatively young. And you can see the idea behind that if it's something like delinquency or, you know, things that a young person might do because they kind of went on the wrong path at some point. But of course, once you are dealing with somebody who's extremely dangerous because he's deeply, ideologically convinced that he needs to follow down this path, and you're not going to change that, as you say, with the chat or two in a kind of de radicalization program, and people were at the time aware of how extreme his views were. Then, of course, this entire system that isn't really set up to deal with these cases begins to look rather, as you say, absurd and bizarre when applied to a case like him. So it's easy, I think, in hindsight, to see where all of the problems are, but I don't think think there's an easy way of remedying all the bits that make it quite easy for perpetrators in Germany to exist and to basically exert their freedoms or use their freedoms in the way that anybody else might be able to.
- [10:15]
Jasia Monk
Well, the first step might be to stop being in denial about some of the basic realities of what is happening. One of the things that I found striking in the aftermath of the attack is there's a number of these kind of strange bureaucrats in Germany who are responsible to fight against discrimination against all kinds of various groups. A worthy cause, though it's not always the most capable individuals who are in those roles. And the number of people who are charged with fighting against real discrimination against the LGBTQ community were pressed on what the threats are for that community. And when you look at speak to members of that community, it's quite clear that unfortunately, a lot of the time when they accept experience hostility in public sphere across Europe at this point, and certainly when there's attacks as well, that often is from people with an Islamist background who have extreme theological views and the animus that is sometimes inspired by that. We've seen that also repeatedly with some terrorist attacks, including in that nightclub in the United States a number of years ago. And yet a lot of these bureaucrats were saying, well, the danger is from the right and from conservatives and so on, and there may be certainly some threats from neo Nazis and others as well, but they really weren't willing to to name the nature of the attack as Islamists. And the fact that it is that ideology which often targets those groups and which helps to explain to some extent the otherwise very strange and striking fact that the share of gays and lesbians in Europe that now vote for the Rasmo Nationale, of Marine de Pen in France or for the AfD in Germany is rapidly growing.
- [12:15]
Katja Heuer
Yeah. And I think people often see this as a zero sum game. It can't be that there are several threats to a community. It has to be either war or there's competition around which is the biggest threat. I mean, if there are far right threats, then that doesn't mean that the Islamist threat isn't real. But there's always this moment now, I think, and this is quite telling as to where we are in terms of our debate here. When an attack like this happens and then people hope for the perpetrator to be of a certain ethnicity or background or ideological.
- [12:49]
Jasia Monk
And I don't know if you're alluding to that, but there was somebody who was holding a speech, speech at the Christopher Street Day, informing the crowds of what had happened, who literally said this. What I was hoping, and it was a strange choice of terms. I was hoping it was a kanaka, which is a derogative term I think, with persons themselves. Not White knuckles is a little bit like a kind of self claimed politicized term about a non German in the way that perhaps queer has become in reference to the gay community in the United States. I was hoping that it wouldn't be a kanaka, but sadly it has turned out to be one. I was hoping that it would be a white CIS person who made this attack. It's a very strange, strange thing to express in that moment.
- [13:27]
Katja Heuer
It is, and it's also utterly callous. I mean, it leads a million miles away from thoughts about the victims, about the people that this happened to, about the general situation that people just don't feel particularly safe anymore at these sorts of events. And it's ultimately not just, you know, political or social events like this one. People say the same about Christmas markets or about concerts or about any other public events. We've had several attacks even on very small kind of village fate type things or, you know, where people were attacked when they attended something in their local village or small town or beer festivals and things like that. And that just leads to a general perception, I think, that people just don't feel safer anymore. And if you move away from discussing that and what that means and what to do about it towards who's the perpetrator and is it somebody that I can blame, then that becomes a very politicized and ideological debate that isn't really constructive in terms of actually improving the situation.
- [14:28]
Jasia Monk
So towards the end of our substantive conversation about the history of Weimar as well as present day Germany. We talked about some of the upcoming state elections in East Germany in which the far right AFD was already projected to do very well. We talked in particular about influence, fact that perhaps in Saxony Anhalt they may win an outright majority. What impact do you think these attacks are going to have on those elections and how do you think ordinary Germans are going to react to them?
- [14:59]
Katja Heuer
It's clearly inflamed passions quite a bit. I've lived in Britain for a long time now, but I've still got many friends and family members in Germany and speaking to them over the last few days, it's really affected them. I know many people in Berlin when this attack happened, you know, people were telling me that their friends or siblings attended this pride event and were deeply shocked by what happened and they're going to go away with a different view of how they go about their lives. And I think that is bound to have a political impact as well. It doesn't necessarily mean that we immediately see a surge of the far right. I think in general, maybe some people may decide not to vote anymore because they don't know who to vote for because they don't trust any political party to deal with this. We may see an entrenchment on the left to say now especially we need to fight the far right so they may be able to mobilize people. But I do feel that this is quite a big political thing because it's not an isolated event that came on what some now actually call a bloody summer even because there have been so many events where people were attacked in different contexts. And there was a student, for example, who was just randomly became the victim of another attack where I think it was an Afghan individual, basically just killed him on the street during the day. He was completely a random victim. They didn't know one another. And there were several of these incidences now over the summer where it involved basically people who had either come to Germany or were had a migrant background of some description. So I feel that this accumulation is building up. You have people on the left saying, oh, why is this happening now when we've got elections coming up? Maybe they kind of suspect that there's some. I don't know how they imagine these things happen, but some people have suggested
- [16:54]
Jasia Monk
that maybe they about false flag attacks and all of those kinds of things which you see. Obviously often it used to be the right that claimed those kind of false flags in the United States, but it's also a Very tempting idea on parts of the left. I mean, let me sharpen my question perhaps a little bit. You know, the basic claim of parties like the AfD in Germany is that the institutions are failing. The people who are in charge don't know what they're doing. They're too captured in the ideology to take seriously the threats to our safety and well being and only we can fix it. I disagree with that in two ways. I disagree that the institutions are as disastrous as these parties say. I think we're very attuned to the failings of our societies and we tend not to see the things that are working well. And even for Germany, it's in quite a bad situation at the moment there. Many things that work very well in the country compared to most other places in the world. And secondly, I don't believe for a moment that the AfD, for example, would do a better job at dealing with these problems for all kinds of reasons we could go into. Having said that, stepping back a little bit, it's not surprising if people look at in particular the failures of the police, of a court system, of the entire setup, down to this absurdity about we're not going to share the picture of a perpetrator on social media because that would violate his personality rights and say, who's in charge here? Why should we trust them? And that, I guess, makes me afraid for the country's future and the future of other countries where there's similar problems.
- [18:37]
Katja Heuer
Yeah, and I think you're right to be afraid because the figures have shown over the last few years that trust in public institutions, and this goes all the way from Parliament in the abstract as an institution, all the way down to things like the police, public civil servants, that kind of thing. So public trust in general has been eroded over the years. And this is something that extremist parties can always use as a way of saying we need to stop tweaking things because the system itself isn't working. So we need radical solutions. And more and more people begin to believe that that is the case. And so you see the political changes happening there. I mean, this is a particularly stark case where there's so many little things along the way that kind of went wrong to get to this point, all the way from how was he allowed to grow up with this sort of mindset in the first place without any intervention as such, all the way to, you know, the way, as you say, that this was dealt with once the incident had happened. And all that people see is politicians coming up with phrases that may have come out of AI. I mean, it's virtually if you typed into AI, give me a speech by a politician after a major incident, incidents like this that's happened, you know, we, we won't have them destroy our way of life. Let's carry on, you know, living the way that we do. We must stick together. All they want to do is divide us. All these cliches, they, they don't help, they make things worse. And people feel that politicians don't have any answers to this. And once they feel that, what's the point in voting for the same politicians again? You know, it's going to be the next question that they ask. And so they vote for parties that have not been in power yet because they feel they might as well be roll the dice and give it a go.
- [20:20]
Jasia Monk
Katje Heuer, thank you for taking this extra time to update us on this tragic event in Gole.
- [20:26]
Katja Heuer
You're welcome.
- [20:30]
Jasia Monk
Katja Heuer, welcome back to the podcast.
- [20:32]
Katja Heuer
Thank you.
- [20:33]
Jasia Monk
Weimar is obviously a topic which has salience beyond the relatively short period during which the Weimar Republic lasted. And one of the reasons for it is that people love to use it as a historical metaphor for other political periods. And that's obviously something that has been very fashionable in the last years with a rise of the far right people and other elements of our politics, like an increasing sort of partisan fragmentation in many countries, et cetera. And so people are saying we're back in Weimar. You think that that is a really unhelpful way of thinking about things. Why should we banish the Weimar metaphor?
- [21:13]
Katja Heuer
Well, I wouldn't say outright banish it, but just use it constructively and a bit more cautiously, I think. I certainly get the feeling it's used mostly now as a bit of a tool for expressing emotions like fear and anxiety, I think, about what's currently going on and it doesn't tend to go beyond that most of the time. So we've just had the Bavarian minister president, for example, in Germany, one of the key conservative politicians, saying that Germany's on a Weimar path. That sounds quite daunting without actually saying anything kind of useful or helpful as to what the situation actually is and what we can do to solve it. And I feel the same goes for things like Hitler comparisons. Calling people fascists, that kind of thing is usually done not necessarily with a direct look to history, but more out of a sense of fear that history might be repeating itself. So I'm not saying that Spanish the whole thing. I wouldn't be a historian if I didn't think that we could learn something from history, but at the same time it's got to be done in a way that is actually helpful and forward looking.
- [22:18]
Jasia Monk
Why is this metaphor so tempting? I mean, obviously the Third Reich is the great catastrophe of modernity and Weimar is the thing that led up to the Third Reich. I mean, there's a kind of very straightforward answer to that. But different parts of political spectrum seem to see different things in the Weimar comparison a lot of the times. Interesting that you used as your example Marcus Soder, the Prime Minister of Bavaria. And Bavaria has been ruled since the end of World War II by a very conservative kind of sister party of the Christian Democrats nationally. A lot of the time when people use the Weimar comparison, it tends to come from the left. It's like everybody on the right is fascists, and these populists particularly are fascists. And if we don't stand up to them, then we'll end up back there. So there is this kind of way in which this metaphor is appealing across the political spectrum.
- [23:14]
Katja Heuer
Yeah, I think there's now a sense, certainly I can say that for Germany, where the center parties, so people who see themselves as kind of the old established party spectrum, both left and right of the center, seem to rally together against the kind of emergent parties, particularly on the far right, but also on the far left. And that there's now a sense that if that doesn't get stopped, then the center will erode. And I think that's why the right is now, as in the center right, the conservatives are also now beginning to use this as a metaphor to warn against political fragmentation, against extremism. And I feel that the appeal of that is quite stark now because first of all, I think it is genuinely the most terrifying example of a collapsed democracy that we've got in Western history, given where it ended and what we know happened afterwards. So therefore it's kind of the most extreme example to grasp if you want to make a point about saving democracy. And I think perhaps more speaking to the last 10 years or so, I think there's a sense, particularly in Germany, but across the west, that the established post war order is beginning to look less certain and more fragile than it perhaps did 10, 20 years ago. So in terms of issues like migration, the economy, the economic system, the way that we see the voter spectrum kind of fragmenting into smaller bits, all of that points to big political changes and people are looking to the past, I think, to find explanations for why that is. And in terms of Germany, you're looking Back to the last failed example of a democracy, and that is the Weimar Republic. Yeah.
- [24:53]
Jasia Monk
And the other thing that's interesting is that the Weimar comparison has historically been made a lot in Europe, and particularly in Germany, but it's sort of jumped across the Atlantic. So Niall Ferguson has talked about Weimar America, and it seems to me that for the left, sort of the idea of Weimar is really the idea about what happened at the end of Weimar. When you're making Weimar comparisons, it's really about the rise of the Nazis, including the fact that there wasn't a cross partisan enough rejection of the Nazis early on that there was conservatives who thought they would kind of make deals with the Nazis. And so when there's a question about should you go into governing coalitions with right populist parties, the Weimar comparison is a way of saying, what are you going to end up with? Is the Nazis right? I think for the right, when they talk about Weimar, I didn't see that quote by Marcus Soder, so I don't know in what context he used it, but certainly when somebody like Niall Ferguson uses it, I think they mean more something about dysfunction. Right. They're saying that the less focused on the end of the Weimar Republic and the catastrophe it leads to than on the fact that Weimar itself was deeply dysfunctional in all kinds of ways. And so they're saying our country today is becoming as dysfunctional as Weimar, obviously, also with the kind of frisson of look what terrible things that might lead to it in the background. But I think the emphasis is slightly different, Right?
- [26:12]
Katja Heuer
Yeah. And certainly also more on the economics, I would say. So there's certainly a look towards the fact that in Germany in particular, that its current economic model doesn't seem to be functioning properly anymore in the last really deep crisis to look at. If you want to exclude the oil crises and the bit of unemployment that there was in West Germany in the 1980s. Apart from that, you've got to go back before the war and before Nazism to find comparisons. And then this kind of idea that you were seeing a deep economic crisis of the scale of the Wall street crash and the Great Depression that followed is, I think, a bit of a bigger scare factor on the right than it is on the left, where the focus tends to be about combating FAS and the far right. But there's appeal in that for everybody, because I think it's perhaps the one example in modern history where everyone can agree that this was bad. And so you get the right and the left kind of saying, we need to avoid this, but drawing different conclusions from that.
- [27:13]
Jasia Monk
So in a way, we've jumped into sort of one of the things that makes the topic so interesting to contemporary ears that it's used as this metaphor all of the time. And so I think it's really hard to think about it, period of time. The Weimar Republic lasted for what, 15 years between 1918 and 1933, or perhaps it's really born in 1919, so even a little bit less long than that in one country that is obviously a significant country in the world, but one of many countries. I mean, it's very hard to think of another sort of period of rule that is that brief, that people have that much cultural fluency in. And so that's really interesting. But at the same time, of course, Weimar is therefore reduced to some of the stereotypes, right? Economic mess, political dysfunction. It all led to the Nazis. And that's the three things that every educated person knows. And then there's probably a lot of things that a lot of educated people, even within Germany, but certainly beyond Germany, don't know. So let's go back to the heart of your new book and on your latest work. In what ways is Weimar like the kind of shorthand that educated people are going to have for it? And in what ways is that shorthand really misleading about what that short but important period in German history was like?
- [28:32]
Katja Heuer
Well, I think we have a tendency, as we always do, to look at past events through the benefit or the disadvantage of hindsight, depending on your perspective. So we look at the Weimar Republic from its endpoint, from where it led to, and I think in that we often forget that actually there was a lot of enthusiasm for democracy to start with, and there are some lessons to be learned from that, too. So if you look at 1919 and you see just how keen people are to go voting, women in particular, they get given the vote for the first time in Germany after the First World War, and they go out to these political education evenings. And I got really quite surprised researching for my new book, which takes the whole thing down to street level. I'm looking at Weimar itself, which is the town that the Republic was born in, it named. And once you zoom in that far and you look at individual people's diaries, for example, you'll find that women, for example, were actually going to these sort of evenings where all the different political parties were telling them, you know, what their programs were, and they go in to listen to kind of old male professors telling them what voting is and what their duties as active citizens are. Going to be like. But there was genuine enthusiasm turn up was very high in the sort of 80 odd percent and 90, 19, 19 and the idea that this mattered, you wanted to go and decide on the future of your country was very much there. And the fact that that declines later on is in itself worth looking at and is often forgotten, I think as a lesson. Because there is this cliche, I think that Germans just weren't used to democracy, ergo they didn't really value it and therefore they were more prone to give it up. I don't think that was the case. I think people did take it very seriously to start with and it's the disillusionment with the malfunction of it and with the not being able to deliver or with the idea that it didn't deliver that later on drove them away from it.
- [30:20]
Jasia Monk
And that's something where I think the experience, for example of post Soviet transitions should also teach us a lot. Where in the first elections after the fall of communism in Poland and the Czech Republic and Hungary and so on, you obviously had a lot of people participating in voting because you were able to participate in a meaningful election for the first time ever, or for the first time in many, many, many decades. But by the third, fourth, fifth parliamentary elections, particularly in countries that at the time felt that a lot of things weren't going as well as they had hoped, participation in the election had really dropped off. So actually this I think we can now recognize as a pattern that's not really that specific to that time and place, but that tends to happen in, in new democracies. Now, as you're saying, one of the reasons why people then became disengaged in the Weimar case is that the political system that was established was very fractious, looked to people, truthfully or not, that it was not capable of actually delivering results. Why is that? Some of the main explanations that people give for that are that there wasn't a deep democratic history. For of course most Germans had voted in some form of election before 1918, though it generally wasn't for bodies that were as powerful as parliaments are in full democracies, or at least most German men had done so before. So one explanation is lack of democratic experience. A second explanation is that there's just too much ideological fragmentation, that you just weren't able to have some kind of stable governing majority because there were the communists and the Social Democrats and the various centrist parties and the conservative nationalists, nationalists, and then eventually the Nazi party that rose. Another explanation is the humiliation of defeat in World War I and the Versailles Treaty and the pretty onerous terms of that. And so any government had to agree to things that was humiliating and therefore any government would immediately become unpopular. And then of course there was the economic crisis that was partially a result of that and then obviously aggravated after the black back Friday after the stock market crash of 1929. I'm sure I've missed out some explanations, but is that roughly the list? Is there something missing? Which of these do you think is more decisive than others? Are there misconceptions that people have about this?
- [32:50]
Katja Heuer
No, I think that's, I mean that is a good list. And it already goes to show just how complex this whole thing is. And the matter is, and we can't just kind of write this off and say that Germans just didn't really know what democracy was or weren't really used to it because I think think that's the same fallacy as you just said, that people applied to the post Soviet system where they were kind of saying, oh, there was just no democratic culture and therefore people didn't get it. I don't think that is it. I think it's almost the opposite. People who come to democracy as a relatively new thing have got very high expectations of it and also they're initially quite enthusiastic, but they expect what you vote for on the ballot paper to actually make a difference. And when that doesn't happen, when it seems to be the case that you get the same situation again after you just voted, be that either a completely dysfunctional result or the same kind of block of parties just putting themselves together in a slightly different coalition, but really ultimately you get the same multi party government. Those kinds of things end up frustrating people, I think. And that's a big factor in the Weimar Republic as well. Interestingly, I think in the middle years it leads more to a sense of kind of malaise or just kind of, you know, oh, well, I won't bother today. So you see the turnar drop, but you don't see an increase straight away in extremist voting. And this is quite interesting. So in those middle years that seem relatively stable because of American investment largely and loans being given to Germany, you do see the turnout drop. Fewer people go out and they say, I might do something else with my Sunday. So elections are always on Sunday in Germany, always have been. And so quite often people, I saw this in people's diaries, they'd go, it's a nice Sunday, I'd rather be somewhere else. And they'd, they just don't bother, but they don't go and vote for Nazis and Communists straight away. So this is really important because even in 1928, the last election before the Wall street crash, the Nazi party still only get 2.6% of the vote. They have got all the other factors are in place, the kind of multi party coalitions, things not really moving forward. Hitler is already there and doing election campaigning and everything. All the other factors that people attribute to the rise of the Nazis are there. What isn't there is absolute economic devastation. So I always think that is a factor that is vastly underestimated. I think in today's political discourse is that this is often the biggest driver. People just want to have stable lives where they can have an economic future for themselves, for their children, for their grandchildren. And the moment they stop believing that things will at least stabilize, if not get better, that's when people turn to quite extremist options and when they give up on ideals of democracy, I think. So that for me, out of this whole bundle of factors that you mentioned, that would be the biggest one for me.
- [35:35]
Jasia Monk
And tell us a little bit about that economic devastation. Obviously, listeners will be familiar with the Great Depression in the context of the United States as well. That crisis, though is even deeper in Germany, in part because of the element of hyperinflation.
- [35:52]
Katja Heuer
Yeah. So the fact that they've had that experience. So in 1923, you know, most people will be familiar with those images of like children playing with banknotes and, you know, wheelbarrows being wheeled into, you know, shops and things like that. But I think, you know, again, once you break it down to street level, when I looked at people's diaries at the time and letters and things, you really begin to realize what that does psychologically to people when money is just not worth anything anymore. So my main guy in my book is a guy called Carl Weyrich, a book binder by trade and runs a little stationery shop in the town of Weimar. And initially he's kind of joking about it in his diary with a sense of gallows humor. So there's kind of. He says that he buys a bicycle, a used bicycle for 2 million marks for his wife, even though she can't even ride a bicycle. But he says himself that if he'd waited another few months, he would have been able to buy an egg or a loaf of bread for the same money. And so initially there's this gallows humor, but then very quickly, I mean, he's running a shop, he doesn't really know where to get the wares from how to get things like typewriters, because he can't pay for them once he's got them in. He's asking customers to pay millions, billions for them. Kind of pay 6 billion today and take it home offers like that. And later on he wrote, I don't even know how I reported those figures to the tax authorities. And I think that does something to society because ultimately the image that it conveys is that nothing is certain. Something like this can just happen out of the blue. And that does something, I think, long term, because people just don't really trust the system themselves, the situation that they're in to ever last. And that's really quite a dangerous kind of form of political hedonism, I would say, that sits in there where people go, I might as well roll the dice. And then things stabilize when they get a grip on that. But that psychological experience doesn't go away. Between the Wall street crash in 1929 and the hyperinflation period in 1923, you know, we're talking six years. And then people basically don't believe any politics.
- [37:53]
Jasia Monk
Well, it's kind of double whammy, right, where the first experience is that a lot of people's life savings disappear. Right?
- [37:59]
Katja Heuer
That's right.
- [37:59]
Jasia Monk
One thing about hyperinflation is that any sense that you could have stable plans for the future disappear, but perhaps some people remained in employment. And then suddenly in 1929 are not always the same people. Sometimes the same people then experience this mass unemployment. Right. And so the first economic disaster teaches you that you really can't have stable plans for your own future. You might be very maturely comfortable today, but that doesn't mean you might be materially comfortable tomorrow. You might think, well, as long as I have a stable ongoing source of income that allows me to deal with that. And then suddenly you have mass unemployment to boot. And so that kind of really undermines the preconditions for any trust and stability.
- [38:38]
Katja Heuer
Yeah, I think so. And also the fact that they came out the of the First World War and there was already that crisis to deal with in 1919, it was already bad. So even in 1919, 1920, you get inflation, just not hyperinflation. But it's already bad with kind of prices for bread and things like that doubling and tripling every few months by then. There's kind of an experience that's lasted several years and it's entirely associated with this post World War I era because people weren't used to that. They can remember the times before 1914, when it wasn't like that. And that's a sense of nostalgia is then beginning to set in. And people think, well, actually, maybe we were quite unhappy before 1914 because we want the political change, but at the same time, it was stable. You could depend on things. You trusted the government and even the Kaiser kind of implicitly. Most people were happy enough with the system. There weren't extremist parties then. That really only happened during the First World War. So this nostalgia is also quite dangerous. And again, we're seeing that again today. The idea that make America great again implies that there was once a time when it was great. And that in itself was something that political parties can always work with. The idea that it was once better than it is today. And that's also something that's deeply associated with the way that political parties play on the current sense of uncertainty.
- [39:57]
Jasia Monk
Incidentally, a lot of people today say, how can I have kids? Look at how uncertain the world is and how much change that's within it. And look, I think the argument for that is reasonable. And there's been a lot of important political events, including some genuine disasters over the last decades. Artificial intelligence is totally changing some of the foundations of our world. But when you think about what somebody who was born in 1890 would have experienced by the time that they're 35, you have the outbreak of World War I. You have the collapse in Germany, but many other European countries as well, of a system of monarchy that had been there for centuries or for decades, depending on the context. You have the Spanish influenza, which is an incredibly deadly and destabilizing event. Then in Germany, you have hyperinflation. You have, obviously a huge change of a territory of a country. Then you have a Great Depression, and then you have something like the rise of the Nazis. I mean, it's just sort of the number of extreme political events that aren't just out in the world, but that have a very direct influence on the lives of individuals within Those societies within 35 or 40 years is really hard. I think that tees up my next question. There's a historical journal whose title nicely expresses one of the key questions that historians always ask themselves, which is continuity and change. So you look. You have a kind of very straightforward and brilliant idea of approaching the history of Aiman Republic by looking at the city of Weimar and looking at a lot of the lives of people in that city. How much have their lives changed relative to the past? In 1920, in 1930, are all of these events we've Talked about immediately legible in their lives in such a way that it feels to them like they live in a completely different world. Are there elements of the culture that actually have deep elements of continuity, where perhaps in the everyday life of the local kegelfaen, the local bowling association, or the local zinfeijn, the local choir? Actually, it doesn't feel that different to a few decades before. How should we think about the actual kind of daily life in Weimar?
- [42:27]
Katja Heuer
Well, that's what I was wondering, too. That's why I thought it makes sense to pick one place and a particular group of people and follow them throughout this whole time frame, because I think we have a tendency to just look at this history top down. So we're looking at the big things that change. But it's hard to tell with individual people what does this actually mean to them and how do they actually perceive that. So to go back to Carl the bookbinder, he was born in 1885, so he is kind of that person that you just described. He's gone through a lot of the tail end of the German Empire. Then the First World War happened, and then he's suddenly finding himself in Weimar. He moved to Weimar in 1914, just before the First World War, and then set up a shop there. And he's not a particularly political person, so in a way he's a good barometer for when politics and economics become so central that he's starting to talk about it in his diary. So to give you an example, 1924, there was an election, or there were two elections, but I wanted to know how Khalid voted. So I went to his diary, had a look, and instead of the election results, I found that he'd gone, like up a local hill on a Sunday, you know, gone for a hike. I'm sure he voted anyway, because most people did, but it's just not important enough.
- [43:38]
Jasia Monk
It's not mentioned. Right. It's not the central event of that day.
- [43:41]
Katja Heuer
Yeah, no, exactly. I mean, if you think about, you know, even the situation today, most people think of, I don't know, family reunions, events in their own life, graduation, that kind of those, the big events in people's lives. And when politics becomes so big, however, that it has an impact on what you do, whether you wanted to or not. That's when he starts mentioning that so Suddenly. Then in 1933, you find for the first time really an outwards or an outright kind of commentary on politics when he sort of writes in his diary. And now we're putting all of Our hopes in this new young chancellor called a Hitler. And I was completely taken aback by that. There was absolutely no sign up until then that he was politically kind of active or that he was mentally engaged even with all of that stuff, because he's a fairly ordinary, quite likable, actually ordinary guy who just gets on with his life. But the situation does get so desperate, he can't pay his mortgage anymore. There's a point after the Great Depression hits in when he's about to lose everything. His house, where the shop's in, and he also lives above with a small family. Previously, in the First World War, the poverty and everything had got so bad that he'd basically lost his first family. His child and wife both. Both die of disease because there's malnutrition and as you said, there's the Spanish flu. There's also a huge tuberculosis crisis going on. So to him, all of that is so uncertain. And all that the government has got to offer is basically an austerity program under Heinrich Bruning in 1930. And Bruning actually goes on the radio and says to them, this is kind of your own fault. If anybody expected that life would get better after this war that we fought, think again. When actually Hitler then comes in and he says, give me four years, I'll sort out unemployment. I'll make sure the economy gets going again. Nobody needs to worry about their livelihood. That's tempting to people like Karl. And he starts mentioning that. And as for the continuity, that's interesting too, because Karl is very much, as I say, born in 1885. He comes from that old world, pre1914 world when he spent his youth. So he's, for instance, still extremely religious.
- [45:44]
Jasia Monk
He.
- [45:44]
Katja Heuer
He's a Protestant, and that's very important to him. And this is also a continuity factor that stays with him throughout his entire life, where you see him refer to the Bible or certain kind of phrases that people used at the time which are rooted in religion. And that remains kind of his main reference point for his morals as well. So, for example, despite the fact that he early on puts his hope into Hitler, he's shocked by the anti anti Semitism and by the violence that ensues afterwards. And he actually writes in his diary in 1938, when Castallnacht of the November pogroms against the Jews happen, that he feels that this is blasphemy. You know, it's kind of the strongest moral condemnation that he can reach for in his religious vocabulary, if you will, to say that he thinks that this is deeply wrong and this is going to come back on Germany and the Germans themselves, because it's not. Right. So in many ways there's this constant strand of identity and of kind of a backdrop of what Germany was beforehand and what had stayed to some extent as well.
- [46:47]
Jasia Monk
Yeah. I mean, the other thing that's just striking about that phrase that you cited from the diary is, you know, a young chancellor called a Hitler. Right. So the fact, it's almost like he
- [46:57]
Katja Heuer
just looked it up right. In the, in the newspaper again, because it's so formal still. He doesn't, you know, it's clearly not a name that he's used very often at this point.
- [47:06]
Jasia Monk
Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's kind of. It shows how hard it is to inhabit the mind of people who don't yet understand the significance of some event that's about to come. Right. I mean, in his mind, Hitler might be there and deliver on his hopes or he might prove a dud and it might be that a year from now you never hear of him again. Right. Whereas obviously to us, we understand, but that he goes on to be this disastrous and kind of central figure in world history that until today probably has worldwide name recognition above, I don't know, 80%. So probably a child in India today is more likely to be able to produce that name of the tip of their tongue than this person who apparently voted for him and helped him take power. So that's, that's really striking. What about the culture of Weimar? I mean, Weimar itself obviously is a storied town in Germany because it is associated with a lot of the historic thinkers and philosophers and so on who were based there. But what about the kind of. Then, of course, we have these images of the Weimar Republic that come from things like, like the movie Cabaret and so on, as this kind of place of extreme experimentation and artistic freedom to create in the everyday culture of somebody like this bookbinder, does it feel totally different from the time of the Kaiser or when he goes to his church? Does it feel like there's a lot of continuity with a time before World War I? How should we think about the kind of cultural moment in Weimar?
- [48:52]
Katja Heuer
Yeah. So what makes Weimar intriguing is, as you say, it's got this kind of almost fabled status in the German imagination as a culture capital. It's where important poets like Goethe and Schiller lived and worked, who probably, if people aren't familiar with them, have got the sort of status of, I would say, Shakespeare in the English speaking world. That's what they are to the German language. You can't go to school in Germany and not recite some Goethe at some point. And he's very deeply associated with that town. So are composers like Liszt and Bach, who spent years there, Nietzsche died there. It's really kind of a who is who of German culture. And yet when we think of the Weimar Republic, as you say, we think of cultural experimentation, cabaret, film, that kind of stuff, which is very, very Berlin. I mean, not even other German, big German cities like Munich or Hamburg or Cologne have got that sort of, you know, very kind of experimental nature of modern art. And Weimar is actually establishing itself as a bit of a counterpole to that is where a of conservatives are drawn because they believe that there's this kind of new culture as a threat to their way of life and to Germanness itself. Increasingly, they intertwine that with kind of racial or racist ideas of what to be German actually means. And they're saying that this new form of art is internationalist, it's Jewish, it's left leaning, it's not German. And so those people quite often rally in Weimar, but because they see it as the hub of kind of old German high culture. So interestingly enough, what we associate with Weimar when we hear that term today is actually very unweim in lots of ways. The one exception to that is the Bauhaus movement, which became hugely influential, especially after it was driven out of Germany by Hitler in 1933. But that was set up in Weimar in 1919 in the town, I think, deliberately, because the architect Walter Gorbius, who's behind it, he is a Berlin. Now, he could have stayed in Berlin where he's got all of his connections, but I think he deliberately wanted to set kind of the cat amongst the pigeons a bit with that. And as he said, the way he phrased it was he wants to poke the hornet's nest of German conservatism. And that's probably not a coincidence that he moves to Weimar with his merry band of, you know, kind of proto hippies. They're walking around with these like long coats that they call Wusenkittle or Russian coats and sandals and long hair and they go skinny dipping in the river ILM and Weimar. So the conservatives are not exactly happy with this bunch of students kind of living in communes. And I think that was deliberate. But it just goes to show that Weimar is very much not what we associate with Weimar culture. In fact, the term Weimar Republic itself was coined by Hitler in 1928, who uses it almost kind of sneeringly to say this, this isn't a German thing, this is a Weimar Republic. It's actually still called the Deutsches Reich or the German Empire as it was beforehand. And Hitler uses that term first. So it's interesting how that's morphed over time.
- [51:52]
Jasia Monk
Yeah, it's interesting that that has just become the standard neutral term given its provenance. And I bet that most people don't know that. So a certain young chancellor by the name of a Hitler takes over in 1933. How do the characters in your book then perceive the changes that ensue in Germany over the next six years? And in Weimar itself, which is right next to one of the most important concentration camps, Buchenwald.
- [52:24]
Katja Heuer
Yeah. So Weimar itself becomes what was called a gaur capital at the time. So Gauer are the sort of districts that the Nazis divide Germany into like administrative districts. And Weimar is basically a local district capital and therefore it's supposed to become a Nazi model town. That's how the local Gaul leader, Fritz Sauckel terms it. If the name rings a bell with people, that's because he's one of the defendants at the Nuremberg trials after the war, because he's later on in charge of forced labor during the Second World War. But at the time he's the Gauleiter of Thuringia. His seat is in Weimar and he wants that city to become Naziful to look like a Nazi model town. And so Weimar, for example, is the only GAO capital out of all of them that actually gets what they call a Gaul Forum. So this is a big Nazi party complex, like a U shaped set of buildings with a great big people's hall which is supposed to have a room for 60,000 people in it to listen to kind of speeches and parades and things. There's a parade square in the middle. It's a really giant building. When you think, I think Weimar is a town of just 35,000 people. It's tiny, like a sort of nice cobbled streets, timber framed houses kind of place. And then suddenly you put this kind of giant set of Nazi buildings, neoclassical straight lines, huge thing into the middle of it. A lot of Weimar has hated it, despite the fact that Nazi support was actually higher in Weimar than average across the country. At the same time, they don't want their town to be radically altered in the way that it was.
- [53:58]
Jasia Monk
So it's immediately Nimbyism is the only political force that can win even against Nazism.
- [54:02]
Katja Heuer
Yeah, I guess that is what it is. I mean, Karl himself is interesting in this because at one point, Nazi officials turn up at his house where his shop is, and he lives in a flat above the shop. And they just turn up and tell him, well, look, sorry, we need to tear your house down because this is supposed to become part of a kind of Nazified colonnade and we'll just need to rebuild all of the office. And they give him just a token amount of money to say, this is your compensation. Deal with it. And at that moment, he's shocked by the lawlessness of the whole thing. It's really interesting that this is late 1930s at that point. There have been concentration camps, not obviously of the scale of Auschwitz. That comes later, but there have been concentration camps. Everybody knows that they sit outside the law because they're run by the ss. And the SS is not explicitly not a state institution. It's an arm of the knife Nazi party. So people know all of that. And all of a sudden Carl Sitzent writes in his diary, like, how can this be? This is Germany. It's an ordered state, it's got laws. And he actually goes to a lawyer to try and see if he can get this stopped. And just this utter disbelief that suddenly when it hits him, you know, when it's already hit all of the political opponents, racial enemies of the state, that at that point he becomes personally affected by that. He's beginning to question the lawlessness of the whole thing. And this is one of the things that really struck me because he's not, say he's not a bad person inherently, but he's clearly able to push all of the injustices away out of his mind, you know, to kind of carry on with his life. And then it's.
- [55:30]
Jasia Monk
And he's sort of aware of those injustices going on around him, but, but, but he doesn't have a stake in them. And the moment that it comes home to roost, he's sort of outraged by the thing for which he made excuses when, when, when, when it affected others.
- [55:43]
Katja Heuer
No, that's exactly right. And even later on, when you look at the story, you know, after the war, he does look back on this and he. I mean, I start the book actually in Buchenwald, you mentioned this concentration camp which is built right on the outskirts of Weimar in 1937. It becomes actually the largest on German soil. Never a death camp. So there's never, you know, a kind of industrial attempt to kill people, but many people, over 50,000 people do die there of the, of the terrible conditions in it. And Carl is actually one of the people who Whom the Americans, once they liberate Buchenwald, they take a group of civilians up there and Karl is among them to show them what they'd lived next to. And Karl doesn't push that responsibility away from him. He doesn't kind of sit in his write in his diary, you know, this is outrageous. And I bet they made it all up. He does actually write. He's ashamed and disgusted by our German downfall. That's the phrase that he uses, kind of including himself in that. But he never goes a step further and says, you know, what was. Was my personal responsibility here. Could I have done something differently? The moment he goes there even slightly in his diary, on occasion, you kind of see him tempted. He immediately draws that door down again and says, no, actually, you know, what could I have done? I'm just an individual. It's the system that did this. And, you know, I was helpless. I was powerless as an individual. And that, I think, is the same feeling in the 1930s. When he sees stuff that he doesn't like, he tends to choose to look away or to withdraw himself from that situation rather than confront it. So to give you one extreme example, when they do the foundation, the lying of the foundation stone for that Gaul Forum, it's a huge ceremony. 40,000 kind of Nazi supporters are being taken into Weimar to celebrate the whole thing. What does Karl do on that day? He gets on a train early in the morning and leaves the town to go on a hike with his family and only comes back whilst the whole circus is.
- [57:32]
Jasia Monk
And this is not a form of political rebellion or skepticism, it's just he likes hikes.
- [57:38]
Katja Heuer
Yeah. And he wants to get away from this. He wants to be able to not see it, to be able to tell himself. Or at least that's my interpretation of it, to be able to tell himself that this isn't actually happening or you can shut it out psychologically. So he knows what's going on and he knows you should be there because all the Weimaras have been asked to go there. But he doesn't want to see it because he hates the way that the town is transformed by what he calls monstrous. And I think he uses the term hubris as well, you know, in terms of the. Even at the time, of the way that these building projects are totally oversized and ridiculous for the small kind of market town that Weimar is. So, you know, I think there's an interesting psychological dimension here. He still carries on walking and hiking on the hill by the concentration camp is knowing it's there. You still find him in his diary, basically where he says, you know, been up there with my son in January, hiking and sledging. And you know that like, 2km away from there is the camp.
- [58:32]
Jasia Monk
And there's dark jokes about the concentration camp going around the town quite early on. Right. So people are aware, not necessarily of the details of what's happening there, but certainly that something very nefarious is happening there.
- [58:42]
Katja Heuer
Yeah, and that's an important distinction, I think. So people do know that there's the camp. The Nazis don't make a secret out of that at all. It's part of their terror apparatus. They basically say, we have concentration camps. They even use the term concentration camp. I found, for example, mentioning in the local newspaper where there was a German American group that came over from, I want to say, Michigan or somewhere. And they came over on a Germany tour in the 1930s, and they. I saw their tour program, and they basically had tea at the Hotel Elephant in Weimar and then were taken on a bus, and they. They were taken up the hill to tour the concentration camp itself. And in the. In the kind of Nazi jargon, they said, you know, in this kind of report on it, it said, well, now they can see for themselves that these are kind of camps that are used for order and discipline and not, you know, as the Jewish lying world press will have it, as kind of really bad, you know, hygiene and so on. So they're even showing people these camps. And this is not something that is a secret. But I think equally when. I certainly have this for Carl in his diary, when he goes there and when he's taken there in 1945, and they're confronted with the piles of bodies, the. The, you know, the evidence of torture, the medical experimentation, the sheer horror of the whole thing, people are genuinely horrified by that. And I think this is, once again, because they're able to draw that line in their heads, and they're just saying, I'm not going there. Mentally. I know this is bad. I know lots of people die there. They see the coffins come down. Because initially the SS isn't allowed to run its own crematorium up there. So they're using the town crematorium so people can see the transports of bodies up and down. They can see the black plumes coming out of their own crematorium, know this is bad. There's even a rumor going around at the time that one of the lorries is supposed to have tipped over on the street and the bodies all came tumbling out. And whether that's true or not, the fact that people were telling themselves, you know, these stories tells us that they had a good awareness of what's. What's going on. I found evidence of children taunting each other, you know, to say, if you don't behave, you'll end up in Buchenwald. It's that common, the knowledge that. That this camp exists and that nothing bad's happening there and nothing good's happening.
- [60:51]
Jasia Monk
And so you interpret this similarly, that he is aware of this, perhaps queasy about it, but chooses to look another way.
- [61:02]
Katja Heuer
That's the case for him. But you find very different responses from all sorts of people. There are people who wholeheartedly agree and they say that it's the right people that get imprisoned there. This is for communists and for Jews. And, you know, the idea that you extract, for instance, Jewish and, like, money and value from them, that they wouldn't give up otherwise. You know, there are people who agree with that and who come down to the train station again, by the way, the people arrive at Weimar train station, right in the town, and then they're taken up. So people can always see, you know, Jews being rounded up and being beaten onto transport buses and things like that. But some people go there to go because they think, you know, finally somebody's doing something about this. A lot of people are very uneasy, choose to look away, and they say, you know, what were we supposed to have done about this, this? And then yet other people actually try and resist. So I have got somebody in the book called Court Nerling, who's a worker, and he joins the spd, the Social Democratic Party, as a very young man after the First World War. And he fights to the bitter end because he thinks this is so wrong that it's even worth risking his own life and his own family. He's got two small kids and he carries on fighting. So you get the whole range. But I think to explain why the majority of ordinary people, I mean, you can't really argue that an entire our society is evil. I don't think it was. But when the middle tips over and allows the extremists to do what they do, I think you gotta ask the question how that's possible. And I think it is a mixture of fear, consent, and people just allowing these things to happen because they feel helpless and they don't know what else to do. And so they decide to look away. And I think that critical bit in the middle is the bit that we can perhaps draw some lessons from.
- [62:41]
Jasia Monk
So your book goes year by year from 1914-19, 1939, bridge the gap to the present day for us. Very briefly. It's not mostly what the book is about, but just to listeners who are not aware of where we may is exactly geographically, for example, which side of the Iron Curtain does it end up on? What happens after 1989 and how do we get to the present day? Give us 80 years of history in three minutes or less. Go.
- [63:09]
Katja Heuer
Challenge. Accept. Accepted. Yeah. So Reimer is right in the center of Germany. That's part of its appeal and also part of the reason why everybody gets drawn to it. Because it's almost exactly in the center, halfway between Munich and Hamburg. It ends up being first bombed and then liberated by the Americans. Hence they are dragging the people up there to show them Buchenwald. And then as part of the renegotiations over Berlin, mostly because they want to divide Berlin into four occupation zones. Even though the Soviets get there first, the Americans agree to hand Thuringia, this is the state around Weimar, that Weimar is the capital of Thuringia and Saxony, those two states. They hand them over to the Soviets as part of the post war deal to have in their zone of occupation. It wasn't really supposed to matter because Germany wasn't supposed to be divided into two states. The idea was just that everybody gets to run their zone to start with. So this ends up being taken over by the Soviets with grave consequences for Karl, by the way. He's still wondering later on that if he'd maybe moved to Nuremberg, where his wife was from, maybe he could have avoided being kind of occupied by the Soviets, but ends up basically in that zone. They actually reuse Buchenwald as a so called special camp where they imprison political opponents again with grave consequences. About a third or so of them die in Buchenwald in that special camp after it had been liberated and then reused. And then it ends up in East Germany, Weimar with Buchenwald actually becoming its national memorial and museum. And then it stays in the east up until reunification. And interestingly, this whole history was kind of raked through a little bit in I think it was 1999 when Weimar was named culture, Culture City of the Year. And it became a sort of focal point of, you know, its own history, but also of it as, as kind of German history too, because so much of it happened there. And it's still, I would say if you go to Weimar today, still a touristy place, if you stopped any tourists on the street and asked them why are you here? Most people will still tell you what they would have told you in 1914. Namely, they're here for Goethe and Chile and, you know, the other kind of cultural dignitaries and only sections second. Sometimes, you know, there's a. There's a really stark moment when you're standing in the middle of Weimar on the central square, and you're looking at kind of the loveliness of Weimar. It's cobbled streets and everything. And then this bus comes down and it just says Buchenwald Concentration camp and memorial on it. And it takes you up the hill once an hour, and it takes tourists up there too. So it's still part of that legacy, I would say. But Weimar itself still sees itself as a cultural place rather than a place of the 20th century.
- [65:52]
Jasia Monk
A couple of one reflection and then a question. I mean, it's interesting that Germany goes obviously through these very different phases in the 20th century. You have the old Kaiserreich, then World War I, what we now call the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich. Then you have the divided Germany, which takes one form, the communist east, which Weimar ends up being situated in because of this deal that you're talking about. And it was really the kind of distinctive period of West Germany as well, which you could call the Bonn Republic. And as it happens, I just came back late last night from a trip to Bonn for rather strange conference that happened to take place in the old parliament building in Bonn. So I was actually standing at the lectern that Helmut Kohl and witty Brandt and Konrad Adenau and all of the most influential people are of German politics from the late 1940s until the mid-1990s, sort of made their home. And that's a very strange kind of Germany as well, because in a way, like Weimar, which was obviously not where the parliament was located in the same way at the time, et cetera. You know, it's even more than Weimar. It's a provincial town. It is not a huge capital. And there's something quite odd about that period of West Germany, but I think it's afraid of its own shadow in all kinds of ways. When you're in Bonn, it's really very strange to think that this used to be the center of a major nation. And then you enter the Berlin Republic, and the Berlin Republic is after reunification, when East Germany, West Germany come together again. East Germany gets in some ways subsumed in West Germany. And we talked a little bit about that in our last conversation as well. Let's think through the reasons why people might disagree with you and say, perhaps there is something to the metaphor that today Germany has certain similarities to the Weimar Republic we start to work from at the beginning. One of the huge problems in the Weimar Republic was that it was incredibly difficult to cobble together a stable gap governing a majority because so many different political parties just would not go into government with each other. And the communists wouldn't even go into government of the Social Democrats. The Social Democrats and the conservative nationalists had huge distrust between them. And then of course after the rise of the Nazis, quite rightly, the parties, at least left of center, were not willing to go into coalition with the them were very similar to that situation again in Germany today already. Each of the last two governments were kind of ideologically incoherent because you had a mix of left leaning parties and right leaning parties who have a whole bunch of points of agreement, but a lot of important points really don't have disagreement. And even though the leaders of the last government and the leaders of a current government are quite different, even though last government became quite unpopular and people changed the voting behavior to vote it out in terms of the policies they pursue, the government led by Social Democrats with a Green Party as a major coalition partner and then the more center right so called Liberal Party in Germany as a third member is not so different from the policies that the government now pursues when you have Christian Democrats in the lead with Social Democrats as the minor coalition partners. So there's not a lot of overlap in terms of personnel. But because it's this kind of cross ideological coalition, it doesn't end up having such a big change. And most likely that's going to be the case from now on in, I mean, the next Bundestag election. If you look at the polls, you're probably going to have to have even more moderate parties from the left and the right governing together to gobble together any kind of of majority. And when I look particularly at the state of Thuringia that Weimar is obviously located in, according to the latest poll, the AfD is at 39% of the vote. The left party is at 14% of the vote. Between them they have a majority of their unlikely to rule with each other. But it basically means because the Christian Democrats don't really want to be in a coalition with the left and the left doesn't want to be in a coalition with the Christian Democrats. There's no real governing majority. Possibly Vafire might somehow get a majority. Perhaps they're going to go together with Bundesara Wagenknecht, which is a party that comes from the left but is very friendly to Russia. And it is imaginable that they might go into a coalition with AfD. It's really totally unclear how they're going to govern together. You have a deep fragmentation because you have so many different party families, policies that simply do not accept each other as legitimate. The prospect for affecting political change is very low because of this coalitional math. Unless you vote for the extremists. I'm not comparing the AFD to the Nazis, and I think that's a facile comparison. But in terms of the level of fragmentation, you might say, well, this does look like the Weimar Republic.
- [71:14]
Katja Heuer
I agree. What I'm objecting to isn't the idea that there aren't similarities. As I say, I wouldn't be a historian if I didn't think that there was something to be taken from the past. What I disagree with is just throwing that word in there as a scare word and then leaving it there, because I don't think that is particularly helpful. My point is exactly what you just said. We can look at the details and then try and draw some individual lessons from this, rather than just saying, this is like Weimar, therefore we must all be frightened now, because I don't think that's helpful. That was my point, not to say that there aren't any similarities. There are loads. I mean, this is why I wrote the book in the first place, because I do think sitting here, basically writing, as I often do, about Germany today, and then you're kind of suddenly in the afternoon, you write in your book in 1926, something that may actually look quite similar to 2026, 100 years later. So that's certainly the case. And I do think we can learn from that history. It's just about being constructive about it. So say if you look at the political fragmentation, for example, and you just mentioned the idea that people compare the AFD to the Nazis to just say to voters, look, we did this before in 1933, therefore you mustn't vote for the AfD now isn't going to get a single voter back from the AfD. And this is my bone of contention here. This is what I'm saying. It's identifying the issues, why people vote the way that they do, and they aren't exactly the same today as they were in the 1920s. Just as the Nazis aren't the same as the AfD, so it's worth looking at why this stuff happens to identify the reasons why people are discontented with the status quo and with the moderate politicians. That I would say is more helpful in a constructive way than just to say to people. As you see these placards in Germany and people walk around and they say, voting AfD is so 1933. That's not going to make a single person sit there and go, oh, maybe I need to go back. Back to the SPD or to the cdu?
- [73:08]
Jasia Monk
Yeah. No, that's a way to signal that you're one of the good guys and get some kind of points in an internal moral status economy. It's not an attempt to persuade anybody on the other side who might be tempted by the other side. So what are the reasons? Right. I mean, in a sense, I understand the extent of discontent in Germany at the moment. In a way, I don't understand the extent of discontent. So let me sort of steel man each of those arguments. On the surface of it, there's just no analogy at all. Right. We've gone through some of the things that some of the characters in your book had experienced by 1933. World War I. The collapse of an old regime,
- [73:50]
Katja Heuer
the
- [73:51]
Jasia Monk
terrible pandemic, huge loss of territory, hyperinflation, mass unemployment, cost, constant political dysfunction. That's a lot, right? You can understand why that would delegitimize a system. What's happened in Germany for the last 60, 70 years? Well, the country has become one of the most affluent in the world with one of the highest standards of living. East Germany specifically has gone from being very poor in 1989, certainly by today's standards, to being much more affluent. Much more. I mean, it's really striking to look at videos of Leipzig, for example, from 1989, taken just after the fall of a wall. And you still see parts of the city basically in ruins from World War II, but had never been built up. You see big other parts of the city that just are completely run down because nobody's renovating these quite beautiful buildings in the center of town and so on. And today you go to Leipzig and it looks like a very pleasant, modern city.
- [74:51]
Katja Heuer
They call it hype sick these days because it's become so cool.
- [75:04]
Jasia Monk
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Good Fight. In the rest of this conversation, we talk about what to do about all of these developments. Does Weimar have any general political lessons to teach us about such questions as how to deal with a rise of the alternative for Germany today? How can we contain the rise of this political party? Is it possible to influence it so that it moderates as certain right wing populist parties did in Denmark and Sweden? What does that mean for moderate parties like the Social Democrats and the Christian Democrats? And the kind of strategy that they should pursue to listen to that part of the conversation. To support what we do here, go to writing.jaschamon.com and become a paying subscriber. That's writing.jaschambunk.com. Sat.