Volume 1, Number 10 · January 9, 1964
Weimar and After
By George Lichtheim
A History of the Weimar Republic
by Erich Eyck
Harvard, vol. II, 535 pp., $12
Stresemann and the Politics of the Weimar Republic
by Henry Ashby Turner Jr.
Princeton, 287 pp., $6
The Economics of Success
by Ludwig Erhard
Van Nostrand, 412 pp., $6.50
A widespread nostalgia for the literature of the Weimar Republic is among the more surprising phenomena encountered by the visitor to the present Bundesrepublik: the literature, not the politics. No one in West Germany, however enamored of the roaring Twenties, desires a return to the age of Ebert, Hindenburg, and Stresemann. The Berlin of those days has acquired a legendary aura for the sake of its hectic and undeniably brilliant intellectual life. Nobody wants the politicians back, not even those Germans (a dwindling number) who go on believing in the reunification of their country. No myth attaches to the first German democracy, which perished so ingloriously in the flames of the 1933 Reichstag fire. It is as though its memory had been swallowed up in the cataclysm of 1945, when the fire spread to engulf the whole city, and much besides.
Review, 2430 words
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