Volume 50, Number 16 · October 23, 2003
Could He Have Stopped Hitler?
By Amos Elon
Gustav Stresemann: Weimar's Greatest Statesman
by Jonathan Wright
Oxford University Press, 569 pp., $39.95
Gustav Stresemann, to whom the unlucky Weimar Republic owed whatever tranquillity, stability, and prosperity it attained in the mid-Twenties, has intrigued historians ever since. The subject of Jonathan Wright's well-researched new biography, Stresemann was a 'republican of the mind.' He held high positions in the Weimar Republic, but his heart remained in the defunct Hohenzollern monarchy. Weimar lived under threat of a military coup. It was said to be a 'republic without republicans.' Thomas Mann—not surprisingly to those who knew of his intense support for Germany in World War I and his hostility to the Anglo-American model of liberal government—took several years to reconcile himself to it. Several governments fell; others were reshuffled regularly, often twice a month, only to be reconstituted with the same party coalition. As Walter Rathenau, another 'republican of the mind,' put it, the German 'revolution' of 1918 had not been a real one. It had only chased away the Kaiser:
Review, 2709 words
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