THE WEIMAR EXPERIMENT

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 33077, 18 November 1972, Page 10

THE WEIMAR EXPERIMENT

Weimar Germany: Democracy on Trial. By Sefton Delmer. Macdonald. 128 pp.

Expressive of the current passion for recent history, Macdonald’s Library of the Twentieth Century continues to live well up to its modest aims. Carefully limited in scope, well-written and profusely illustrated, the volumes so far published offer scholarly but not forbidding academic views of crucial events and personalities this century. The present volume, written by a veteran journalist who was an eyewitness to some of. the events he describes, maintains the reputation of the series with a balanced and succinct account of the first German experiment in republican democracy, the Weimar republic of 1918-33. As Sefton Delmer so rightly emphasises, the Weimar republic was from the first doomed. Bom of a military defeat which the military admitted privately but not publicly, so giving rise to the myth of the “stab in the back,” compromised in early infancy by the pact between the Chancellor, Ebert, and the German High Command, by which the army agreed to support the republican regime if Ebert agreed to put down the more extreme left-wing groups which also supported it, and crippled throughout most of its life by the reparations and disarmanent clauses of the Treaty of Versailles, the attempt to plant liberal institutions in German soil could scarcely do other than fail. There is, however, a special

fascination about failures, and especially about failures as spectacular as that of Weimar. It is not surprising that the period is one of abiding interest for laymen as well as historians.

If the Weimar era was one of social and political failure, it was also one of artistic success. Painters, sculptors, poets and, notably, architects, made Germany in the period 1923-33 an exciting place to live, perhaps the most exciting in the world, artistically. Having experienced the “feel” of Weimar Germany himself, Sefton Dehner is well-placed to select photographs and paintings which capture the spirit of the age. This they do with greater impact, in this reviewer’s opinion, than the illustrations to any volume earlier in the series. Mr Delmer’s text is sound, but not exciting. The illustrations are very exciting indeed. A bibliography is provided for those who wish to consider the republic in greater detail, though oddly enough it does not include what is surely the standard work on the subject, Erich Eyck’s two volume “History of the Weimar Republic” (English translation, Oxford University Press, 1962).