–book review by Jens Kruse —

Death of Democracy

Benjamin Carter Hett opens his book The Death of Democracy. Hitler’s Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic (New York: Henry Holt, 2018) with the burning of the Reichstag during the night of Monday, February 27, 1933, “the last night of the Weimar Republic, the last night of German democracy” (3).

This event, even more than Hitler’s ascension to the chancellorship on January 30, 1933, was the hinge moment in history when Germany’s slide from democracy to dictatorship, peace to war, culture to barbarism became irreversible.

In the next eight chapters, Hett, a professor of history at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, carefully tries to answer the question he asks in his “Introduction”: “How could this happen” (7)?

How could a state that was in many ways the most modern and most exemplary of European democracies descend into dictatorship? The German Republic that had emerged from the post- World War I chaos into the mid- and late 20s had some of the world’s most advanced social systems, led the world in its art, music, film and literature, was unrivaled in its reputation in science and scholarship. How could a people capable of such achievements follow a dictator into war and genocide?

The answer is, of course, complex. Hett explains the many factors that led to these catastrophic developments in clear and vivid prose. Among the factors are: the trauma of the world war, and especially of its ending; the conspiracy theory that attributed losing the war to a treacherous “stab in the back” of the military and the country by communists, socialists and Jews; Hitler’s rise as a politician on the strength of his lies, his propaganda, and his myth-making; the deep divisions in German society between anti-democratic conservatives and communists on the one side and democratic parties on the other; the divisions between Catholics and protestants; between the cities and the countryside. It did not help that, when the Walls Street crash of 1929 led to the world economic crisis, a crisis that in Germany was further intensified by the harsh terms of the Treaty of Versailles, German governments pursued a policy of austerity that drove more and more voters to the extremes and especially the Nazi Party. And even then the democracy of the Weimar Republic might have survived if a group of conservative politicians had not conspired to bring Hitler and the Nazis into the government for their own purposes, thinking that they could use him, that they could control him.

This, needless to say, turned out to be a miscalculation that led to catastrophic consequences for Germany, Europe, and the world.

In the more than seven decades since the end of World War II historians have told this story many times. So why tell it again? Hett is well aware of this question and he answers it straight on. First, history is an accreting form of knowledge: as archives become accessible and new documents become available historians have the opportunity for new insight and understanding. But second, and perhaps more importantly, each present sees the past from its particular perspective. And Hett makes clear that we live in such a present. He points out that “our time more closely resembles the 1930s than it does the 1990s” (10). Especially in its end stage the Weimar Republic struggled with questions like: “How should national borders be squared with ethnic identification? How should countries manage the rights of minorities? What should be done with refugees and other migrants?” (10).

The Nazis had definite and simplifying answers to these questions: answers that appealed to enough, though never a majority, of German voters to make Hitler chancellor and eventually dictator; answers that led inexorably to war and genocide.

Benjamin Carter Hett’s The Death of Democracy. Hitler’s Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic is important reading for our time. It can be checked out from the Orcas Library. It is available through Darvill’s Bookstore.

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