Weimar
Life on the Edge of Catastrophe
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- Pedido anticipado
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- Se espera: 9 jun 2026
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- $15.900
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- Pedido anticipado
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- $15.900
Descripción editorial
From the author of the international bestseller Beyond the Wall, a history of interwar Germany told through the town of Weimar, the cultural capital that was both the birthplace of the country’s first full democracy and a launchpad for the Nazis.
“Katja Hoyer is a humane and compassionate writer, and her gripping book is poignant reading in our present circumstances.” —Benjamin Carter Hett, author of The Death of Democracy
The Central German town of Weimar is perhaps most familiar to non-Germans for giving its name to the Weimar Republic. After Germany’s inglorious defeat in World War I, the signing of a new constitution in Weimar marked the nation’s first experiment with full-fledged democracy. And yet this storied town, long known as a center of German culture and tradition, was also the place where Nazis were first welcomed into a local government, a milestone in Adolf Hitler’s fateful rise to power.
In Weimar, historian Katja Hoyer examines Weimar as a microcosm for the entire German nation between the world wars. The Weimar Republic saw a flourishing in culture and the arts, including the establishment in Weimar of the Bauhaus school of architecture. But after Hitler seized the chancellorship in 1933, the town underwent rapid Nazification, with many ordinary Weimarers basking in the attention they and their town received from the regime and from Hitler personally.
Combining gripping narrative with deep historical analysis, Weimar explores both the political upheavals and the rhythms of daily life in one town, revealing how fascism took hold first there, and then across the nation.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The birthplace of Germany's liberal democracy also nurtured Nazism, according to this irony-drenched study. Historian Hoyer (Beyond the Wall) chronicles the interwar fortunes of Weimar, a city in the state of Thuringia where Germany's first democratic constitution was adopted in 1919. The town was an epicenter of high culture—the home of Goethe, Schiller, and Bauhaus—but Weimar's left-leaning humanism, Hoyer argues, was outweighed by a cultural conservatism that embraced the fledgling Nazi Party as a bulwark against communism. She notes that the town warmly welcomed Hitler on his many visits, hosted the 1926 Nazi Party rally, and voted more heavily Nazi than Germany as a whole, while Thuringia's state government energetically pursued Nazi policies, including purging Jews from the civil service. Weimar was also complicit in atrocities committed at the nearby Buchenwald concentration camp, Hoyer contends: businesses used forced labor from the camp, and the town crematorium burned the cadavers of inmates. Hoyer tells Weimar's story through the eyes of its citizens, probing the intimate details of Germans' shifting political attitudes and painting a vivid picture of Hitler's success as disturbingly credible. (One woman encountering him in a local café "found the Nazi leader surprisingly easy to talk to.... She regaled him with amusing episodes from her life... and ‘Hitler cried tears of laughter.' ") The result is a fascinating microcosm of Germany's gradual descent into the abyss.
