Overview: Weimar Republic, 1918-1933

The documents, images, maps, and media clips in this volume reveal some of the many and varied developments in Germany during the Weimar Republic, between 1918 and 1933. Take a closer look, for instance, at the spellbinding canvas “Evening over Potsdam,” which graces the top of this very page. Completed in 1930 by the German-Jewish artist Lotte Laserstein, it depicts a gathering of friends on a terrace overlooking the steeples and towers of Potsdam, a historic city on the southwestern outskirts of Berlin. Less than three years later, the newly installed Nazi government used that very same city as the backdrop for a tableau of a radically different kind— the pomp-filled “Day of Potsdam” on March 21, 1933, a ceremony that symbolically enshrined Hitler’s chancellorship in a long succession of powerful German rulers and sealed the end of the Republic. That later image might tempt us to interpret the expressions of Laserstein’s friends as ones of foreboding, an early premonition of things to come. Laserstein herself saw the Nazis’ growing popularity in 1930, after all, and she would later flee the country in 1937, never to set foot in Germany again.

Laserstein and her body of work conjure far more about this period than just the political and economic anxieties of its last three years, however, and that makes “Evening over Potsdam” such an intriguing document. Laserstein developed her artistic vision within the vibrant atmosphere of the Republic and in dialog with its many transformations. As a child in Wilhelmine Germany, Laserstein’s aunt taught her to paint, but Laserstein only received formal training upon admission to the highly selective Berlin Academy of Fine Arts in 1919, a beneficiary of the new opportunities for women, Jews, and artists that had opened in the midst of the country’s revolutionary changes. The Republic had—among a host of progressive measures—removed the censorship of cultural expression, guaranteed women the right to vote, and enabled a greater degree of self-determination. Laserstein furthered these changes through her own paintings, many of which depicted variations of the “New Woman,” a figure conveying autonomy and athleticism, qualities that Laserstein herself embodied. The year 1930 witnessed not only her completion of “Evening over Potsdam,” but also her first solo gallery exhibition, as she charted a path in a male-dominated medium. Situating the painting within the context of Laserstein’s own growing artistic reputation, as well as that of the Nazis’ first big electoral breakthrough, suggests the contradictory nature of the Weimar Republic: the historical context that had enabled a party like the NSDAP to emerge and thrive had also enabled someone like Laserstein to do the same.

This introduction gives a very condensed overview of the Weimar Republic and, like all historical writing, it also gives a necessarily subjective one. I encourage readers to expand upon and revise the brief analysis here by consulting the burgeoning scholarship on Germany between 1918 and 1933 listed in this volume’s bibliography. I begin my overview with the proclamation of a republic on November 9, 1918, which Germans at the time experienced as a watershed event, and I highlight the establishment of the Republic’s foundations over the subsequent nine months. This took place amidst armed conflicts with forces on the far left and—increasingly and more ominously—on the far right over the type of state form that should govern Germany, and those conflicts did not end with the ratification of a new constitution on August 11, 1919. It also took place amidst the transition from a wartime to a postwar society, which entailed demobilizing millions of soldiers; caring for the millions of war-wounded, widows, and orphans; and navigating the punitive provisions of the Versailles Treaty. This introductory overview then departs from a chronological narrative in order to highlight a few key themes in the history of the Weimar Republic and some of this volume’s relevant sources. I conclude with a short discussion of how our historical understanding of the Weimar Republic has changed over time. A brief note on nomenclature: Historians refer to this period as the “Weimar Republic” or “Weimar Germany” (a designation that derives from the fact that deliberations over the constitution took place in the city of Weimar. That designation only started to gain widespread currency after 1933, though. At the time of the Republic itself, Germans referred to their state as “die Deutsche Republik” (the German Republic) or “das Deutsche Reich” (the German Empire or Realm), with the choice of term reflecting one’s political leanings, satirical intent, or desire for compromise.

The first collection of documents in this volume bears the title “War and Revolution, 1918-1919,” and spotlights the transformative events in Germany that began in late fall 1918 and came to be known as the “November Revolution.” Such a compact single-month designation obscures a longer timeline of engagement for a democratic Germany, however. The three preceding GHDI volumes highlight movements for government reform that had animated German political life since the mid-nineteenth century. The sacrifices imposed by the First World War, meanwhile, politicized Germans to an unprecedented extent and lent these demands newfound urgency. The images and texts in this section reveal the exuberant and improvisational atmosphere of the Republic’s first year, as different constituencies tried to reshape the state and society to meet those demands, and as the subsequent compromises and perceived betrayals fostered resentment and sometimes violence. Regardless of one’s political leanings, though, Germans agreed on the significance of the moment. The diplomat Count Harry Kessler recorded in his diary entry on November 9, 1918, that he felt he had just witnessed “the end of the old order of society in Germany,” and he called it “one of the most memorable and dreadful days in German history.”[1]

Fearing that revolutionary momentum on the far left might lead to the sort of upheavals engulfing nearby Russia at that very moment, the moderate Social Democratic leaders of the hastily convened provisional government decreed a series of reforms in an effort to steer the public’s democratizing impulses onto a decidedly parliamentary path. Within days, the new government had removed censorship, guaranteed freedom of opinion and assembly, lowered the voting age from 25 to 20, and recognized the right of women and soldiers to vote. The government also convened business and labor leaders to announce a wide-ranging agreement, the Stinnes-Legien Pact (Document #27), under which business formally recognized labor’s right to form unions and workplace councils and finally enacted the eight-hour workday, a goal of German workers since the 1870s. (Employers later repealed that provision in 1923).

The iconoclastic spirit of the November Revolution also opened up space for new forms of self-expression, as the artistic and social “outsiders” of pre-1918 Germany—to borrow the classic formulation of historian Peter Gay—became cultural “insiders” in the young Republic, or at least more accepted members of it. Artists and thinkers increasingly questioned prevailing values, issuing passionate manifestos and utopian programs, several of which you can read in the chapter in this volume titled “Arts and Culture” (Documents #1, 33, and 56, to give just three). The artistic movement known as Dada, for instance, mocked bourgeois taste and celebrated irrationality. Having emerged in Zürich during the war, its center of gravity had shifted to Berlin by 1918, in a direct reflection of Germany’s increasingly dynamic spirit. A similar energy inspired the architect Walter Gropius to found the Bauhaus School of Art and Design in April 1919, also in the city of Weimar and practically in the shadow of the National Assembly. Bauhaus channeled a similarly egalitarian and democratizing spirit, too, in its ambition to incorporate art and aesthetics into the functional objects of daily life. A related sense invigorated the homosexual rights movement, which had first begun to organize in the 1890s, and flourished in the Weimar Republic, as shown by the proliferation of publications, clubs, and advertisements. Examples of these appear in the chapter “Gender and Sexuality,” and you can get a spatial sense of the density of LGBTQ locales in “Queer Berlin,” under the “Maps” section.

At the same time, political organizing flourished across the spectrum. Three major new political parties on the center, center-right, and far right formed in November (the DDP, BVP, and DNVP), and two more did so soon thereafter on the center-right and the far-left (the DVP and KPD). The German Workers’ Party (DAP), meanwhile—the precursor to the Nazi Party—formed on January 5, 1919. All of these parties, their vast ideological differences notwithstanding, grew out of the same revolutionary moment, as Germans reimagined their future in myriad ways (see Documents # 57, 73, 86, and 87 for articulations of three different visions). In fact, only two major political parties in the Weimar Republic could trace their founding to the prewar era, the SPD and the Catholic Center Party [Zentrum], and even those two had evolved significantly in 1918, as they moved from the margins of power—where pre-war politics and prejudices had relegated them—to its absolute center. For the SPD, in particular, its newfound status as a governing party enflamed long-simmering tensions with splinter parties further to its left, which burst violently into the open in December 1918. Throughout that winter and into the spring of 1919, the provisional government’s moderate SPD leaders cracked down with increasing ruthlessness on a revolutionary group of erstwhile party comrades who pursued a more radical vision of social transformation that oriented itself on the emerging Leninist model in Russia. The resulting bloodshed widened the rift between the moderate left and the far left, hampering the two parties’ ability (the KPD and the SPD) to join forces a decade later, when a genuinely existential threat to both of them had begun to emerge on the far right.

At the same time, a remarkable 83% of eligible voters across the country cast their ballots on January 19, 1919, for representatives to a National Assembly charged with drafting a new constitution. The three parties that had made support for the new republic central to their identities—the so-called “Weimar Coalition,” comprised of the SPD, the Catholic Center, and the DDP— together secured 76% of the vote, which marked a decisive victory for republican democracy. When the 423 duly elected delegates convened in early February in the city of Weimar, moreover, they represented the new face of Germany. They came from a broader cross section of society than had the members of any previous German legislature, in terms of religious and class background, and in terms of gender, with 37 women taking their seats alongside 386 men. Although this number still woefully underrepresented women, Germany had nevertheless far surpassed its peer democracies. The U.S. House of Representatives had only one woman at the time, out of 435 members; the British House of Commons just one out of 707 members; and women in France did not even have the right to vote, let alone be elected to office.

Those 423 delegates gathered in Weimar managed to craft what may well have been, in the words of one of its framers, the “most democratic constitution in the world.” It stipulated the direct election of the president, for instance, making it one of the first in the world to do so, and it allowed citizens to vote directly on any issue, once 10% of the electorate had called for a referendum. The 1919 Constitution (Document #50) also established Germany’s parliament on the basis of proportional representation to ensure the broadest range of political voices, and it incorporated a number of principles from the historic, but never implemented, 1849 constitution that had served German democrats as a rallying cry throughout the intervening seven decades. (For more on this earlier constitution, see the GHDI section, “From Vormärz to Prussian Dominance, 1815-1866.”) Women gained new rights and protections, articulated most directly in Article 109 of the constitution that guaranteed gender equality. Article 119, meanwhile, pledged state support for mothers and children, in recognition of the unprecedented change in family structures in postwar Germany, particularly in terms of the unprecedented number of widow-headed households. That spirit of equality notwithstanding, the state actually encouraged employers to dismiss millions of women in 1918 and 1919, so that returning veterans would find jobs waiting for them, one of the countless contradictions that defined the Republic.

Another contradiction that had especially profound consequences during the last two years of the Weimar Republic stemmed from one particular provision of the “most democratic constitution in the world”: Article 48. Instead of concentrating all the power in the Reichstag—a body that would represent the breadth of German political opinion in a proportional and very democratic manner—the constitutional framers decided to create a strong president as a counterbalance to the inevitably contentious and drawn-out parliamentary deliberations. They wanted the president to be able act decisively in moments of national crisis, without getting bogged down in the partisan debates and messy deal-making inherent in representative democracy. Indeed, the framers felt that Germany faced just such a national crisis during the constitutional deliberations themselves, as revolutionary uprisings and violent reprisals rattled Berlin in March 1919 and ravaged Munich just one month later. Article 48 allowed the president to issue emergency decrees [Notverordnungen], even when they temporarily contravened specific parts of the constitution itself, such as freedom of the press and the right to privacy. The Reichstag still retained the power to rescind a presidential decree with a simple majority vote, but a president could circumvent that safeguard by preemptively dissolving parliament. Article 48 depended, as all legal provisions do, on the good faith of the leaders exercising it. Germany’s leaders demonstrated that good faith throughout the 1920s, particularly under the presidency of Friedrich Ebert (SPD), who held the office from 1919 to 1925 (for one example, see Document #20, under the chapter “Politics, 1920-1929”). Things changed in 1930, however, when President Hindenburg and his advisors increasingly used Article 48 to move the country in an ever more authoritarian direction.

As we leave the “War and Revolution, 1918-1919” section, subsequent chapters draw together sources around specific themes in the Weimar Republic and, taken as a whole, both illustrate historical trends and raise historical questions. The section “Jewish Life,” for instance, reveals yet another paradox of this period in German history—the way in which growing opportunities for German Jews coexisted with increasing antisemitism aimed at them. Hugo Preuß, the principal drafter of the Weimar Constitution, illustrates the opportunities. Prior to the war, the University of Berlin had denied Preuß a law professorship because of his Jewish faith, but in late 1918, the new Republic entrusted him to craft its legal foundation. If you are looking for an example of a prewar “outsider” becoming a postwar “insider,” look no further than Preuß. Other prominent examples of German Jews having finally attained high-ranking positions in public life include Max Liebermann, who became president of the Prussian Academy of Arts in 1920, and Walther Rathenau, who became Foreign Minister in 1922. Earlier quotas on the number of Jews in higher education fell away, too, so that, by the 1920s, as the historian Peter Fritzsche has pointed out, a Jew could more easily secure a spot in a German university than in an American one. By some measures of social integration, too, German Jews enjoyed greater acceptance than ever. The number of “mixed” marriages between Jews and non-Jews, for instance, numbered around 50,000 by the early 1930s, according to the historian Yehuda Bauer. At the same time, however, other measures indicated a sharp rise in antisemitism over the course of the 1920s, seen in the increasingly explicit antisemitic messaging by some political parties, especially the NSDAP; in outright bans on Jewish membership in some organizations, such as the one enacted by the Stahlhelm veterans’ group in 1924; and by the growing number of popular coastal resorts that refused Jewish guests, which rose from 100 in 1914 to 360 by 1931 (Document #8, under “Jewish Life”).

The Bauhaus School, already briefly mentioned above, provides yet another example of this period’s paradoxes in terms of the school’s development and ultimate fate. The school brought together nearly every area of the arts and crafts, from ceramics and metalworking to building design, and the chapter “Architecture and Urban Life” in this volume gives an indication of the school’s wide-ranging vision. It extended to a sleek, efficiency-minded kitchen, the so-called “Frankfurt Kitchen,” that Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky designed for inclusion in a massive development of 12,000 modern dwellings in the city of Frankfurt in the late 1920s (Documents #17, 18, and 19). Bauhaus’s progressive spirit and unorthodox faculty and students vexed the steadily more conservative local officials in the city of Weimar, however, who prompted the school to move to Dessau for political and financial reasons in 1925. Seven years later, the city government there, by that point under Nazi control, similarly turned against the school and its vision, leaving a truncated iteration of Bauhaus to attempt a brief third life in Berlin that finally ended in 1933. Bauhaus’s influence and legacy, though, extended far beyond the Weimar Republic. Many students and instructors continued to navigate careers under the new Nazi regime, while others—including some of the school’s brightest lights—went into exile. Under the category “Maps” in this volume, you can see the global reach of its ideas and its exiled alumni, from Calcutta and Tel Aviv to Ankara and Chicago.

Users of other volumes in the GHDI primary source collection will also notice many common historical threads and questions that link the Weimar Republic to earlier and later periods in Germany history. Ongoing efforts to define and consolidate a German state, for example, which stretched back centuries, continued in the Weimar Republic, and not just in terms of the vocal calls to reclaim territories lost in the Versailles Treaty (Document #5, under “Rural Life” and Document #103, under “War and Revolution,” for example) and the sporadic efforts to forge a union between Austria and Germany (Document #26, under “International Relations”). Finance Minister Matthias Erzberger’s 1919 initiative to overhaul and centralize Germany’s tax system (Document #49, “War and Revolution”) reflected a bureaucratic variant of this impulse and one that established the foundations of a fiscal system that operates in Germany to this day. Many of the economic patterns of rural life continued well into the Weimar Republic, as well, as revealed in the recollections of Reinhard Florian, a Sinti-German, who described his father’s work as a horse trader in East Prussia and recounted that a handshake sufficed as a binding “business contract” into the early 1930s (Document #18, under “Rural Life”). In Oberammergau, in southern Bavaria, meanwhile, Document #2 (under “Faith and Religion”) highlights both the ways in which townspeople carried on the tradition of the Passion Play in 1922 and the modern challenges that they faced, including soaring inflation and the commercial temptation of taking the production on a lucrative tour of several U.S. cities. Historians of the Weimar Republic, myself included, have long fixated on the glitter and tempo of Berlin, but this volume seeks to show how diverse and geographically varied Germany was at this time. Nearly half the population still lived in communities of 5,000 people or fewer, after all. “Weimar” may well have been Berlin in many ways, to paraphrase a 2007 formulation by the historian Eric Weitz, but it was also so much more.

“Weimar” was also so much more than the ostensibly doomed period of German history that preceded the Nazi regime, despite the term’s persistent connotation of foreboding. Indeed, over the past three decades, historians’ characterizations of the Weimar Republic have shifted markedly. Drawing on an array of sources, researchers in the 1990s began turning their attention to the dynamics of gender, the body, sexuality, technology, urbanization, new forms of media, and consumerism, inspired by the methodological and theoretical possibilities of discourse analysis. The 1928 film clip advertising transatlantic travel (Document #31, under “The Economy, 1918-1929”) offers one example of the types of sources from which researchers started to draw. By expanding the types of documents that they consulted and the sorts of questions that they asked of these documents, historians moved the issue of Nazism’s rise from its earlier position as the exclusive focus of Weimar historiography to its current position as one of a number of questions about the era that one might pose (and still an undeniably critical one). In doing so, such histories have also highlighted the positive and lasting legacies of the Republic, including in the areas of urban planning, social welfare, and sexual rights.

Recent historians have also underscored the hitherto underappreciated support for and resilience of the Weimar Republic, and they have highlighted the remarkable levels of engagement in the democratic process. An increasing attention to language, which emerged in the methodological shifts of the 1990s, has revealed the ways in which concepts such as “crisis” had connotations to the 1920s ear that differ from those of today. When political actors and commentators deployed the word “crisis” during the Weimar Republic, as the historians Moritz Föllmer and Rüdiger Graf have shown, the word signaled a pending choice and opportunity for change, rather than an expression of hopelessness in the face of an intractable problem. In that sense, “crisis” represented a call to action, even a cause for optimism, if the larger society made the choice for which one advocated. Furthermore, making that choice often entailed democratic engagement, and historians have pointed increasingly to the ways that parties across the political spectrum in the Weimar Republic used calls for “democracy” to justify their demands. This included the Nazi Party, especially in the second half of 1932, as it decried the president’s reliance on emergency decrees to govern, rather than inviting the NSDAP, at that point far and away the largest political force in the country, to form a coalition (which nevertheless still would not have secured a majority in the Reichstag).

Indeed, when measured by voter turnout, Germans demonstrated stronger democratic sensibilities in the 1920s and 1930s than did most of the older and more established democracies to the west. A perusal of the interactive map of the Reichstag Elections (Document #5, under “Maps”) shows not only the ebb and flow of voters’ political leanings, but also the remarkably high percentages of Germans who exercised their right to vote in the first place, which consistently fluctuated between the high seventies and low eighties. The Nazi propaganda film “Germany’s Bloodletting” (Document #53, under “Politics 1930-1933”) offers a remarkable visual record of the many ways in Germans in the last years of the Republic energetically engaged in the democratic process, including marches and rallies; trucks towing billboards on a variety of political issues; flag-waving supporters from leftwing parties as well as rightwing ones; Litfaßsäulen (advertising columns) plastered with election posters; and a closeup shot of a ballot with at least 34 different parties represented. Nor was support for the Republic itself nearly as anemic as earlier histories had insisted. Instead, as historians including Manuela Achilles and Nadine Rossol have argued, a number of initiatives to foster republican sentiment—from Constitution Day celebrations (August 11) to vast celebratory pageants—resonated with the population. By the mid-1920s, the pro-Republic veterans’ organization, Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold boasted 600,000 members, dwarfing similar organizations with rightwing leanings, such as the Stahlhelm (Documents #39 and 40, under “Politics, 1920-1929”). In other words, the fact that the Nazi Party nevertheless came to power in 1933 had more to do with economic factors and contingent political decisions than with hoary characterizations of a democracy without democrats or a republic without republicans.

As you read through the trove of primary sources in this and the subsequent volume, however, I invite you to make up your own mind.

In addition to the brilliant and tireless work of Insa Kummer, I wish to thank her predecessor, Kelly McCullough, as well as two of my former Master’s students, Kristin Osborne and Austin Hall, for their remarkable assistance.

Erik Jensen, 2026