Interesting but unpersuasive

This book bills itself as a reexamination of the Weimar Republic that explicitly aims to write a history of the genesis of the republic without looking at it from the perspective of Germany's fall into totalitarianism. The author states that he wants us to look at Weimar as a successful democracy that was not doomed to fail as it is often represented. This is an interesting approach but the book just doesn't have enough to really prove the thesis.

First, what the book does well is document the political situation in Germany in the closing months of WWI and examine why the imperial government fell so quickly in the face of reform movements, naval mutiny, and widespread popular uprisings. If you want to learn more about the Germany political situation in late 1918 and early 1919 this is an excellent book. In particular it does a good job explaining the various political and ideological movements in Germany at the time and how they cooperated or clashed.

What the book does not do well is make the case for the possibility of Weimar as a stable democratic government. In part, this is because the book spends far too much time describing the course of the German spring offensives on the Western Front, the negotiation of the Brest Litovsk treaty, and the terms of the Versailles Treaty and not enough on the actual state of Weimar and how the Social Democrats who controlled its government responded to the challenges. Much time is spent on Erich Ludendorff's strategic thinking but barely a word on the Weimar constitution itself. It is mentioned as being worked on but the book does not spend any time on the politics of writing it or even mention any of its provisions and how they structured the government. If the book is supposed to be about the early years of the postwar German government, it really needs to spend more time on the actual details about that government.

There is quite a bit of discussion of the various uprisings and coup attempts in 1919 and 1920 which is all interesting information but the book gives the impression of a battered democracy existing on a knife's edge between collapse, deals with the devil, and legitimacy crises. The conclusion then states Weimar successfully navigated these issues and proved stable but that is certainly not the impression one gets from the facts presented. If the book had done more to explain the democratic government's responses to challenges and how it prevented small scale civil wars from becoming more general bloodletting that would have gone a long way to proving its thesis but as it is there is just too little info on that aspect of the political situation.

While I did enjoy the book and learned a fair bit, far too much is asserted rather than proven to really say it succeeded in its aims.

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