| 18 mins read
Anya Pearson interviews Katja Hoyer, the German-British historian, journalist, and author whose acclaimed book Weimar: Life on the Edge of Catastrophe was published earlier this year. Drawing on new archival research, Hoyer tells the stories of the men and women of Weimar who lived through the new republic and Hitler's regime between 1919 and 1939. The book reveals how ordinary citizens navigated the rise of fascism in this historically and culturally significant city that was both the birthplace of the liberal tradition and a crucial incubator for Nazism.
Why did you choose to write this book about Weimar?
A lot has been written about the interwar period and the rise and reign of the Nazis. Growing up in Germany, I certainly was exposed to that topic at school, but I still felt that it is often looked at from a bird's-eye perspective that is devoid of the actual story. What people haven't really looked at is: why were the Nazis so popular in the first place?
Certainly in Germany this tends to be a defensive move, as though the rise of the Nazis was a natural catastrophe. But I wanted to flip this perspective and look at it at street level. As uncomfortable as it is, I wanted to try and make it understandable how ordinary people – who weren't particularly radical – were able to live in a radical criminal regime, get used to the idea and even support it.
I needed one specific place and group of people to follow throughout the 20 year period to allow anyone, anywhere in the world, to pick up that book and see the patterns that led to Nazism.
Your book is a blend of public records with personal letters, diaries and memoirs left by the city’s inhabitants. Why was it important to you to tell the real-life stories of local residents of Weimar? And why was it important to you to refrain from judging their behaviour?
I think in order to judge something, we have to understand it first. That's not the same as justifying it; it's an explanation. We'd all like to think that we would be on the side of angels if we were put in a similar situation, but I'm pretty sure the inhabitants of Weimar would have been horrified if somebody told them ten years earlier that they would be living next to a concentration camp.
If we want to prevent such things in the future, judging in and of itself isn't enough. We need to understand how very ordinary people gradually get used to extreme thoughts and ideologies. In order to do that, you have to see somebody's entire story.
We often look at German history in chapters up to 1933 and then from 1933, and that means that we'll never find out how somebody who became a teacher in 1919 responded to having to teach ‘racial hygiene’ 15 years later. Carl Weirich, the central character in my book, lived in virtually the same house, running the same shop, under the Kaiser, the Weimar democracy, the Nazis and a socialist regime. Germans who lived in that time make a great case study in how far ordinary people can be pushed to accept things that they would normally intellectually and morally reject.
Carl Weirich attends the rallies, he becomes a member of the Nazi party, but he doesn't look beyond his domestic and business concerns, does he? And he certainly doesn't believe that he could influence the path of history. What's your view of free will and individual agency during this era?
A lot of people don't think that they have much agency. That's no different today than it was in the 1920s. Plenty of people today will watch something on the news, get angry about it, and then push it out of their minds and carry on with their day-to-day lives because they feel they can't change it. That attitude is very human; to find little rooms in your life where you can just have a Saturday night off without contemplating that there are people being bombed somewhere in the world.
Carl is an extreme example of where that can lead if you allow those spaces to be filled by bad actors because you withdraw. However, I don't want to judge; I don't know what it's like being worried about feeding your family or losing your home after a world war. Perhaps we can recognise similar patterns today, even if we are in very different situations.
You write that “the question of how and why a nation that prided itself on its culture and civility enabled the catastrophe of Nazism haunts us to this day because we fear a repeat”. Do you agree with Zigmunt Bauman that the social mechanisms which enabled it remain present in modern society?
Modern technology enabled the industrial nature of what was going on. But the fundamental difference is that [Nazism and the Holocaust] has now happened and we are very well educated about it, despite the fact that some people have misconceptions.
It would have been very difficult for somebody like Carl Weirich in 1933 to imagine Auschwitz because it simply didn't exist. When the Nazis talk about concentration camps in their propaganda, they say: “Well, the British used them in their Empire. They're basically open air prisons”. That was the gateway drug. People were saying: “Our prison's only got 54 spaces and we have 200 Communists here. If they want to lock them up on an airfield and put a fence around it, fine”. Carl Weirich’s understanding of the Buchenwald concentration camp is a gradual process.
People do have a point when they say that we should learn from history. The fact that the Cold War didn't escalate into a Third World War has a lot to do with the fact that people learned from the Second World War. Maybe it's a bit too optimistic but I do think the knowledge we have now makes the crucial difference.
Are we appropriately remembering the Holocaust in Europe?
The emphasis on education and remembering is absolutely right because there's so much distortion. Having said that, this risks becoming symbolic. Holocaust education avoids stark images to avoid re-victimising the people affected by it, but I worry that we make it too abstract and intellectualised if we don't see the horrific nature of what happened; it allows us to keep that gap between our own mental space and the past. We just have to make sure knowledge doesn’t become an end in itself.
We also have to think carefully about what we're trying to achieve and whether this means different things to different people in Europe. Germany deals with having been the perpetrator, while countries like Poland look at it from the victim perspective while finding it difficult to acknowledge that there were Polish perpetrators too.
Was the failure of Weimar as a democratic experiment a foregone conclusion?
It wasn't doomed to fail. It’s now the consensus among historians that you need to take Weimar seriously in its own right. It survived the 1923 crisis, which in democratic terms is pretty much as horrendous as it gets. In the letters and diary entries that I found from 1919, people were so enthusiastic about that new start for the country. The economy is the thing that broke it. People perceived Hyperinflation as a temporary crisis; they could see light at the end of the tunnel. I found it amazing looking at people's diaries or their letters when they lost everything – like Carl when he lost his entire shop – they could still see a future worth rebuilding. In 1929, that goes out of the window. People just do not believe that things will get better. The crisis lasts too long, it's too deep and it comes on the back of all these other crises. That's the difference here.
I know the comparison is a bit imperfect but Roosevelt also comes forth as a ‘strong man’ leadership at the very same moment Hitler gets elected on the promise of: “Give me four years and I'll sort this out”. For me, the big ‘what if’ is what if somebody from within the democratic spectrum had come forward with that kind of charisma and vision and said a similar thing? I don't think there's anything specific about Nazism that made it the obvious winner other than the fact that they had the people, messaging and money to make the most credible case for a different future.
Post World War One Germany was full of misery, hunger, death and struggle. One woman writes “everything seems to be different and worse”. This reminds me of the overriding public sentiment in Britain; one of national decline. What do you think the citizens of today should take from your book? And what is the role of hope?
We often point to this time as a warning, but there are plenty of positive lessons. Heinrich Brüning was appointed the last democratic Chancellor of Germany in the Weimar Republic in 1930. He tells the German people: “Look, we’ve lost the First World War, and anybody who thought we would come out of that okay is deluding themselves”.
That may have been true, but that’s not what you tell people in a crisis. You cannot say to people: “Yes, this is bad, but there's nothing we can do about it”. When Hitler comes in, he says: “Give me four years there will be no unemployment”. Even Carl, a very apolitical person, writes in his diary: “Hitler says he needs four years. Let's give them those four years and see what happens”.
That is a constructive lesson to learn for politicians today: people weren't turning away from democracy as such; they were turning towards those who could paint a positive picture of the future. The AfD in Germany understands this. They have changed their campaign slogan to “everything is possible”.
Was your focus on middle- and upper-class voices due to the limitations of the archive material you had to work with?
I tried to include a range of people: there's Kurt Nehrling, a working class SPD activist, and Carl is economically very precarious as well. But Weimar doesn't actually have a very large working class; it's where the local nobility had their palace, it’s associated with Goethe and Schiller and other glittering figures of the German literary scene. It's a bit like Stratford-upon-Avon, I suppose.
Do you think you adequately address the role of social class in explaining the rise of Nazism given the very particular demographic of Weimar at the time?
It's the lower middle class and Protestants who vote in their droves for the Nazis. I chose Weimar not because it's average, but because it’s a special place. You can see everything that happened first, in a more extreme form, and therefore more clearly. It's almost like a petri dish of political developments.
The Nazis always struggled with appealing to the working class, which is also why the comparison between people voting for far right parties now and then is a bit imperfect. At the time, the working classes were often radically left wing – including Communists – so they were difficult to win over.
You write of your ambition to ‘find lessons to safeguard democracy and freedom in our own time.’ Do you think you were successful in this?
I'm not offering them outright in the book, because I think the moment you do that as a historian, you stop your readers from actively engaging. And I know a lot of historians make sense of the past and then offer some opinions on what we should take from it. I deliberately don't do that here.
I don't really care whether you're a reform voter or a far-left activist; I want you to be able to read this book and recognise familiar patterns from your own life. I want you to think: “I would have acted differently here” or “I can really see why they did what they did”. That's quite experimental and I would say quite unusual in the academic context.
What are the key lessons as you see them?
One of them is that we have a tendency as human beings to find the path of least resistance. That's entirely natural and understandable, but it does mean that we allow things that we disagree with to go ahead.
Asking people for great acts of resistance is a bit unrealistic. We would all like to be Sophie Scholl in the courtroom, defying the judge as we're being sentenced and making a grand speech before we get guillotined. That isn't most of us. But what I think what does make a difference is engaging with things enough to be angry. With something like Kristallnacht, if your neighbours are being dragged out of their houses and put on transports to concentration camps, you have a choice on how to respond. In Weimar, there was a horrific example of a woman who used to run a toy shop who everybody loved. She repaired teddy bears and dolls for children. Helping someone like this or at least engaging with their plight would make you compassionate enough to act differently.
That collectively makes a difference. For example, the Nazis realise that there's a huge danger that the euthanasia of disabled children will blow up in their faces because people don't think that it’s right. Eventually there are enough people complaining that they suspend the active killing.
That's the biggest lesson for me: to just take a moment and let what's happening sink in, even if it's uncomfortable, because it will make you act differently.
You must have built a very close relationship with the people you were writing about. Who will stay with you for the longest time now that the book is finished?
Probably Carl Weirich, to be honest, because he's just so ordinary and really not a bad person, and yet at the same time he probably votes for Hitler. The pogroms make him deeply uncomfortable, but he doesn't really do much about them and just gets on with his life. That really stuck with me because it's just such an ordinary thing to do, but that's the very thing that allowed him to live in a town where you have a concentration camp next door.
Weimar: Life on the Edge of Catastrophe by Katja Hoyer is published by Allen Lane.
