‘Weimar’ by Katja Hoyer review

The German Ministry of Education received an angry letter in September 1934. Its irate writer complained that ‘a volume of the Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn has lain for years in the Schillerhaus in Weimar as the only book on this German poet’s writing desk’. This could not continue, he raged, in Hitler’s Germany. A 1930 guide to the house, which was purchased by the city of Weimar in 1847 and preserved as a memorial, confirms it: a work by Mendelssohn was indeed displayed alongside a quill pen, a letter opener, and a glove once belonging to Friedrich Schiller. Despite a moving plea by the site’s director to leave the book where it was, it disappeared two months later during ‘improvements’.

I was reminded of this anecdote while reading Katja Hoyer’s riveting new book as the episode typifies the bizarre and frightening blend of culture and barbarity characteristic not only of life in Weimar under the swastika, but also in Nazi Germany as a whole. As Hoyer argues, in the interwar years ‘Weimar is Germany in a nutshell’, as the former German president Roman Herzog once claimed.

Weimar was also where the new German democracy was born with the drafting of a new constitution in 1919, the city coming to lend its name to the short-lived republic which followed. As we read in Hoyer’s book, the city hosted many of the era’s best-known figures, including Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius, actor Marlene Dietrich, artists such as Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee, communist leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, Paul von Hindenburg, and Hitler, who visited more than 40 times between 1919 and 1945. The book’s real strength, however, is its focus on Weimar’s less ‘illustrious’ citizens. One central character ties it all together: Carl Weirich, a stationery shop owner. He was born on 9 November, meaning his birthday coincided with the founding of the first German Republic in 1918, Hitler’s ill-fated putsch attempt in Munich in 1923, and the nationwide pogrom against Jewish Germans (the so-called ‘Kristallnacht’) in 1938. Unknown to Weirich, or at least unremarked upon in his otherwise detailed diary entries, his life intersected with many others in the cast that Hoyer assembles. Joseph Goebbels stayed in a hotel next door to his shop on Geleitstrasse.

At least in terms of those who would eventually be welcomed inside Hitler’s imagined national community (i.e. ‘Aryan’, able-bodied, heterosexual Germans without a socialist past), Weirich embodies the experiences of Weimarers and Germans generally at this time. Galloping inflation hit him hard and just as his business began to recover the Great Depression descended. Initially hopeful about the ‘young man’ (Hitler) and the Nazi regime, going so far as to become a sponsoring patron of the SS, Weirich’s enthusiasm faded. His home and shop were threatened with demolition due to the Nazis’ grandiose construction plans for Weimar, and were later damaged in an Allied bombing raid. Weirich was dismayed by how the nearby Buchenwald concentration camp had ‘badly affected’ Ettersberg Hill, where he liked to hike. His son became a Wehrmacht soldier and was executed by the Soviets after the war.

The book’s other characters – among them, a hotel owner with a ‘secret’ Jewish background and a socialist resister – represent very different trajectories. As Hoyer charts their experiences, she simultaneously tells Germany’s story. But while she positions Weimar as emblematic of national trends, it clearly had a distinct profile. The city outpaced the national average in its early support for the Nazi Party. The state government of Thuringia, with its capital in Weimar, was Nazi-led by as early as 1932. As Thomas Mann declared that year: ‘Weimar is a centre of Hitlerdom.’

There is much to commend in this book: its writing is gripping, Hoyer’s command of existent histories is clear, and her primary research – including Weirich’s diary, a recent acquisition by the city’s archive – is thorough and inventive. However, the heavy-handed foreshadowing is jarring. We know what happens, but the book’s various protagonists did not. Constant reminders of how it all ends have the effect of distancing us from them, and also suggests a degree of inevitability that I would challenge. As Weirich celebrates New Year’s Eve in 1936 the ominous portent that ‘he had no idea how soon catastrophe would strike’ is likely true, but unnecessary. Indeed, as I try to teach my students in classes on Weimar and Nazi Germany, the failure of Weimar as a democratic experiment was not a foregone conclusion. Moreover, from the perspective of the individuals in this book, the awful future – such as death in an extermination camp, the fate of the Jewish hotel owner – was both unimaginable and unwritten. Excluding presaging asides would have more effectively allowed us to imagine ourselves in their shoes, acting without the benefit of hindsight.

Hoyer concludes Weimar’s story in 1939, although the war years are summarised in an epilogue. This is a curious decision in an otherwise comprehensive chronology, although the neat 20-year span is attractive and, as the title indicates, Hoyer is concerned with the ‘edge’ rather than the disaster itself. The disquieting blend of normality and horror she sketches nonetheless continued during the war. A German soldier visiting Weimar while on leave recorded his impressions in a local inn’s guestbook in July 1941, just as the invasion of the Soviet Union had begun: ‘This house is the nicest place for the soldier; if he is here, all his worries disappear.’ Perhaps he also purchased a postcard of Ettersberg Castle, less than 20 kilometres from Buchenwald where by April 1945 56,000 prisoners had died.

Reading Hoyer’s book, I recalled Svetlana Alexievich’s stated aim in Voices from Chernobyl: to tell the stories of ‘little, great people’ who voice their ‘own, little histories’ while ‘big history is told along the way’. This is where, despite minor drawbacks, Weimar: Life on the Edge of Catastrophe excels.

• Weimar: Life on the Edge of Catastrophe
  Katja Hoyer
  Allen Lane, 466pp, £30
  Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)

Kristin Semmens is Associate Professor in History at the University of Victoria, Canada.