Weimar's descent from democracy to barbarism

Weimar is a small German city, yet it looms large in European history. In the 1920s it was synonymous with liberalism, internationalism and the fine arts, yet, within a decade many of its residents had embraced Nazism, and Hitler was professing his love for the city. In this episode of the History Extra podcast, Katja Hoyer speaks to Spencermisen about how the city that gave its name to Germany's great social democratic experiment succumbed to tyranny. Hello Katja, I wonder if I could start by pointing you in the direction of a quote you cite in your new book on Weimar. The quote is from Roman Herzogist.

president of Germany in the 1990s and in it, Herzog says, Weimar is Germany in a nutshell, a town in which not only culture and thoughts were at home, but also Philistinism and barbarism. Why is that, Katja? Why why in the first half of the twentieth century did the fate of this small-ish city in the centre of Germany become emblematic, representative of the fate of an entire nation? That is a very good question because at first sight there's nothing particularly special about Weimar.

It's quite a small town. I mean it's picturesque, quaint enough with sort of cobbled streets and timber framed houses and and all that. But it isn't as such kind of a large city or or something where kind of big events happened in the past. What it is though is It's always been regarded as a sort of culture center in the heart of Germany.

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