Born of defeat
In November 1918, with the war lost and mutiny spreading, the Kaiser abdicated and a republic was proclaimed from the Reichstag balcony. The constitution written at Weimar in 1919 was among the world’s most democratic on paper — universal suffrage, proportional representation, plebiscites — with one loaded chamber: Article 48, allowing rule by presidential emergency decree.
The republic’s cradle gifts were poisonous: a Versailles treaty whose reparations and war-guilt clause every party loathed; the army’s “stab-in-the-back” myth, transferring defeat’s blame from the generals who had lost the war to the democrats who had signed its end; and political murder as ambient weather — Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in 1919, finance minister Erzberger in 1921, foreign minister Rathenau in 1922, with putsch attempts from right (Kapp, 1920) and left, and in November 1923 a Munich beer-hall fiasco by one Adolf Hitler, whose trial made him famous and whose prison term produced a book.
Inflation, gold, and glitter
1923 was the annus horribilis: French occupation of the Ruhr, passive resistance financed by the printing press, and hyperinflation that reached trillions of marks to the dollar — wheelbarrow money, life savings vaporised, and a middle-class trauma that never healed politically. Stabilisation under Gustav Stresemann (the Rentenmark, American loans, Locarno) opened the “golden years” of 1924-29 — the Weimar of legend: Bauhaus design, Metropolis and the world’s most advanced cinema, Brecht and Weill’s Threepenny Opera, Berlin’s cabaret modernity, and more Nobel-calibre science per square mile than anywhere on Earth. The glitter rested on short-term American credit.
The fall
The Wall Street crash called the loans; by 1932 six million Germans were unemployed and the electorate had polarised to the streets — Nazis and Communists together outvoting the republic’s defenders. Government by Article 48 decree became normal years before Hitler; the aged president Hindenburg’s camarilla, believing the Nazi leader could be hired and managed, made him chancellor on 30 January 1933. The Reichstag fire in February supplied the emergency, the Enabling Act in March the legal suicide; within six months the first German democracy was a one-party state.
Weimar’s afterlife is its warning function: constitutional design, economic shock, and elite miscalculation studied ever since as the anatomy of how a modern democracy dies — legally, and with most of its institutions intact until the end.