Book review: A lesson still not learned

Crowds at the Reichsbank during the inflationary time of the Weimar Republic. Picture: Getty Images

• Fateful Hours: The Collapse of the Weimar Republic 
• Volker Ullrich 
• Translated by Jefferson Chase 
• Pushkin Press, €32.00 

This is as much a work of choreography as history. Covering just over a decade, Volker Ullrich manages a cast of thousands but never quite drowns in events or the tremendous cast who marched enthusiastically towards the defining catastrophe of the last century, one resonating loudly today.

There were any number of organisations involved in the Weimar Republic of 1918 to 1933, everything from feudal Prussian landowners to communist train workers, from monarchists pining for the old autocracy to conservative Catholics and insatiable business interests. 

Each grouping demands a seat at the table where the important decisions are made. Each has its internal conflicts, ensuring that cross-party co-operation is unlikely.

The absence of that co-operation — the certainty of those holding conflicting beliefs that prevented centrist government, thereby ceding the stage to lunatics on the fringes promising nirvana the day after tomorrow — is the tragic but timeless take-home message from Fateful Hours. 

A second is that underestimating a nascent political organisation’s lust for power, and what it might do to secure it, never ends well.

The parallels from those days barely a century ago and today’s spiralling events are unsettling. 

Political assassination was commonplace as was state suppression of protest. In one instance, almost 1,000 protesters were killed by police. 

The return to power of a national hero — Hindenburg — to stymie extremists when he was near his dotage has contemporary parallels. 

So too has the idea that capitalism was in its death throes and that a new, better tomorrow beckoned. 

That this decade-long implosion was partially a consequence of the concentration of wealth and the spread of poverty is echoed today.

That the Nazis’ rise was fuelled by the votes of young men and first-time voters is reflected today too. Freikorps morph into the Proud Boys.

After the First World War, Ullrich reminds us that Germany was in a grim bind. Economic recovery seemed almost impossible. 

Obliged to pay draining war reparations followed by wealth-destroying hyperinflation and then, to rub salt into the wound, the Wall Street collapse, created the kind of unrest that upends societies and elevates false gods. Ullrich documents that progression in a way that should make a repeat seem impossible but…

It is almost a convention in a review like this that the warning — learn from history or repeat it — is trotted out but as the evening news warns with increasing regularity it may already be too late. 

Ullrich tells us his and his historian wife Gudrun’s life’s work (she died in 2022) was to try to “answer the question of why civilisation in Germany broke down between 1933 and 1945, to help prevent something similar from happening again”.

Fateful Hours is a tremendous contribution to that bulwark even if the far-right Alternative for Germany won nearly 15% in recent elections in North Rhine-Westphalia. 

This raises an unanswerable and disturbing question: Why do we ignore warnings drawn from the actuality of our world and rush headlong towards catastrophe time after time? Hardly a cheering prospect but one all too alive today.