A Democratic Legacy? The Memorialization of the Weimar Republic and the Politics of History of the Federal Republic of Germany

Abstract

‘Are we living under Weimar conditions, Mister Chancellor?’ ran the headline printed by the German weekly Welt am Sonntag early in 2005 above a long interview with Gerhard Schroder.1 Statistics had just shown a rise in unemployment rates to over 5 million people and right-wing extremism appeared to be steadily gaining support. The comparison of today’s Federal Republic of Germany with the first German democracy of 1918 may seem strange at first sight. However, upon looking into recent political debates, it becomes clear that the Weimar Republic is used quite often as a reference point for comments on current developments in Germany. This presence of the Weimar Republic shows that, for the Federal Republic, the first German democracy is — and has been ever since 1945 — more then merely a bygone historical era. The Weimar past hung over the Republic’s beginnings like a very long shadow. The famous phrase ‘Bonn is not Weimar’ (‘Bonn ist nicht Weimar’), coined by the Swiss journalist Fritz Rene Allemann as a title for his study of the Bonn Republic, was only beginning to gain acceptance as a legitimate depiction when the book was first published in 1956. Contrary to the GDR, where official propaganda left no doubt that ‘lessons from Weimar’ had been learned through the ‘antifascist-democratic’ revolution after 1945, the Federal Republic was never certain of its ‘otherness’ in relationship to Weimar – even though the urge to learn from the failure of the first German democracy had played an important role in the democratic reconstruction after the collapse of National Socialism.2