The Berlin Police and the Weimar Republic

Abstract

Much of the history of the modern German city has been written in the style of Kulturund Sittengeschichte, weaving 'symphonic images' from the customs and events of entire historical epochs, or it has taken the form of narrative chronicles devoutly put together by local Heimatforscher. To English-speaking readers, the former approach can be irritating because of the subjectivity of its sweeping conclusions. Local histories, on the other hand, have the disadvantage of being antiquarian records too obviously intended for home consumption. This generalization certainly applies to the historiography of Berlin. There have been some very bold interpretations of Berlin's changing personality over the centuries (among them notably Werner Hegemann's provocative study Das steinerne Berlin, I930), and any number of anecdotal compilations centred on its older quarters. Only in recent years have we been given monographs that are neither impressionistic nor trivial. The works commissioned by the Berliner Historische Kommission since the end of the second world war show that well-selected topics in the history of one city can lay the basis for a fresh look at the social history of modern Germany.1 Such reinterpretation has been much in demand in our own decade.2 For conventional studies of Germany's political and economic condition since 1918 seem inadequate today either to convey the nature of the Hitler regime or the confusion and indecision that led up to it. Playwrights have tried to fill the need through dramatization, while academic historians have turned to