What Could Have Stopped Hitler — And Didn’t
On a rainy morning in June 1922, Walther Rathenau, the German foreign minister, rode out of his Berlin villa in an open convertible. As his chauffeur slowed at a curve, a second car overtook them. A man in a long leather coat raised his pistol and shot Rathenau five times. For good measure, a second assassin threw a hand grenade into Rathenau’s car. The blast lifted the foreign minister from his seat.
Rathenau was everything Germany’s nationalist right wing hated: Jewish, rich, a staunch supporter of the young German democracy and actively working to reach an agreement over World War I reparations with the Allies. His death reverberated throughout the country and beyond. When Franz Kafka heard the news, he bitterly responded that he was surprised the murder hadn’t happened sooner, it was “so very much part of Jewish and German destiny.”
“Political murder was the order of the day in the early Weimar Republic,” the German historian Volker Ullrich writes in his new book, “Fateful Hours.” Violence was a fact of Weimar life. Assassinations, coups, occupation — all of these storms and more hit the young, wobbly German republic in just the first four years of its existence. And yet, not only did the Weimar Republic survive its early challenges, Ullrich argues, but its demise was never inevitable, even as late as January 1933 — the month Adolf Hitler became chancellor.
Ullrich, translated here by Jefferson Chase, is not the first to make this argument; he follows in the footsteps of the many scholars who have set their sights on Weimar over the years, among them Peter Gay, Eric Weitz and, most recently, Harald Jähner. But Ullrich breaks new ground, laying out his case in illuminating granularity, moving inch by inch through the political machinations that began with the establishment of Germany’s first democratically elected government, in 1919, and ended with the chancellorship of Hitler.
And much more so than in any of his previous books, which include a two-volume biography of Hitler, Ullrich explicitly positions “Fateful Hours” as exemplar and warning for our own perilous, norm-shattering times. “It’s in our hands to decide whether democracy fails or survives,” he writes.
Friedrich Ebert, the German democracy’s first president, came from the left. His Social Democrats faced deep-seated opposition: a bulky coalition of discontents forced into unlikely alliances — while the Social Democrats themselves relied on the right-wing Freikorps to put down armed rebellions.
Ullrich emphasizes that the Social Democrats didn’t do enough to fundamentally change German society while they could. By 1925, Ebert was dead, and a former officer of the Imperial German Army, Paul von Hindenburg, had triumphed in the national elections. This victory, celebrated by the right, was one of the major inflection points in the nation’s fate. It would be Hindenburg who appointed Hitler, however reluctantly, to the chancellorship.
Ullrich summons a chorus of eyewitnesses along the way to this apocalyptic outcome, including the noted diarist Victor Klemperer and Sebastian Haffner, whose memoir, “Defying Hitler,” is one of the masterpieces of the era. It is Haffner who gives the most indelible description of the nation-shaking hyperinflation that hit the young republic in 1923. In the face of this profound economic instability, experience and expertise also lost their value, and the young and quick-witted sprang up to displace their elders. “The 21-year-old bank director appeared on the scene,” Haffner wrote. “He wore Oscar Wilde ties, organized champagne parties and supported his embarrassed father.” Haffner, like his contemporaries Stefan Zweig and Thomas Mann, saw a direct path from the trauma of inflation to the triumph of Nazism exactly 10 years later.
Many histories of the Weimar Republic bask in the cultural fermentation occurring in those years: the extraordinary movements happening in painting, in cinema, in sex. Ullrich barely mentions these aspects of Weimar life, most of which were in any event centered in Berlin. By focusing so narrowly on Germany’s politics, he gives the reader an ominously clear view of the step-by-step buildup to Nazism, and all of the moments it could have been stopped, but wasn’t.
What might have been done to alter its brutal ascension, from the dangerous flexibility of Article 48 to grant rule by emergency decree to the fallout from the Great Depression? Ullrich tells us, insistently, that history is ultimately decided by individual people, while giving a curious minimum of detail as to who these individuals actually were. Of Friedrich Ebert, we hear only that he was formerly a “saddler” whose lack of higher education annoyed the Wilhelmine elites. And this is more character development than we get for most.
Instead, what becomes apparent in Ullrich’s fine-grained political ticktock is how much was decided by chance and luck. For example, Hindenburg’s 1932 decision to dissolve the Brüning cabinet came at a time when the German economy was still in tatters, and the radical National Socialist Party held more appeal to the populace than it might have just two years later when Reichstag elections would have otherwise been held.
Still, though the main players may remain psychologically opaque, the road map to authoritarian disaster is laid out here in gleamingly sinister detail by a historian who knows the period as well as anyone could. And the playbook is only too familiar. One of the Nazis’ first targets was school curriculums. They managed to ban the antiwar classic “All Quiet on the Western Front” three years before Hitler was installed as chancellor in the Reichstag.
The parallels to our own moment aren’t perfect, but they are resonant enough to make us ask, once again, who or what it will take for us to save ourselves.
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