Weimar's Long Shadow

Richard Ned Lebow, Ludvig Norman

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2024
• eBook ISBN: 9781009484312
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Weimar casts a long shadow over post-war political thought. The Weimar Republic is used to understand contemporary threats to democracy and to critique or defend modernity. It has generated a series of political lessons that are invoked whenever democracies are challenged. This book questions the historical validity of most of these lessons and their applicability to contemporary political orders. It shows how Weimar lessons are often influenced by partial and superficial readings of events, often intended to advance particular political projects. The chapters give detailed accounts of how so-called Weimar lessons have influenced, if not shaped, political debates in Germany, elsewhere in Europe, and the United States.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title
• Title page
• Imprints page
• Table of Contents
• List of Contributors
• Note on Bauhaus Font and the Cover Design
• 1 Why Weimar?
• 2 An Unheroic but Understandable Failure: German Social Democrats and the Collapse of the Weimar Republic
• 3 Bonn’s Weimar
• 4 The Paradigmatic Example of Weimar and Postwar Political Science: The Case of Otto Kirchheimer
• 5 Swedish Social Democracy and Weimar: Engineering the Democratic Population with the Myrdals
• 6 Our Past, Weimar’s Present: Democracy’s Defense and the Inversion of an Historical Lesson
• 7 Weimar on the Potomac?: Leo Strauss Goes to Washington
• 8 Shadows of Babylon and Shreds of Artificial Silk: Weimar’s Cultural and Political Legacies in the Contemporary Television Se ies Babylon Berlin
• 9 Militant Democracy: A (Supposed) Weimar Lesson Revisited
• 10 Weimar and Modernity
• Index