The Weimar Republic: The Crisis Of Classical Modernity

A young German historian who died before he reached 40 sets the familiar story of Weimar's successes and ultimate failure in the context of modernization, that is, all the socioeconomic changes that swept across Germany, including the great cultural innovations. The book's virtue lies in the emphasis on these nonpolitical elements that clearly contributed to the debility of Weimar, though Peukert makes clear that there was no inevitability to Hitler's triumph. An intelligent, scholarly work with an eye for the oft-neglected connections among the ways people think, feel, live and vote.