With a Passion for Reason

Celebrating the Constitution in Weimar Germany

Dados Bibliográficos

ID9645656
AutoresManuela Achilles (University of Virginia, autor correspondente)
Ano2010
Volume43
Fascículo4
Páginas666-689
Data de publicação2010-12-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoCentral European History (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0008-9389 • E-ISSN: 1569-1616
EditoraCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s0008938910000750
OpenAlexW1992573499
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas8
Referências citadas16

It has long been held that Weimar democracy lacked the symbolic appeal necessary to bind collective sentiment and to win popular support. While recent revisionist histories of Weimar politics and culture take their cue from Peter Fritzsche's argument that “Weimar is less a cumulative failure than a series of bold experiments,” the turn toward new approaches and perspectives is uneven and incomplete even in those studies that avoid conflating the fragility of Weimar democracy with the overall lack or absence of democratic identifications. Detlev Peukert, while admonishing his readers not to minimize the Weimar experiment in democracy, also argues that the first German republic had no founding ritual, and that this absence in national history attests to a general lack of legitimacy. Eric Weitz, in his eloquent survey of the republic's promises and tragedy, has little to say about the proponents and forms of Weimar democratic culture. Thomas Mergel, who shows that the Weimar parliament was marked by a cooperative atmosphere of pragmatic republicanism, attributes to the republican Left a certain tendency “toward a rationalistic understanding of politics, toward the underestimation of the emotional attachment to a flag.” This assessment is entirely in line with the earlier claim that the rationalistic optimism (Gotthard Jasper) of the republican forces led to a “consequential underestimation of the integrative power of state symbols” (Klaus Wippermann)

Aristocracy (class · Constitution · Democracy · Legitimacy · Parliament · Political culture · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Weimar Republic · European Political History Analysis · Law · Political Science Research and Education · Political Systems and Governance