The culture of 'crisis' in the Weimar Republic

Bibliographic Data

ID4481453
AuthorsRüdiger Graf (0000-0003-4497-4483, Ruhr University Bochum), Moritz Follmer (0009-0009-8515-7931, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, corresponding author)
Year2012
Volume111
Issue1
Pages36-47
Publication date2012-08-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueThesis Eleven (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0725-5136 • E-ISSN: 1461-7455
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/0725513612445364
OpenAlexW2149541693
LanguageEN
Citations received6
References cited21

Both in scholarship on the Weimar Republic and in historical research in general, many conceptions of 'crisis' tend to remain vague and difficult to operationalize. These operational defects of the concept of crisis arise inevitably, we argue, from the concept's constitutive link to human perception on the one hand and from its subsumption of complex interconnections of historical processes within different subsystems on the other. Frequently today, in both ordinary and historiographical usage, this basic openness of the concept of crisis is foreclosed when it is deployed with a solely negative connotation of 'downfall' and 'decline', or of something being thrown into question or jeopardy. Such uses obscure a way in which a crisis can evoke not only the pessimistic sense of a threat to the old order but also the optimistic scenario of a chance for renewal. A one-sidedly negative understanding of crisis as prelude to calamity, we argue here, is problematic for historical research for two reasons. Firstly, it obscures comprehension of the consciousness of actors in the relevant period who at any particular moment can have had no prior knowledge of the crisis's outcome. Secondly, it tends to reify the relevant crisis and to occlude its basic character as something narratively constructed in the accounts of both contemporaries and subsequent historiography

Aesthetics · Consciousness · Economics · Epistemology · Historiography · Identity crisis · Operationalization · Pessimism · Political science · Politics · Positive economics · Scholarship · Social science · Sociology · Weimar Republic · European Political History Analysis · European Socioeconomic and Political Studies · Law · Philosophy · Political and Economic history of UK and US

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