N oah B enezra S trote . Lions and Lambs

Noah Benezra Strote’s Lions and Lambs: Conflict in Weimar and the Creation of Post-Nazi Germany is a highly original and powerful first book. It challenges long and widely shared views about the German post-1945 “success story,” and particularly about the American impact on it. Strote offers a new explanation about the conditions under which (West) Germans—different from their countrymen in the Weimar Republic, but also, of course, in the German Democratic Republic—were willing and able to establish a durable democratic order. In sharp contrast to an influential narrative that portrays U.S. engagement in post–World War II Germany as the dominant factor, Strote stresses the importance of the political productivity of what one might call German self-reorientation. The starting point of the book, however, is the more traditional (and for some younger historians now even conventional) argument about the fragmented political culture of the Weimar Republic. It refers to sociologist M. Rainer Lepsius’s diagnosis of a few strong and highly compartmentalized “social-moral milieus” that precluded the unfolding of a convincing liberal democracy after 1918 (quoted on 9). “The lions and the lambs” were not able to “wander next to each other peacefully,” as the historian Friedrich Meinecke had hoped for in November 1917; despite all the “lessons of the war,” the transition of the Kaiserreich (Imperial Germany) into a stable parliamentary system did not take place (10).

Archaeology · Democracy · Economic history · German · Nazism · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Weimar Republic · World War II · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies