Contested Commemorations

Views of the Weimar Republic as essentially anarchic, unloved and unmourned have been extensively questioned in recent scholarship. Still, popular pronouncements tend to perpetuate such impressions—witness one critic of the recent Berlin Metropolis 1919–1933 exhibition at the Neue Galerie in New York, who began his appraisal with the sweeping statement that ‘Nobody in Germany liked the Weimar Republic’. Benjamin Ziemann’s monograph provides a fascinating and illuminating corrective to such crude generalisations. Focusing in particular on the activities of republican veterans’ leagues within the chequered organisational landscape of post-war Germany, Ziemann scrutinises the ‘symbolism, language and performative power of public commemorations of war’ in order to reveal ‘the participatory potential and performative power of Weimar democracy’. Rather than subscribing to the prevalent ‘brutalisation thesis’ which portrays Weimar culture as stymied and, ultimately, tragically doomed by the stab-in-the-back myth peddled by a myriad traumatised nationalist veterans, he provides a carefully nuanced and readable account of Social Democratic attempts ‘to turn the trauma of war from a liability into an asset of the new democratic system’. The organisation to which Ziemann devotes most attention is the Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold, a republican defence league founded in the early 1920s, and he evaluates a range of sources (from pacifist officers’ autobiographies and anti-war novels to material from the grassroots archives of local veterans’ league branches) to elucidate his thesis. Eschewing simplistic models, and exploring fully the complexities of the German post-First World War experience, Ziemann provides an even-handed analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the republican veterans’ movements under discussion, and their strategies of commemoration. Although, with hindsight, the reader knows that this portrait must inevitably be tarnished by failure, the author successfully captures both the heroism and the ambivalence of these Social Democratic endeavours

Democracy · Historiography · Militarism · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Weimar Republic · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · European history and politics · History · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society · Law