Weimar by Katja Hoyer reviews – the town that changed Germany | History books

‘Weimar is Germany in a nutshell,” the president of the 1990s, Roman Herzog once joked: “a town that is not what it used to be, not only with culture and ideas, but also with pagan and brutal beliefs.” A small city (65,000 people) sits in the center of the country and serves as a shrine to his sons Goethe, Schiller and Nietzsche. In 1919 the country’s first democratic constitution was issued in its theatre. It was chosen as the birthplace of Germany because its refined culture stood in stark contrast to the “Prussian army” of Berlin. From 1919-1925 he received the Bauhaus School, led by Walter Gropius, and put it at the forefront of art and design.

However, from the mid-1920s, the city of Weimar, then the capital of Thuringia, became central to the rise of the Nazi Party and its first, regional, attempt at government. After 1933 it competed with Bayreuth for recognition as the “spiritual home of Nazism”.

Historian Katja Hoyer, 2023’s best known Behind the Wallhe evokes this tension in his new work depicting the story of interwar Weimar. He divides the book into chapters covering local events each year between 1919 and 1939, including public records and personal letters, notes and memorabilia left by the townspeople.

In these years, 1926 is the link. This was the year Weimar hosted a Nazi party conference on the weekend of July 3-4, the first since the party was re-founded in 1925, following a 14-month ban. It was a short story: the police said there were 7,000-8,000 people. However, the meeting established the main elements of the Nazis, including the Hitler Youth.

On Sunday morning, in the hall where the Weimar constitution was agreed seven years earlier, Hitler launched the “Blood Flag” ceremony. The new SA Stormtrooper units marched across the stage, cleaning their standards by touching them to the party flag that was carried in the 1923 Munich putsch, and said to have been stained with the blood of a South African. Hoyer writes: “At the beginning of Germany’s post-war democracy, Hitler carried out a ritual purge of the young republic.”

The Nazi soldiers were not happy with them in the town. For two days they left a trail of damage and injuries behind them: breaking cars; vandalizing houses, spying on local people and shooting a police officer. Yet by 1929, in the midst of economic crisis, the Weimarers felt differently. In the state elections of December 11% of the Thuringian population voted for the Nazi Party, but in Weimar this proportion was 24%.

Being the third, he entered the government for the first time, in collaboration with other justice parties. They took control of the government ministries of the interior and of education. Until the collapse of the alliance in 1931, Thuringia in general, and Weimar in particular, became the seat of the Nazi government.

1937 was the darkest year for Weimar before the war, with the establishment of the Buchenwald concentration camp, the largest in Germany, just five kilometers from the city center. The camp and the town were connected. The prisoners arrived at the Weimar train station. Local authorities provided facilities and services including, until 1940, the use of crematoriums. Although legally a labor camp, not an extermination camp, it would have killed 56,000 (mostly Jewish) inmates.

Weimar businesses provided food and equipment to maintain the camp while local residents enjoyed the zoo that was set up to entertain the guards and their families. Indeed, despite the Nazis’ abhorrence of the Bauhaus, the sign above the camp’s gate reading “Jedem Das Seine” (“To Each His Own”) was inscribed on the school’s beautiful casket by Bauhaus graduate and Buchenwald inmate Franz Ehrlich.

Hoyer’s hatred of the Third Reich is obvious, but he does not want to criticize ordinary people whose historical records give him the quality of his work: “it is difficult and often not useful to judge the behavior of people from a century later”. However, his book brings us many problems.

One example is stationery store owner Carl Weirich, Hoyer’s most quoted quote. On the verge of bankruptcy several times because of the financial crisis, Carl voted for the Nazis in 1933. In 1934-5 he was even a financial supporter of the SS. However, he was not a permanent member of the party, and by 1938 his activity book showed that it was not safe. Following Kristallnacht, he said that “the mass persecution of the Jews began when they blasphemed God himself”.

Weirich’s writings are horrifying at the sight of the crematoria and piles of corpses at Buchenwald where he and other Weimarers were shown by American soldiers after their liberation. However, not once, in a journal dating back to the 1970s, did he question the role his decisions might have played in these atrocities.

Although he avoids judging people, Hoyer still writes with moral intentions. Understanding why ordinary people, even loved ones, abandoned democracy in the past, he says, is essential to protecting freedom today. Considering that the last Thuringian state elections in 2024 were also very successful, with the AfD rising to 33%, the project may not be as important.

Weimar: Life on the Edge of Catastrophe by Katja Hoyer published by Allen Lane (£30). To support the Guardian order your book at guardianbookshop.com. Shipping fees may apply.