As Germany’s cultural capital, the town of Weimar nurtured the genius of figures like Nietzsche, Goethe, Schiller, and Bach. After World War I and the collapse of the German Empire, a temporary parliament met there to draft and ratify a constitution for history’s first German republic. Yet by the mid-1920s, Weimar had changed from a beacon of intellectual and artistic achievement into a staging ground for the rise of Nazism.
Central to German-born historian and journalist Katja’s Hoyer’s latest book, Weimar: Life on the Edge of Catastrophe, is the question of culpability. What role did ordinary Weimarers play in steering Germany toward the abyss?
Rather than offering easy judgments, the book asks readers to consider how specific people benefited, resisted, or simply stood by in a climate of escalating state violence and repression. The result is a powerful synthesis of history and deeply personal stories as a clear cautionary tale for our own time.
Still, some cases are unambiguous. In the German state of Thuringia, home to Weimar, conservative parties formed coalitions in 1924 with a small number of Nazis to secure the parliamentary seats they needed, effectively granting Hitler’s movement its first political foothold. These concessions, they argued, would prevent a Communist takeover in Thuringia.
Before long, Hitler would launch his campaign to dismantle German democracy from the Thuringian capital. He visited often and so did his paramilitaries. A moral panic in Weimar over modern art, music, and broader social changes helped create a receptive climate.
Among Hoyer’s central protagonists is local bookbinder Carl Weirich, whose diaries form the book’s emotional core. In his writings, Weirich reflects on the struggle to keep his stationery shop open during years of economic turmoil, his devastating personal losses, and the small consolations — bicycle trips and long hikes — that kept him going during Germany’s difficult early postwar years.
There is also Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, sister of philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and founder of the Nietzsche Archive. Elisabeth tried to secure the archive’s financial future and her own by cozying up to state leaders and allowing the Nazis to appropriate her brother’s messages. (Elisabeth herself often perverted his work in the edited collections she published.) Another is Emmy Sonnemann, a celebrated actress at Weimar’s German National Theatre. She would later marry the odious Nazi leader Hermann Göring and enjoy the extravagance that came with becoming the First Lady of the Reich.
In the case of Carl Weirich, what’s most unsettling is how politically detached he remained in the 1920s and early 1930s. Waves of Nazi terror directed at political opponents and Jews pass through his entries with few mentions, Hoyer concluded. Only later would it become clear that no one, however removed, remained untouched.
In April 1945, three weeks before Germany’s unconditional surrender, American troops marched a thousand locals including Carl up a forested hillside outside Weimar, where they were made to confront the horrors of Buchenwald. It had operated for years, and Weimarers had long “lived under the thick black plumes.”
A US Army film crew was also there that day. In a documentary that later incorporated army footage, the narrator leaves little room for doubt. “These Germans, the ones who said they didn’t know, were responsible too.”
Maksim Goldenshteyn is Seattle-based writer and the author of the 2022 book So They Remember, a family memoir and history of the Holocaust in Soviet Ukraine.
