CfA Special Issue: Women’s History of the Weimar Republic

ARIADNE, the journal published by the Archive of the German Women’s Movement, is inviting contributions for a special issue on the “female history/ies of the Weimar Republic”. The editors aim to present the different female lifestyles and social realities and ask which role women played in the new state.

Proposals have to be submitted before 1 July 2017 to schibbe@addf-kassel.de.

German Centre for Weimar Research

In August 2016, the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena established the Forschungsstelle Weimarer Republik, a “central platform for German and international Weimar research”. Funded by the Ministry of Economy, Science and Digital Society of Thuringia, the new research centre hosts a yearly conference, organises regular workshops for early career researchers, awards prizes for research publications (from BA theses to Habilitationen), and publishes a series on Weimar history.

Weimarer Verhältnisse?

The FAZ and regional broadcaster Bayerischer Rundfunk have teamed up for an essays series on the topic of “Weimarer Verhältnisse?” (Weimar conditions): a group of distinguished historians of the era, including Andreas Wirsching, Ute Daniel and Hélène Miard-Delacroix, consider the reasons for Weimar’s collapse and its lessons for today, from democratic breakdown to economic policy.

Journal Review: CEH, Dec. 2016

In the current issue of Central European History, Jochen Hung reviews new literature on the history of the Weimar Republic, focusing on the often-used “plot” of Weimar’s cultural modernism juxtaposed with its democratic breakdown: “More than thirty years ago, Eberhard Kolb commented that the vast wealth of research on the history of the Weimar Republic made it “difficult even for a specialist to give a full account of the relevant literature.” Since then, the flood of studies on Weimar Germany has not waned, and by now it is hard even to keep track of all the review articles meant to cut a swath through this abundance. Yet the prevailing historical image of the era has remained surprisingly stable: most historians have accepted the master narrative of the Weimar Republic as the sharp juxtaposition of “bad” politics and “good” culture, epitomized in the often-used image of “a dance on the edge of a volcano.””

CfP: The Ends of World War I and their Legacies

Call for Papers: Settlement and Unsettlement – The Ends of World War I and their Legacies

German Historical Institute, Washington, DC

Deadline: 31 March 2016

Weimar 2.0 in Berlin?

A slightly different take of the currently popular Weimar comparisons in the Berlin-based expat magazine Exberliner: “Our new issue looks at the impact that Weimar’s gay sexologists, expat authors, cabaret dancers and Dadaist visionaries had on today’s Berlin and asks: How close are we to Weimar 2.0?”

Trump and Weimar Germany

The comparisons between Donald Trump’s political success and Hitler’s rise, so numerous even before the election, have intensified since the former won the electoral vote in November 2016. Historians have weighed in with differing opinions and analyses about the two phenomena. This is an on-going collection of articles on the topic, all suggestions welcome!

The Weimar Republic: Gone, but not forgotten

Matthew Wills gives a short overview over the current relevance of Weimar’s history for today’s political landscape: “The Weimar Republic has been on people’s minds with the results of the U.S. presidential election and rise of the radical right in Europe. Is there a lesson to be learned from the Weimar experience?  Any answer to that question has to be grounded in the chaotic history of the republic that barely held Germany together from 1919 to 1933.”

Bundesarchiv builds digital Weimar archive

The German Federal Archive (Bundesarchiv) is building a new portal for primary sources of the Weimar Republic. It will be accessible from 2017 under the name “Weimar – Die erste deutsche Demokratie”. You can follow the developments on a dedicated blog called “Weimar – Wege zur Demokratie“.

Weimar back in the News

Over the last few years, Weimar Germany has been the go-to horror scenario for journalists and scholars the world over, as a historical precedent to the 2008 financial crisis, a symbol for the situation in Greece, or an explanation for German fiscal policy.

Now, the New York Times has predicted a “Weimar moment” for the whole of the Western world, arguing that “Germany’s slide into a popular embrace of authoritarianism in the 1930s offers a frame for understanding how liberal democracies can suddenly turn toward anti-liberalism.”