WEIMAR

Portrait of a German city and its people, for better and certainly for worse.

“Weimar has long been Germany’s beacon of culture, but for a time, it was also its heart of darkness,” writes Hoyer, an East German–born historian. It was a place that Schiller and Goethe called home, a center of learning and the arts; it was also a place that Adolf Hitler enjoyed visiting, where he “could move around freely, even telling his staff not to clear restaurants or cafés he wanted to sit in.” While Weimar is well known as the seat of a post–World War I government with plenty of liberal and socialist representation, it was also the site of some the Nazis’ earliest electoral triumphs. And the Third Reich’s most extensive concentration camps, Buchenwald, was built on its outskirts—close enough to the city, Hoyer notes, that residents could not have helped but notice its existence and what went on there. Hoyer’s account complements Volker Ullrich’s Fateful Hours: The Collapse of the Weimar Republic (2025), extending the chronology both forward and backward but also centering on the city’s people, some famous, some ordinary. Among the former, notoriously, was Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, who misrepresented her late brother Friedrich’s work to align it with Nazism and curry favor from the regime for herself; in the latter category are a hotel keeper, a bookbinder, a shop owner—all part in some way of the city’s history, some victims, some victimizers. It was a Nazi stronghold from the earliest days, the home ground of senior officials such as Hitler Youth chief Baldur von Schirach and of ordinary Wehrmacht troops killed in battle and swallowed up in the Gulag following the Soviet occupation. Throughout, Hoyer’s narrative leads to a pointed lesson: The Weimar Republic, she writes, “is the most stark and terrifying example of a collapsed democracy in Western history.”

A charged, eminently accessible history that speaks to a troubled present as well as to the past.