FATEFUL HOURS

Ullrich, the author of a two-volume biography of Hitler, examines Germany’s first, short-lived democracy.

At the conclusion of World War I, in 1918, the German polity was mostly ready to be rid of kaiserism and was leaning well to the left, thanks in large measure to the return of disaffected, radicalized armies from two fronts. One key incident was a revolt among sailors who refused to sail into battle against the British fleet, launching a vast mutiny during which “workers and soldiers everywhere formed revolutionary councils.” The radical movement eventually morphed into a moderate, center-left government that immediately faced several challenges, including periodic armed revolts by right-wing paramilitaries that would spawn a far-right opposition constantly engaged in plotting coups. Enter Adolf Hitler and his National Socialists, who, though decidedly a minority party, grew to become the vanguard of the right thanks in some measure to constant blundering on the part of the Weimar government—one mistake being not suppressing the Nazis in the first place. Yet, as Ullrich notes, “Hitler’s ascent to power was the product of a sinister game of behind-­the-­scenes intrigue in which a handful of players pulled the strings,” including industrialists and financiers who were all too glad to fund any effort that branded itself as anti-communist. The author argues throughout that nothing associated with Hitler’s rise was inevitable: Instead of making him chancellor, for one, President Paul von Hindenburg could have dissolved the Reichstag and postponed elections, which “would have meant a barely disguised military dictatorship,” but also would have allowed an improving, inflation-ridden economy to stabilize. The parallels to our own time, as Ullrich lays them out in this fluent narrative, are alarming, with new authoritarian parties and governments following the fascist playbook in every detail, from culture wars and book banning to anti-immigration decrees and the steady, willful “erosion of the constitution and democratic practices.”

An uncomfortably timely reminder that democracies are fragile things that can turn into dictatorships overnight.