The Weimar Republic

Fuck you faggit ass pleb

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Unlimited Degeneracy, young male prostitutes, 1 in 5 people are addicted to drugs, homos accepted in high society, jews own the banks.

They should've rolled back and brought back the monarchy. Liberal democracy is the gayest idea this planet has ever experienced.

>young male prostitutes
Berlin was actually considered "the gay capital of Europe" even prior to WWI, as it was one of few cities (likely the only) that had tens of thousands of male prostitutes.

Source: 1913: The World Before the Great War by Charles Emmerson

Now let's see you provide sources for all of those things.

dank /pol/ memes or what are you expecting?

>Doomed from the outset?
I would say yes. I think the communist uprisings were the thing that put the first nail into the coffin. On the one hand the people could see that the extreme left just would not accept a republic and on the other hand it helped the old elites. Before that they were isolated by the revolution, but when shit started to hit the fan the SPD and other parties were forced to collaborate with them and so they could regroup. Kapp Putsch and beerhall putsch are the most obvious examples of the newly organized rightwing extremists.
> Betrayed from within?
Definitely. A lot of people love to put all the guilt on the communists and they had their fair share of making everything more complicated for the democrats, but the biggest traitors were the conservatives/old elites still clinging to their positions from the time of the Kaiserreich. It wasn't just the nazis, the bureaucracy, courts etc. were often made up of men who despised democracy. And we better start not with the military which acted as a reactionary, militaristic state within the state.

The weimar republic sadly was just a short moment of dawn before it all crashed down with the Nazis.

Doomed from the outset.

The primary problem with the republic was the fact that so many of it's people did not see it as the legitimate government of Germany.

"We Germans were stabbed in the back->we didn't really lose the war->Versailles must be a sham->Weimar government must be a sham"

That was the thought process that had A LOT of credence and popular support among almost every political except the Social Democrats.

I may be wrong here, but IIRC Weimar leadership (Grand Coalition, mostly SPD leadership) had the fear that federally banning parties on either extreme would do nothing but legitimize them and galvanize an already highly politicized public.

Basically right up until 1932 almost all the political factions in Weimar were viewing the NSDAP as a brutish little pest that will eventually fizzle out and go away.

Brüning had pretty clear monarchist sympathies.There are some historical theories that claim his bungled handling of the first years of the great depression was his effort to intentionally sabotage Weimar and bring about a restoration of the Wilhelmine monarchy.

It was alot like the third French republic were it was almost hard to form a governing majority in the legislature. (Reichstad?) But they also had a president with a wide array of unilateral Powers including making his own government under an emergency. These two things together make it an inherently unstable system. That being said I don't think it was inevitable that it was going to be replaced by a dictatorship of some kind.

I enjoy the wiki entry:

Trotsky said:
>Worker-Communists, you are hundreds of thousands, millions; you cannot leave for anyplace; there are not enough passports for you. Should fascism come to power, it will ride over your skulls and spines like a terrific tank... Make haste, worker-Communists, you have very little time left!

Ernst Thälmann replied:
>Trotsky gives always but one reply: 'The German Communist Party must make a bloc with the social democracy...' This is the theory of a completely ruined fascist and counter revolutionary. This theory is the worst theory, the most dangerous theory and the most criminal that Trotsky has constructed in the last years of his counter revolutionary propaganda.

Six months after the Nazi party won the German elections, Ernst Thälmann was imprisoned by the National Socialists and spent 11 years in solitary confinement

Right place at the wrong time. Legitimately the peak of German art and culture.

>young male prostitutes
Utopia, basically

You need to remember the context. The Social Democrats put down the communist Spartacist Uprising in 1919 and shut them out of government in favour of the liberal German Democratic Party and the Catholic Centre Party

>SocDems actually being reasonable
>muh SocDems are worse than the Nazis

Well be shit get hit i suppose. KPD germany would have been worse and even more destabilizing for Europe and the World though.

Not worse, but they had their part to play in the demise of Weimar.

Also a socialist Germany would've made the Comintern unstoppable in Europe. Soviet resources + German technology = game over.

If the KPD manages to get full power.

If the KPD would have won a Reichswehr Putsch combined with an uprising of right-wing forces would have occured. The KPD would have lost against it and the Civil War would have destabilized germany and affected the rest of Europe. Lord knows the consequences.

If the KPD would have succeded in installing a socialist dictatorship they would have been able to subdue europe together with moscow giving as a more hellish cold war (which would have been more hot than IRL).

A good argument for the 2 party system.

The failure of the Weimar Republic stemmed from the fact that no single party could claim to represent the majority of the population. Eventually only the KPD and the Nazis had any chance of keeping power as they were the only ones determined to tear down the broken political system they existed in.

SPD were not worse than the NSDAP, but they did a lot of shit that was fucking retarded.

They thought there was something inherently good and self-evident about the republic. They staunchly defended the republic in it's twilight hour while still maintaining that the two biggest threats to the core of the government were nothing but 'fads' (extreme left and extreme right).

>implying a 2 party System would have worked
>totally disregarding the deep political rifts in the republic and the forces working against it

Yeah no a 2 party System would have either ended with 2 parties unable to actually due to uncurable internal rifts or even stronger opposition from right and left wing extremists leading to even more peril for the democracy.

I know it wasn't worse. That was ironic to Show how retarded the KPD was.

>The KPD would have lost against it

I'm not so sure about that, the KPD was a big party with a good paramilitary (the RFB). Plus a lot of working class SPD voters likely would've thrown their lot in with the KPD in the event of a KPD vs DNVP/NSDAP civil war. And the possibility of international brigades like Spain.

Also the USSR and the KPD were tightly linked through the Comintern, Stalin would've certainly helped out his man Thaelmann.

This is only kinda half accurate.

Throughout the relatively stable middle years (23-27) there did exist the grand coalition, a de facto political alliance that existed between all "bourgeois" parties left of traditional nationalists and right of the communists.

The coalition falters and eventually breaks in 29, because not a single fucking man can agree on what to do about the great depression (which fucked Germany HARD). In that power vacuum is when you start to see the Reichstag become an inoperable chaotic mess with meeting after meeting of nothing but deputies screaming and fighting with each other. This becomes exponentially worse as the NSDAP start to win significant numbers in the legislature.

The weimar constitution was very absolutist to be honest. The president could disband the parliament or dismiss and appoint chancellor at his own will. Should someone with dictatorial intentions grab the power, there was literally no legal way to get him out.
Also there was no % treshold for parties in parliamentary election, so it was filled with shitloads of non-parties (some of them got less than 1% votes and still held several seats).
that included parties of extreme left and right. So it was difficult to create some majority and there were re-elections all the time

as far as the Willy, there were still many monarchists in the government, icluding the president Hindenburg. He cooperated with Hitler, seeing at least something close to monarchy in his rule. But should Willy really sit on the german throne, the French would probably invade isntantly.

As for what the Willy thought, he lived in his own ivory tower for the rest of his days. When France capitulated, he sent Hitler a letter saying something like "congratulate for taking Paris with my soldiers." Also Willy wrote him again asking when will Hitler recreate the monarchy and put him back on the throne. Hitler said something like "what an idiot" and threw that letter into the trash

>Could it have been saved from fascism in the 1930s?

would one want to be 'saved' from fascism? as far as Germany goes that seems like a wonderful time to be alive, the germans were most likely better off than they ever had been before and ever will be. Hitler did some terrible things, but it's hard to deny how powerful he made Germany and how much he did for the average German.

i'm not a facist btw, I just don't get the issue

>the germans were most likely better off than they ever had been before and ever will be.
They had constant shortages of food even before war broke out in 1939, had wages cut and died en masse for a pointless endeavour

Kek'd heartily.

Weimar lacked balls. They should've used Old Guard conservatives like Jünger to destroy both the NatSocs and the Commies.

Not sure if this is a ruse or not.

Regardless, the fact is that most people did not turn to Nazism because they knew there was a guarantee of a better life at the end of the tunnel.

By the end of it, everyone knew that the republic was going to collapse. Throughout the middle period of the Weimar years, a vote for the NSDAP had become a vote of general protest, it meant a lot of different things to a lot of different people.

The Conservative "Revolutionaries" were just jaded bourgeoisie dismayed at the rise of socialism.

what did that have to do with Hitler though? that had to do more with the war. unemployment was nearly non-existent during the Nazi regime, there was an abundance of high paying jobs

And? Their jadedness could've been marshaled to destroy fascism and communism.

Unlike fascism, conservatism is a legitimate stance, and unlike communism, democratic socialism is a legitimate stance.

it's not, I don't idolize Hitler or Nazis. I just don't get why people act like it was terrible to live there at the time

Wiemar sucked the people who made it were traitors to the kaiser.

>What do you think of the Weimar Republic, Veeky Forums?
It did surprisingly well considering they had to deal with the aftermath of WW1, war reparations, hyperinflation, large governmental changes, a powerful block of individuals hostile to its whole existence, and later the Great Depression. "The Rise And Fall of Weimar Democracy" (bookzz.org/book/852356/a309ee) is one of the best books I've read on the subject and one of the major points it made was it was surprising that the Republic lasted as long as it did.

>what did that have to do with Hitler though

Because his economic policies had those affects. Unemployment was a sham. Jews and women were not allowed to work and the men were either pushed into the army for war preparation or basically treated as indentured labour in the Reichsarbeitsdienst. Strikes were banned and living standards fell despite the moderate wage rises because of the drive for rearmament, which sucked up resources.

Because it was? It was a military run state headed by a madman who kidnapped your Jewish neighbors at night, quelled descent, and couldn't keep their economy running without war. They drafted the men and indoctrinated the children. I would take Italy over Germany

the conservatives such as the DNVP sided with the fascists

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_National_People's_Party

I see no reason why the likes of Juenger would've done differently. "Third Positionism" is a mask for fascism.

"Old Guard conservatives" didn't have any substantive political presence across the country, they were mostly influential in the private sector, not the public.

You could argue that the Stahlhelms might represent a traditional conservative political outlet, but even then the Stahlhelms were more of a political club than an actual party.

>RFB

The SPD had their militia but it is doubtful that they would have helped the KPD. Even if they would have helped it wouldn't have been enough.

Stahlhelm,SA and other right wing probably were stronger or at least as strong as the left wing milita. The Reichswehr as an actual (very qualified) military fighting force (they only lacked the equipment) would have sided with right wing forces. They would have probably crushed the left wing forces before substantial soviet help could have arrived. Especially because the Reichswehr actually had underground networks that would have allowed to quickly raise and equip Freikorps. Stalin on the other hand had no direct Land border and had to somewhat consider not antagonizing the other great powers too much .

>you will never sit in a Bauhaus chair watching Fritz Lang movies before going to a nightclub and dancing to swing music whilst buying drinks with thousands of worthless banknotes

just die in my sleep already