A Review of Invisible Fatherland: Constitutional Patriotism in Weimar Germany
By Moritz Föllmer
Was the Weimar Republic doomed to fail? Historians are usually careful with such questions, invested as they are in exploring contemporary perspectives and allowing for contingency. Yet, in this case, the conclusion long seemed difficult to avoid. After all, before the dynamism of the Nazi movement and the machinations by conservative elites that dealt it a final blow, the newly founded democracy had to grapple with the weight of the German Empire it replaced; the dire consequences of a devastating war that ended in defeat; revolutionary and counterrevolutionary movements; and hyperinflation and economic depression. It was tempting to see the origins of this failure in Weimar Germany’s awkward beginning. Some historians blamed moderate social democrats for an incomplete revolution that missed a prime opportunity for social transformation and bitterly divided the left. Others agreed but took a more long-term view. They identified a nineteenth-century Sonderweg (special path) into a modernity that Germany embraced economically but not politically, enabling reactionary noblemen, military officers, judges, and professors to sabotage democracy after 1918.
In the past, scholars who engaged extensively with the complexities of interwar Germany were hardly more optimistic, as evidenced by Gerald D. Feldman’s 1985 contention that Weimar was a “gamble which stood virtually no chance of success.” Some of those willing to view the 1920s as a period in its own right extended this pessimism from the fate of democracy to a crisis-ridden modernity. In the process, they blurred neat divisions between progressive and right-wing currents and adopted a Foucauldian perspective. Feldman’s former student, Peter Fritzsche, then establishing himself as the leading historian of interwar Germany, put this thinking into words in 1996: “The coming of the Third Reich in 1933 was not so much verification of Weimar’s singular failure as the validation of its dangerous potential.”
To be sure, there have always been those who kept pointing to promising attempts to put democracy on a stronger footing, which could have borne lasting fruit under more favorable economic circumstances. Still, the trend to re-evaluate Weimar democracy, starting sometime in the 2000s, has felt conceptually innovative and intellectually stimulating. It started from the observation that not all post-1918 developments culminated in 1933. Some of these developments continued into the 1950s and 1960s, underpinning the more stable democracy that formed in the Federal Republic, while others were not specific to Germany but had parallels in other European countries and indeed the United States. In line with that view, the introduction of full democratic suffrage in 1918/19—for all men and women at the federal, state, and local levels—has been reappreciated instead of dismissed for not achieving enough. And the received wisdom that Weimar was a “republic without republicans,” in the sense of a failure to make a strong public case for itself, has given way to a recognition of democratic initiatives, at grassroots as well as governmental levels, that demonstrated a keen sense for symbols and rituals.
It is to this latter reassessment that Manuela Achilles has made a significant contribution. Her findings have been published in several articles and chapters and now form the bulk of her book. She argues that constitutional patriotism was vibrant in Weimar Germany and that it was embraced both by political leaders in Berlin and by ordinary citizens in small towns. Achilles thus takes her readers into the heated political atmosphere after a gang of extreme-right terrorists shot Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau, who was Jewish and a member of the left-liberal Deutsche Demokratische Partei (DDP), in late June 1922. She shows how the subsequent outrage reinvigorated republicans. Some of them attacked nationalists physically because they held them responsible for the assassination. Others expressed a desire to display the black-red-gold colors of the Republic even when flags were in short supply. This energy gave a boost to Constitution Day, introduced shortly before. Prussia, where Social Democrats, DDP, and the Catholic Center Party remained in government (in contrast to the federal level, where their coalition lost its parliamentary majority for good in 1920), officially promoted the commemorations of the signing of the Weimar Constitution. Citizens participated widely, sometimes in the tens of thousands. Celebrations entailed sports competitions, torchlight processions, and folk dances, with republican parties offering beer and bratwurst.
Certainly, the author recognizes that this popular republicanism encountered some serious problems. She describes how hostility to the Republic remained strong throughout the 1920s. School principals continued to give monarchist speeches; motor rally competitors decorated their cars with the black-white-red banners of the Empire; and schoolboys wore swastika badges. Conservative politicians accused their center-left opponents of exacerbating division rather than fostering unity. Much of the non-socialist press shifted toward openly right-wing politics. This, however, makes one question just how deep-set anti-republicanism was before the Depression, as it meant that provincial newspapers systematically underreported republicanism’s popularity. In the process, the press constructed rather than simply reported antipathies.
Against this backdrop, left liberals in particular treaded carefully. They promoted conciliatory narratives that aimed at successively broadening the Republic’s appeal to its former adversaries—whether in the wake of Rathenau’s assassination or on Constitution Day—in their regular evocations of Germany’s cultural traditions or in their commissioning of a historical anthology for pupils by the telling title of German Unity, German Freedom. Was this because left liberals remained emotionally attached to the German Empire and its founder Otto von Bismarck (79, 139)? Or did it result from their “deliberate avowal of plurality and difference” (210)? Achilles seems undecided. Although she does not put it this way, the paradox might have been that pluralism entailed according space to a longing for unity that was ultimately anti-pluralistic. Upon receiving said historical anthology on the tenth Constitution Day in 1928, one pupil wrote to share his enthusiasm and view that “all German citizens have to pull together on one rope, so that the Reich is lifted up.” (243).
In any case, Achilles’s interest is not in the issue of whether more could have been gained from popular republicanism and whether constitutional legalism was perhaps taken too far. Instead, she wants to do justice to a sometimes incoherent but on the whole impressive collective effort that, she argues, should not be measured against the yardstick of eventual success or failure. Consequently, she conveys her appreciation of what she calls a “civic habitus of democratic equality” (81), manifested in the social democratic Reich President Friedrich Ebert’s unexceptional personality and sober demeanor, the black garb worn by both male and female members of the Constituent Assembly, and the abolition of symbols of status and honor, which had been so important under the German Empire.
This argument is plausible enough, but it also kicks in a door that is now considerably more open than at the time of Achilles’s earlier publications. It reads somewhat forced when she introduces her book as a step “toward a new paradigm of Weimar Democracy Studies” and explicitly demarcates it from Richard J. Evans’s The Coming of the Third Reich, a survey published in 2006 whose focus was not on the Weimar Republic as such. A prologue on the disturbing events happening in Charlottesville, VA, on August 11, 2017, yields little more than generic observations about the fragility of democracy. It would have been more pertinent to take the concept of constitutional patriotism further, either diachronically into the history of the Federal Republic since 1945 or synchronically, by looking at similar attitudes in other democracies of the interwar period. In the end, the book’s strengths are in the empirical exploration of how republicanism was practiced in symbols and rituals, from speeches in the Reichstag to Constitution Day celebrations and black-red-gold flags in provincial Prussia, as well as in the description of the way citizens reacted with outrage to Rathenau’s assassination and center-left politicians calmly reached out to political enemies—one-sided though such conciliatory attempts mostly were.
Moritz Föllmer teaches modern history at the University of Amsterdam. He has widely written on Weimar and Nazi Germany, European urban history, and the history of individuality.
References
Feldman, Gerald D. 1985. “Weimar from Inflation to Depression: Experiment or Gamble?,” in Die Nachwirkungen der Inflation auf die deusche Geschichte, Gerald D. Feldman (ed.), 385.
Fritzsche, Peter. 1996. „Did Weimar Fail?,“ Journal of Modern History, 629-56, 656.
Invisible Fatherland: Constitutional Patriotism in Weimar Germany
By Manuela Achilles
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Hardback / Viii + 311 pages / 2025
ISBN 9781009651028
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009651028
