Abstract
Did Weimar fail? For years now, this classic question has served generations of students as a familiar puzzle with a predictable solution. More recently, however, Weimar has experienced a new lease of life both in continental and in US scholarship. In US political thought, a new interest in democratic theory, transnational intellectual history, and the cultural origins of the Cold War has enabled conversations between previously disconnected communities. The doctoral grandchildren of Peter Gay, the descendants of émigré civic humanists, and the followers of the Frankfurt School have recognized a common past in Weimar thought and are giving it new relevance.
Joining this growing conversation, Udi Greenberg raises the question of how much of Weimar is still in us, that is, people living in the post-Cold War world in which a certain democratic consensus has prevailed. No longer an emblem of democratic crisis, in this book Weimar becomes a marker of democratic reconstruction and an ambivalent seedbed for elite-driven ideas of regime change. Greenberg argues that ‘Weimar’ ideas of democracy and internationalism, developed in the 1920s and 1930s and then transferred or transposed to the United States of America by émigrés, were revived in the US-sponsored postwar order. But he also sheds new light on the local failure of these ideas in interwar Germany. A closer look at US philanthropic initiatives to secure democracy after the First World War moves the cultural origins of the Cold War forward by a couple of decades. In the interwar years, the Rockefeller foundation and others invested heavily in funding democratic think tanks in Germany. Greenberg demonstrates how the eventual breakdown of democracy in Germany after 1933 could thus also be seen as a failure of the USA’s soft power.
The major continuity between Weimar and Europe’s second postwar, however, lies in the importance of the elite, both as a social formation and as an idea, for German thinkers associated with Weimar. Of five intellectual lives pursued here, each had something to contribute to elite education. Carl J. Friedrich, an educational reformer, and Waldemar Gurian, a Jewish Catholic who turned his potent critique of Bolshevism into a critique of Nazi totalitarianism, stand out as particularly pertinent case studies in this story; a final chapter on Hans Morgenthau also adds nuance to previous readings of his doctrine of international law. These thinkers, who are as singular as they are emblematic of their generation, championed the idea of a controlled democracy, constantly struggling with the spectre of an abstract totalitarianism. The cultivation of responsible elites, an idea that has its provenance in the work of Alfred Weber, the younger brother of Max Weber, was a central preoccupation for all the ‘Weimar’ thinkers featured in Greenberg’s analysis (p. 128). More could be said here of Carl J. Friedrich’s activism that yielded, among other works, his American Policy Toward Palestine (1944). It is puzzling that Greenberg does not discuss this book, which makes Friedrich’s elite-oriented and market-driven model of political change particularly visible through its application to Palestine. Friedrich reveals there a keen sense of competition with British as well as Soviet claims for order in the Middle East. Examining this wartime connection between Friedrich’s interwar and postwar thought would have illuminated a link Greenberg does discuss, namely the threat of Bolshevism as a continued interest for American, German, French, and British liberals, years before the Nazis’ rise to power. While the Nazis’ own contribution to anti-communist thought was quickly forgotten in the Cold War, the German heritage of anti-Bolshevik thought continued to serve as a foil for designing new US doctrines of democratic reconstruction.
While German thinkers may have ‘internationalized’ the way the USA thought about international affairs as well as some US policy doctrines, precisely what is meant by the ‘Weimar’ brand is to be debated. Seeing Friedrich as a ‘Weimar’ thinker might require goodwill and imagination. Friedrich not only spent some years of the First World War in the United States of America, a stay that had inspired him to found the German Academic Exchange Programme in the 1920s. He also assumed a lectureship at Harvard in 1926. Some of the slogans often mentioned in the context of Weimar Germany deserve to be explored with more historical depth. For instance, while the phrase ‘democracy without democrats’ can be attributed to Jan-Werner Müller’s recent Constitutional Patriotism (pp. 14–19), tracing its provenance to the critiques of France’s Third Republic would have been more illuminating given Greenberg’s emphasis on Weimar’s inherent transnationalism. The strength of Greenberg’s book lies in separating Weimar thought from the history of the Weimar republic. This might explain why it does not engage with the ‘continental’ historiography of Weimar republicanism (Benjamin Ziemann, Nadine Rossol) or does so only in passing, acknowledging the work of Detlef Peukert (pp. 13–17). Greenberg’s view of Germany’s global intellectual connections is principally in conversation with US intellectual historians of the Cold War. His eloquent alignment of multiple lives gives the book of modern democracy a compulsory Weimar chapter. He also shows that the Weimar moment has been more closely connected to transatlantic flows of capital and political emotions than previously thought. The bad news: seen in transnational perspective, Weimar’s failure now looks even worse. The good news: when your creditor goes bankrupt, sometimes you get to keep the funds.