Last weekend I found myself sharing Brazilian food with Brazilians (of course), French, Irish, and German people. As I was eating “moqueca de peixe”, I was introduced to a professor of German literature who is also a historian of the Weimar Republic. I have been long fascinated by this period in German history. My fascination only increased after I read Sheri Berman’s fantastic article linking a strong civil society to the rise of the Nazi party upon the collapse of the Weimar Republic (this is quite a counterintuitive argument in political science). I could only understand why I am so attracted to this topic when I started reading her (also fantastic) book The Primacy of Politics - Social Democracy and the Making of Europe’s Twentieth Century. In the book, Berman tells the story of social democracy as both an ideology and a political movement. What fascinates me is not the Weimar Republic per se, but the intellectual debates about the viability of democracy and capitalism that occurred at that time in Europe. Berman immerses us in those debates so effectively that it almost feels like we are there, witnessing communism’s metamorphosis into national socialism/fascism or social democracy. The same historical context appears in Netflix’s Babylon Berlin, a series that takes place during the Weimar Republic. In the second season, a senior police official informs the chancellor (a social democrat) that certain circles are planning to assassinate him. He asks, “Communists?”, to which the official replies, “No, national forces”. Nostalgia is a dangerous feeling, but I can’t stop myself from wanting to go back in history to witness those intellectual (and political) developments firsthand. Especially because we still do not have good answers to the question those thinkers were asking: how can we produce a sense of social unity, a sense of community in a democratic and capitalist society? But alas, we are facing our own tough and historically important question (namely, how can we preserve democracy itself?) as we watch Vladimir Putin invade Ukraine. We are living history.
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AuthorBeatriz Rey is a political scientist and a writer based in Washington, D.C. Archives
February 2023
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