Weimar by
Katja Hoyer review – the town that changed Germany
It was
the birthplace of the liberal tradition, but also the incubator for Nazism –
what can this historic city tell us about democracy?
Alex
Faludy
Thu 14
May 2026 08.00 CEST
‘Weimar
is Germany in a nutshell,” 1990s president Roman Herzog once quipped: “a town
in which not only culture and thought were at home but also philistinism and
barbarism.” The small city (population 65,000) sits at the heart of the nation
and acts as a shrine to its sons Goethe, Schiller and Nietzsche. In 1919 the
country’s first democratic constitution was promulgated in its national
theatre. It was chosen as the site of Germany’s rebirth precisely because its
aura of refined culture contrasted so sharply with the “Prussian militarism” of
Berlin. From 1919-1925 it hosted the Bauhaus School, led by Walter Gropius,
placing it at the forefront of art and design.
Yet,
starting in the mid-1920s, Weimar, which was also then the state capital of
Thuringia, became pivotal in the rise of the Nazi party and its first,
regional, experiments in government. After 1933 it competed with Bayreuth for
recognition as the “spiritual home of Nazism”.
Historian
Katja Hoyer, best known for 2023’s Beyond the Wall, evokes some of these
dissonances in her new work charting Weimar’s interwar story. She divides the
book into chapters chronicling local events every year between 1919 and 1939,
blending public records with personal letters, diaries and memoirs left by the
city’s inhabitants.
In this
chronology, 1926 is the hinge. This was the year Weimar hosted a Nazi congress
on the weekend of 3-4 July, the first rally since the party’s re-foundation in
1925, following 14 months of prohibition. It was a modest affair: police
estimated there were 7,000-8,000 attendees. Yet, the gathering established core
elements of Nazism, including the Hitler Youth.
On the
Sunday morning, in the auditorium where the Weimar constitution had been agreed
seven years before, Hitler instigated the “Blood Flag” ritual. Newly formed SA
Stormtrooper units marched across the stage, consecrating their standards by
touching them to a party flag carried during the 1923 Munich putsch, and
allegedly stained with a fallen SA man’s blood. Hoyer writes: “In the cradle of
Germany’s post-war democracy, Hitler performed a ceremony to sanctify a
movement intent on killing the young republic.”
The Nazis
didn’t make a favourable impression in the town. Over two days they left a
trail of damage and injury behind them: breaking into cars; vandalising
buildings, knifing locals and shooting a policeman. Yet by 1929, amid renewed
economic crisis, Weimarers felt differently. In that December’s state elections
11% of Thuringians voted for the Nazis, but in Weimar the share was 24%.
Coming in
third, they entered government for the first time, in coalition with other
rightist parties. They took control of the state ministries of the interior and
of education. Until the coalition’s collapse in 1931, Thuringia in general, and
Weimar in particular, became a laboratory for Nazi government.
Understanding
why people turned away from democracy in the past is essential to safeguarding
freedom in the present
The year
1937 was Weimar’s darkest before the war, with the establishment of Buchenwald
concentration camp, Germany’s largest, only five miles from the city centre.
Camp and town were intertwined. Prisoners arrived at Weimar’s railway station.
Local authorities provided utilities and services including, until 1940, use of
the municipal crematoria to burn bodies. Although officially a work camp, not
an extermination camp, it would claim the lives of 56,000 (mainly Jewish)
inmates.
Weimar
businesses supplied food and materials to maintain the camp while locals
enjoyed access to the zoo set up to entertain guards and their families.
Surreally, despite Nazi abhorrence of Bauhaus, the sign over the camp’s gate
“Jedem Das Seine” (“To Each His Own”) was executed in one of the school’s
elegant typefaces by a Bauhaus graduate and Buchenwald inmate, Franz Ehrlich.
Hoyer’s
abhorrence of the Third Reich is obvious, but she is reluctant to criticise the
ordinary people whose archival traces lend her work colour: “it is difficult
and often unhelpful to judge people’s behaviour from our vantage point a
century later”. Yet her book confronts us with many troubling ambiguities.
One
example is that of the stationery shop owner Carl Weirich, Hoyer’s most quoted
voice. After repeated near bankruptcies caused by economic turmoil, Carl voted
for the Nazis in 1933. In 1934-5 he was even a financial supporter of the SS.
Yet, he was never a formal party member, and by 1938 his diary betrays unease.
Following Kristallnacht, he noted that “increasing persecution of the Jews
began which blasphemed against God himself”.
Weirich’s
diary records with horror the sight of crematoria and piles of corpses at
Buchenwald when he and other Weimarers were shown them by American troops
following liberation. Not once, however, in a journal lasting up to the 1970s,
does he question what part his own choices might have played in bringing those
atrocities about.
Though
she eschews judgment on individuals, Hoyer nevertheless writes with moral
purpose. Understanding why ordinary, even likable, people turned away from
democracy in the past is, she argues, essential to safeguarding freedom in the
present. Given that Thuringia’s last state elections in 2024 witnessed another
far-right breakthrough, with the AfD topping the poll on 33%, that task could
scarcely be more urgent.
Weimar: Life on the Edge of Catastrophe by
Katja Hoyer is published by Allen Lane (£30). To support the Guardian order
your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
This article was amended on 14 May 2026. An
earlier version said that Weimar is the state capital of Thuringia. In fact, it
was replaced by Erfurt in 1948.
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