Weimar Republic Socialism

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To start off this essay I will be discussing the conditions in the Weimar Republic that allowed for National Socialism to rise, these are the timber in the Bergen metaphor. One of the reasons that the Republic failed was the massive amount of debt that the country faced after World War 1 as referendums and loans. This crippled the German economy, which took a much larger hit from the Great Depression than the United States did. This economic trouble affected how the people of Germany viewed the Republic. The people had romanticized views on life per-World War 1 and wished to return to that state. By viewing the economic state of German before World War 1 as normal, it then made the economic state on the Weimar Republic abnormal and “therefore blameworthy and illegitimate.” (OR Bessel 101) This illegitimate moved to the …show more content…

When the German Empire fell, it was by a step down by the previous rulers not by the masses kicking them out. This meant that the pre-war elites still existed in the country and were trying to figure out where they belonged in the newly democratic nation. These elites were against social reform, a necessary element of modernization, and voted against it as often as they could. (OR Peuker 104) However, this was not the only thing that about the setback of German modernization, it was also “the peculiarly crisis-prone nature of the process of modernization itself”. (OR Peuker 104) Modernization takes time, something that the Weimar did not have in its favor. Even per-World War 1 the German Empire had attempted to modernize the nation at an alarming pace. All that resulted from this attempt at quick modernization was another piece of “timber” to add to the growing pile of Weimar

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