America’s Weimar syndrome may be obvious with the reelection of the institution-destroyer Donald Trump as president. But the entire world is one big Weimar now, connected enough for one part to mortally influence the other parts, yet not connected enough to be politically coherent. Like the various parts of the Weimar Republic, we find ourselves globally in an exceedingly fragile phase of technological and political transition.
Today, China, Russia, and the United States, to say nothing of the mid-level and smaller powers, are all running a strange simulation of the Weimar Republic: that weak and wobbly political organism that governed Germany for 15 years from the ashes of World War I to the ascension of Adolf Hitler.
Today, China, Russia, and the United States, to say nothing of the mid-level and smaller powers, are all running a strange simulation of the Weimar Republic: that weak and wobbly political organism that governed Germany for 15 years from the ashes of World War I to the ascension of Adolf Hitler.
America’s Weimar syndrome may be obvious with the reelection of the institution-destroyer Donald Trump as president. But the entire world is one big Weimar now, connected enough for one part to mortally influence the other parts, yet not connected enough to be politically coherent. Like the various parts of the Weimar Republic, we find ourselves globally in an exceedingly fragile phase of technological and political transition.
I see no Hitler in our midst, or even a totalitarian world state. But don’t assume that the next phase of history will provide any relief to the present one. It is in the spirit of caution that I raise the subject of Weimar.
Analogies can be futile, I know, since no thing is exactly like another. Yet they are often the only way to communicate and explain. While on the one hand an analogy is an imperfect distortion, on the other hand it can create a new awareness, another way to see the world. It is only through an analogy that I can begin to describe the depth of our global crisis. We have to be able to consider that literally anything can happen to us. This is the usefulness of Weimar.
A crowd of soldiers fills the scene with the columned edifice of the Brandenburg Gate ahead of them.
What, exactly, was Weimar? The great German historian Golo Mann called Weimar a sprawling and unwieldy “empire without an emper
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