The Weimar Republic: How A Small Town In Germany Became A National Symbol

Added: 2026-05-14

[00:00:00]Now, Germany in the 1920s and 30s is the most obvious example from our history of how fragile democracy can be. The VHimar Republic that followed the first world war was defined by high culture and modernity, but it ultimately descended into the abyss of Nazism culminating in global war and genocide. In her new book, Vimar: Life on the Edge of Catastrophe, the German historian Catcher Hoya looks at the small town that gave its name to that interwar republic and uses it to shed light on how a totalitarian ideology was able to take hold of the country. And Catcher joins me now. Hello.

[00:00:31]>> Hello.

[00:00:31]>> Welcome to Times Radio. Look, rather than focusing on the Vimar Republic as a whole, in this book, you focus specifically on the small but significant town of Vimar. Why did you decide to do it that way? Well, I feel that normally when we look at this time period, it tends to be a bit sort of from a bird's eye view, very abstract, very political, very economic, and that's important, but it often I think neglects the kind of human dimension.

[00:00:53]So, I think as so many people now look to this time period for lessons, it made sense to go kind of on ground level almost kind of at street level to look at this and see how people in one particular place responded to those um you know, kind of really big events around them. For context, before we get back to the history, what sort of a place is Vimar today?

[00:01:12]>> Uh, so Vimar is still the same place really. It's always been. It's quite a touristy place, very well known for being a a very cultural town. It's where really important poets like Gut and Chilla once lived and worked. You've got composers like Bach and List um who spend time there. So, it's really a place where people go if they want to immerse themselves in German culture and in that sort of legacy. And why did it end up having its name you why did it become the sort of emblematic of the Vimar Republic?

[00:01:38]>> Well, this um cultural legacy was quite attractive in 1919 when a new Germany needed to be founded, a democratic and more civilian one than the previous militaristic uh Prussian one. And so the idea of not founding the new republic in Berlin, but doing it in Vimmer uh appealed. I mean, Berlin was also highly unsafe, so they did need to go somewhere else anyway because there were communist um uprisings there that were brutally crashed. But really the idea of branding this entire new German project with something more cultured and civilian appealed.

[00:02:07]>> The uh the former German president Roman Herzog he said VHimar is Germany in a nutshell. What did he mean? Did he just mean in a cultural way or in in a great way?

[00:02:15]>> Well he meant that in the sense that there's this high culture and there's this long legacy of thought of philosophy of poetry but also uh during the Nazi era you had Vimma as a as a Nazi model town. was really kind of rebranded and that culminated in the establishment of the Bhbad concentration camp on its doorstep. So he was saying this juxtaposition of of high culture and barbarity is is German history in a nutshell.

[00:02:40]>> So the way I mean the way you've written the book it reads less like a history book and more like a narrative inside the the everyday lives of people living in Vimar you know from the first world war on onwards. You focus on the diary of a local shop owner. What was it like to to read that when you came across it?

[00:02:54]It was really like a a a treasure trove for any historian. I mean this this guy Kvarish um was born in 1885. He lived for a long time well into the 70s and he kept a diary a really detailed almost line by line account of his life um throughout this entirely you know fascinating and long span that that he lived through. I mean, you know, he started off in uh the the Kaiser Reich era, you know, then ended up basically during the Vimmer Republic, the Nazi era, and East Germany to stay in Vimma in one in the same place. Um, and it was a really really fascinating way of looking at an ordinary person's experience in that time.

[00:03:29]>> You've got some wonderful characters in here, including Nichch's sister, the llama, with whom I'm just absolutely fascinated. How did you pick your characters? Do you have a do you have a favorite?

[00:03:37]>> Well, I do have a favorite. It's probably KL because he is the he is your ordinary everyday guy and goes through this really extraordinary times with the mind of an ordinary person.

[00:03:47]>> Um but you're right there's kind of a really eclectic mix I hope of of people in there. So Nichze's sister is is one of those less ordinary characters in it and there's also Baldi who later becomes the leader of the Hitler youth and grows up in Vimma as a boy. So we meet him as a teenager for the first time. Um, so I wanted a group of people that um, you know, had different backgrounds, different experiences, and most importantly, different forms of agency.

[00:04:12]So if we're looking at why this happened, it's a very different experience if you're the owner of a stationary shop or if you're Fred N's sister, like managing the legacy of that. So to me, that's exactly it. You can't just look at it from top down and say to everyone, this is what we must learn from this time period. It's about looking at the experience of different people. And look often when one thinks of the VHimar Republic one thinks I guess thanks to popular culture one thinks of uh I mean a high degree of sort of hedonism and decadence was that present in Vimar itself >> it's almost the antidote the counterpole to that so many people what we associate with the Vimar kind of era culture today is very Berlin it's really specific to Berlin not even other cities like Munich or or Cologne had that sort of um alternative uh you know really modernist kind of culture so Vimma sets herself up as place where people can go if they are uh conservative and they want to preserve the old German culture as it were against this onslaught of modernism and kind of new culture. At the same time you've got the bow house movement as a new and modernist way of doing architecture and art and even finding new ways of living and vitios who founds that movement decides to locate in Vhimmer rather than Berlin where he was based. So it's almost a way of saying I'm going to go then as he puts it sort of poke the hornets's nest of German conservatism but it is a small town at the end of the day and one that prides itself in in in German high culture and therefore serves as a as a sort of yeah antipote to to that modern culture.

[00:05:41]>> Adolf Hitler himself was drawn to to Vimar was that was that the appeal of the of the high culture the kind of the the sort of you know German majesty of high culture that that drew him there.

[00:05:51]Yeah, there's partially that. So you get all sorts of people in that time period thinking Vimmer is the place to go to relaunch a new kind of Germany. The other appeal is that it's right in the center of Germany as well. So anything that you do there, you can get everybody together quite easily is logistically in a in a place almost halfway between Hamburg and Munich. Uh but Hitler also simply just loved Vimmer. He actually said that literally to one of his local lieutenants once where he just went, I love Vimmer. And and he's personally very attracted to the town. So you find him quite often when he's traveling from Munich to Berlin for political business.

[00:06:22]He just stops on the on the train basically halfway uh and goes to Vimma, spends a few days there, goes walking.

[00:06:28]He finds it very safe. There are very few communists because there's not much of a workers movement there. Um so that's another reason. And then lastly, Thoringia, the state where of of which Bmer is the capital, um becomes a a Nazi haven early on because they relegalized the Nazi party earlier than most other parts of Germany after it had been banned following the the Munich push in 1923 when Hitler first tried to seize power by by violence. And so that almost becomes like a safe testing ground for them to try out how they can rise to power and what they can get away with.

[00:07:00]Look, a key theme of the book is the extent to which ordinary German people relate to the rise of the Nazis to some extent are responsible for the rise of the Nazis. What what what do the messages you draw from that? What do the diaries tell us about how people kind of sort of engaged with everything that was that was rising up around them?

[00:07:17]>> Well, they do respond in different ways.

[00:07:19]So, I've got everything there in terms of people uh liking the idea of Hitler bringing forth some sort of national revival and recovery from the Great Depression. uh but also people who resisted early on and and do so at you know great personal risk to themselves and to their families and everything in between. My main takeaway is that I think the majority of people aren't necessarily keen on extremist politics to start with. They they go there in times of crisis and times of kind of political and economic despair. Um and quite often you find that people are quite uneasy about the extreme nature of Nazi politics and also the violence that surrounds the movement. But they tend to be able to detach themselves psychologically from what was going on.

[00:08:01]So even if you take the concentration camp itself, it's literally on the outskirts of FA. It's just a short walk away.

[00:08:06]>> Um Carl, my book binder, still goes hiking on the on the hill where the concentration camp is, you know, even after it's there. And at one point he writes in his diary, oh, if this stupid concentration camp wasn't there, I could still hike up there in peace. you know, they people learn to live with these things somehow and psychologically detach themselves from the reality of what it means and and how much kind of, you know, horror is taking place without with behind its doors. And I think by the way that you see later on when they're confronted with the with the reality of this. So when the Americans occupy Vimma, they they take a group of 10,000 citizens up there to see what what had been going on. And Carl is one of them. And he writes in his diary, you know, that this was like running the gauntlet. He says that his his heart just filled with with shame and with disgust at what our German downfall had been. So this hour tells me that he feels that there's a kind of collective responsibility for this. But at no point does he feel personally that he done something to to cause this himself. And that I think is an interesting dimension there kind of how far are you able as an individual person to to say this isn't anything to do with me. I'm just going to look the other way.

[00:09:12]>> I mean it says absolutely fascinating things about agency. the fact that he was able to he knew it was there. He was able to hike there, but he doesn't feel responsible for it having written up. I mean, how do how do Germans think of that kind of mindset now? Is that regarded as understandable? Is it regarded as shameful?

[00:09:30]>> No, it's quite so it's quite the opposite. I think there's been um a sense because Germany is so proud of its memory culture and of the way that it educates young people kind of early on about this time period. So that there is a sense that there was both a collective and an individual responsibility there.

[00:09:46]So if you take for instance German military culture today, soldiers are being told that they have a responsibility to think for themselves.

[00:09:52]It's quite an unmilitary thing to do to sort of say you're a citizen in uniform.

[00:09:56]That's the phrase that is being used. So that if there's an order given to you to commit a terrible crime, you don't just mindlessly do it. You kind of think about whether it's the right thing to do or not. And that's across the spectrum.

[00:10:07]people sort of try and and instill in people today that they don't have just a collective responsibility but an individual responsibility. The question is just what does this actually mean for individual people? Look >> finally catcher we all know and remember VHimar as being the sort of the doomed republic the republic that was never going to last. Was it inevitably doomed?

[00:10:25]Like did you as you the more you looked into it and the more you looked at Vimar did you think this this was never going to last given the currents or or could it could history have been very different?

[00:10:34]>> Well I mean how much time have I got? I I mean honestly about 40 seconds.

[00:10:39]>> I don't think it was doomed. I mean you get a feeling for instance when it stabilizes in the mid1 1920s. Even Kyle kind of says you know life is getting better. Um he he goes hiking with with a lot of joy again in the sort of mid and late 20s and then the Wall Street crash sets in and I think that really is something that is very difficult to see how the republic was supposed to overcome that. Having said that, the Americans do manage same crisis and and they do find a very different answer in in Roosevelt to the same crisis and in how to manage it.

[00:11:08]>> Yeah, so fascinating. Catch Hoyo, thank you so much very much indeed for being with us. Catcher's book, Vimar, Life on the Edge of Catastrophe is out now. It's available to order at the Times bookshop where Times Plus members get a 20% discount. Just visit timesbookshop.co.uk.

[00:11:21]This is Huga Rifkin on Times Radio with Elev, the full solution payment service provider for your business.