The "Golden Twenties" were a fertile period of stability and culture in Weimar Germany

“Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable”

-Martin Luther King Jr.

A man pushes a wheelbarrow full of worthless reichmarks. It’s 1923, the reichmark is worth one millionth of a dollar and is plummeting by the hour. Children treat the worthless paper as a plaything. Waiters announce new prices between courses of dinner. Housewives use banknotes as wallpaper.

Hyper-inflation stands out in our collective memory of Weimar Republic. The currency crisis captures the absurdity and chaos within post-WWI Germany and enabled the Nazis’ rise. Weimar is the historical tightrope that Germany wobbled upon between the devastation of WWI and the Third Reich.

Unfortunately, this narrative is both wrong and dangerous. It fundamentally misunderstandings Weimar Germany and the lessons it can teach. While Weimar had significant flaws, it was also vibrant, creative, and progressive. Its failure was not pre-ordained but the result of a complex set of actors and circumstances. In the mid-1920s, Weimar entered a golden age of political stability and cultural advancement. Those forgotten years are worth revisiting.

Proclaim Liberty throughout the Land

By November 1918, it was apparent to generals and politicians that WWI was now unwinnable. Germany was running dangerously low on men and materiel. Two million German men had died at the front and the British blockade was strangling the nation’s economy. Against their weary soldiers, fifty thousand fresh American troops were arriving each week in France. Riots, mutinies, and rebellions broke out among workers and sailors across Germany. The Kaiser stubbornly held out against the inevitable, but on November 9th, Wilhelm abdicated after his top generals convinced him he had lost the army’s support. Two days later, the guns fell silent.

Germany’s new civilian leaders took over a starving nation, broken both economically and spiritually. In this uncertain period, rising unrest threatened to explode into full-scale civil war. Radical ideas gained currency and violence wracked Berlin. The disorder was so great that the government could not meet in Berlin to draft the new constitution. Instead, they chose Weimar.

From the ashes of an authoritarian empire, the delegates in Weimar forged a remarkably liberal and democratic government. They extended the vote to all adult citizens, enfranchising women for the first time. Their constitution also protected civil rights including: free speech, free assembly, a right to privacy, and freedom of religion . The delegates also expanded Germany’s welfare program and eventually guaranteed universal childhood education. To address homelessness, the government devised innovative tax breaks, grants, and loans to builders and homeowners. Overall, the Weimar constitution was among the most progressive constitutions of its day.

Brave New World

The perception that Weimar Germany was mired in economic chaos from 1918 through the Great Depression ignores the significant boom of the mid-1920s that living standards for German workers. Gustav Stresemann, briefly chancellor and later foreign minister, helped stem hyperinflation by creating a new currency indexed to gold and backed by mortgages , the rentenmark. The rentenmark helped Germany regain the trust of international creditors, which aided economic expansion. The innovative and fast-growing German economy attractived American investors. In addition, renegotiating reparations payments under the Dawes Plan brought even more American capital to Germany.

The economy also benefitted from Germany’s reintegration into the global community. After WWI, Germany’s wartime allies, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire, no longer existed. Germany itself was an international pariah. Again, Stresemann played a key role in restoring his nation’s prosperity. He signed multiple treaties with the Allied powers, including the Treaty of Locarno in 1925, which earned him the Nobel Peace prize. The following year Germany joined the League of Nations as a permanent member.

At the same time, women joined the workforce in record numbers . Ever more women attended universities and became doctors, lawyers, and scientists. The Weimar constitution guaranteed equal pay for equal work and the government was supposed to be an equal opportunity employer. Women also became socially active, with over one-million women had joined Germany’s largest feminist organization. In the 1920s, female elected officials were three times more common in Germany than in the UK and six times more common than in America.

A Cultural Capital

Berlin was both the political and cultural capital of this new society. Throughout the 1920s, the city hosted social reformers and artistic visionaries. The drive for gender equality coincided with a sexual revolution too. Berlin opened the Institute for Sexual Research in 1919, which conducted scientific research on the previously taboo topic of sexual orientation. Within this more enlightened climate, the first gay rights movement was born. Berlin had dozens of gay bars and clubs and complex gay characters were common on stage and in novels. In 1929, a parliamentary committee recommended repealing anti-gay laws, a campaign that was just narrowly defeated by conservative opposition.

The progressive environment also fostered innovative artistic movements. Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus school whose modernist style inspired architects and designers around the world. The Bauhaus attracted renowned instructors, including painters Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky. Germany’s artists also played a major role in developing Dadaism and its successor movements. George Grosz and John Heartfield created the photomontage, their collages often filled with strong political messages. Other artists decried militarism and the discredited traditional values of German society. Otto Dix’s Der Kreig questions the costs of war in fifty nightmarish and fantastical drawings. Film pioneers were also social commentators in their new medium. Fritz Lang’s Futurist and Expressionist classic Metropolis uses science fiction to grapple with issues of class, human nature, and technology.

Unsurprisingly, the land of Handel and Bach, Goethe and Schiller, continued to its world-class musical and literary output. These included symphonies by the prolific Richard Strauss and pioneering musicals by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill like Threepenny Opera. In Berlin, jazz performers delighted crowds as the city danced along to the new style. Philosopher and author Thomas Mann won the 1929 Nobel Prize for Literature and Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front remains the among the greatest anti-war books.

As Europe’s industrial powerhouse before WWI, many of Weimar Germany’s most notable achievements came in science and technology. From 1918 to 1933, Germany won 20 Nobel Prizes . Luminaries like Albert Einstein and Werner von Heisenberg produced groundbreaking advances in Physics. In Chemistry, Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch created industrial compounds with applications as diverse as agriculture to warfare. Lise Meitner and Otto Hahn did experiments that would later demonstrate the power and potential of nuclear fission . German factories were world leaders in the production of pharmaceuticals, electronics, cameras, and automobiles.

Broken Dreams

Weimar Germany not perfect, but the narrative of unmitigated catastrophe falls into the trap of reactionary conservatives. The “golden twenties” in Germany saw a young democracy find its footing and contribute to world culture and knowledge. The forward-thinking and liberal policies of the Weimar Republic were viciously attacked by right-wing enemies of democracy. When the Nazis took power, they destroyed this progress with breathtaking speed. Gays were persecuted and murdered and women were pushed into traditional gender roles. New art was declared “ degenerate ” and atomic science was condemned as “Jewish.”

The open society of the 1920s closed forever when Hitler became chancellor. Artists, intellectuals, and scientists fled abroad in an unprecedented brain drain. Even today Germany has not recovered the cultural and scientific preeminence it had before 1933. The Nazi rise was not an inevitable consequence of a failed state, but a sudden and dramatic reversal in human progress. The Weimar Republic serves as both lesson and warning. It is a lesson in how quickly progress can be undone and a warning that every advance of must be jealously defended.