NEARLY a century has passed but the Janus face of the Weimar Republic appals and attracts as much as ever. On the one side, hyperinflation, mass unemployment and political assassination; on the other, dazzling creativity in the arts and sciences—not to mention myriad forms of nightlife to suit every taste, however odd. It was indeed, as Dickens said of the French revolution, the best of times and the worst of times, the spring of hope and the winter of despair.

Did Germany's convulsive experiment with democracy between 1919 and 1933 ever stand a real chance? One might well think not. Born in chaos after the slaughter of a war lost through what many Germans wrongly construed as a “stab in the back”, the fledgling republic was hamstrung from the start. It concocted a “perfect” constitution that gave as much scope to its foes as to its friends, and it was saddled by vengeful victors with reparations demands that were all but impossible to meet. Towards the end of the republic's life, one-third of the labour force was jobless. When Hitler's matchless ability to tap resentment and hatred is added to this poisonous mix, Weimar's plunge into dictatorship looks to have been inevitable.

Or was it? The real wonder is not that Weimar failed but that it lasted as long as it did—longer, after all, than the 12 years of Hitler's “1,000-year Reich”. For a while, from 1924 when the currency was stabilised (or rather re-invented) and the economy recovered, it even seemed to be succeeding against all the odds. In the 1928 general election, extremists of left and right were trounced and the Nazis in particular were close to despair—until, that is, the Wall Street crash and subsequent depression gave them a new, finally decisive boost. Through all these peaks and troughs, writers and artists and composers and the rest, as though rightly aware time was not on their side, flung out one formidable modern classic after another.

The literature on Weimar is immense, but we could well do with a single, authoritative, jargon-free volume that pulls all the strands together. Eric Weitz, a professor at the University of Minnesota, has made a valiant stab at producing one, but he does not quite succeed. He is a reliable guide through Weimar's political and economic maze, and a good one on the social revolution that made many women (far from all) less dependent on husband, hearth and home. In one of his best chapters, Mr Weitz takes us on a ramble through the sleepless metropolis of 1920s Berlin: from the glittering cafés around Potsdamer Platz to Isherwood's cabarets and seedy bars, from the bracing beaches of Wannsee Lake to the dank and stifling dwellings of the workers' quarter, Wedding.

The author's touch is less sure when he turns to literature and music. Naturally Mr Weitz had to be selective: but does it, for instance, make sense to devote six pages alone to Thomas Mann's “Der Zauberberg” and next to nothing to the bitterly satirical work of Thomas's elder brother Heinrich, who better saw where Weimar was stumbling? No quarrels with the choice of the Brecht/Weill “Die Dreigroschenoper” as a Weimar work par excellence; but there is next to nothing on Schönberg (who spent 1925-33 in Berlin) nor on Berg or Krenek, nor on the Kroll Opera House, which under Klemperer and Zemlinsky presented Weimar's—perhaps the world's—most daring repertoire and stagings. Nor will fans of the peerless Berlin Philharmonic easily forgive Mr Weitz for identifying their orchestra as the (more lowly) Berlin Symphony.

More seriously, Mr Weitz's account badly lacks a context. We learn much about the (astonishing) development of social security under Weimar, about seething anti-Semitism and diplomatic blunders. What we lack is a scene-setting chapter explaining the background to all these things. Nor is enough sketched about life in other great European cities to explain what made Weimar unique. Were women less liberated in London, were artists less bold in Paris? Why was the political left bitterly split in Germany but not in Austria, which had lost not just a war but an empire?

Whatever the flaws, this remains an often gripping (and splendidly illustrated) work from which two main lessons can be drawn. One is how quickly democracy can slip away. In 1928 the Nazis won just 2.6% of the vote; five years later Hitler was in power. The other, which Mr Weitz rams home in his last pages, is how often democracy is under most threat not from enemies abroad but from those who use its institutions and claim to speak in its name. These lessons are hardly new. But they are well worth stressing at a time when, in the name of the fight against international terrorism, individual liberties in democratic societies are being steadily curtailed.