ABSTRACT
Many traditional accounts of the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the rise of Nazism list the host of difficulties which faced the fledgling democracy during its short existence (albeit not as short as that of the Third Reich!). Among these were the diplomatic and economic difficulties engendered by the Treaty of Versailles, problems which stemmed from the new constitution, the absence of a democratic consensus, the inflation in the early years of the Republic and the slump at its end. In this account the problems of the Weimar government just piled one on top of the other until the final straw broke the camel’s back. Such an approach has much to commend it; and certainly all the problems listed above were real ones. Yet a word of caution should be introduced here: not all of these problems were encountered simultaneously. For example, the early years of the Weimar Republic witnessed inflation and then the ravages of hyperinflation, whereas the depression of 1929-33 was a time not of rising but of falling prices. This raises some extremely important chronological questions: why was the new state able to survive inflation and not depression? Why did it collapse in the early 1930s and not between 1919 and 1923? Why was the Nazi Party in the political wilderness until the late 1920s? Clearly such questions cannot be answered by a list of difficulties that fails to take into account the timing of their occurrence.
