ABSTRACT
The history of Weimar Germany has, understandably, stood in the shadow of the ‘Third Reich’. Virtually the entire literature about the Weimar Republic has as its central theme the problem of its fundamental instability, of the weaknesses which caused the Republic to crumble within 15 years of its creation. Central to locating the Weimar experience within the history of modern Germany as a whole is the question of periodisation. An important element of the legacy of the war was the discrepancy in Weimar Germany between perceptions and reality. The most important legacy of the war was, obviously, that of defeat in 1918, which made possible the establishment of the Weimar Republic. Weimar Germany contained a society marked simultaneously by change and an inability to adapt to that change, and the combination produced an instability which eventually made possible the erection of the ‘Third Reich’.
