To recommend a book in English (or German) that introduces newcomers to Weimar Germany while at the same time offering scholars some food for further thought is notoriously difficult. Hans Mommen's The Rise and Fall of Weimar Democracy offers a dense, chronologically narrated political history. It is difficult to understand without considerable prior knowledge, as is Detlev Peukert's more broadly conceived, intellectually stimulating The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity. Moreover, both are by now a bit dated. Since the 1990s, a heterogeneous flow of studies has explored local societies from Greifswald to Cologne, milieux from Bavarian peasants to Reichstag deputies, intellectual circles from left-wing social scientists to self-appointed conservative revolutionaries, and aspects of political culture from republican festivities to the activities of right-wing women. It is this bewildering diversity that continues to fascinate historians but makes any attempt at synthesis highly challenging. The volume under review now aims to give structure to the period, to revisit some classical issues, and to explore more recent ones. It largely succeeds in this endeavor, and it brings some much-needed contingency into the interpretation of the period. As Anthony McElligott argues in his insightful introduction, Weimar, for all its problems, had considerable accomplishments to its credit and benefited from more popular support and elite consensus than is often recognized. The idea of a “doomed” republic warrants qualification because it pays insufficient attention to short-term political shifts. And Peukert's “crisis of classical modernity” needs to be replaced by a more flexible emphasis on competing visions of Germany's present and future as a modern society.

What was the “Weimar” like that the contributors present us with? It was, in the first instance, a society divided into different spaces of experience and horizons of expectation, to borrow Reinhart Koselleck's classic formulation. In his excellent chapter, Karl-Christian Führer shows that most Germans were little affected by either high or low culture, let alone by avant-garde experiments. Those with more money and interest tended to favor conservative entertainment, which limited the artistic scope of the myriad subsidized theaters and opera houses, as well as of the privately funded cinemas. Summarizing the burgeoning field of gender history—though neglecting men somewhat, Kathleen Canning argues that the war experience led, if not to emancipation, to new demands for female participation that transformed German politics and society. But these demands translated into very different stances between the radical left, the conservative emphasis on motherhood, and less explicitly political consumption, together triggering fears of “crisis” and hopes for restoration. Weimar society was not least governed by resentment, with progressive women, socialist revolutionaries, and the Jewish minority at the receiving end. Anthony Kauders explores German Jews' reactions to their increasing exclusion, as well as their attempts to define a positive identity; he concludes that they overwhelmingly remained committed to liberalism in spite of the Zionist challenge.

Second, “Weimar” was a society exposed to a whole range of government interventions. Adelheid von Saldern sketches the reform of working-class housing, which was driven by attempts to rationalize architectural and lifestyles. While von Saldern, similarly to Peukert's interpretation, is critical of the disciplinary ambitions and conservative values “in modern guise” (p. 217) that were behind such policies, Young Sun-Hong interprets the Weimar welfare system differently. Instead of rationalization, she emphasizes war-related burdens, the largely positive impact of social reform on working-class people, and the involvement of different groups and organizations, amounting to a “clash between competing modernities” (p. 181). Expertly surveying the economy, Harold James argues that the activities of Weimar's governments caused additional problems, as the intentional inflation of the early 1920s led to subsequent self-restraint that precluded fighting the deflation a decade later.

The blend between wide-reaching ambitions and narrow constraints, third, also influenced the political sphere. As Anthony McElligott shows, the idea of a Volksstaat was, in the myriad crises of the early republic, defended by authoritarian means and thus compromised. Nonetheless, parliamentary democracy worked reasonably well. Yet it clashed with popular expectations as well as with the authoritarian ambitions of the right during the early 1930s, which consequently turned ever more to the idea of a plebiscitary dictatorship. Reichswehr leaders, discussed by William Mulligan, harbored ambitious projects between a professional, highly mobile force and the wholesale militarization of German society. They had to limit themselves to working pragmatically within the republican framework, however, before finally turning to the Nazi dictatorship and accepting a subordinate role within it. Wolfgang Elz recapitulates how German diplomacy under Stresemann adjusted to the Versailles System, albeit without being able to sell its considerable successes to an impatient domestic public. The return to aggressive revisionism had already begun in the early 1930s, laying the groundwork for Hitler's prewar foreign policy.

In sum, this book highlights how Weimar Germany's highly diverse cultural and social landscape interacted with various political ambitions to manage or transform it. Indeed, the republic stood a greater chance for survival than the specter of “doom” suggests, but it was surviving on borrowed time. By about 1930, its credit with large parts of the population as well as with the elites had run out. In spite, or because, of the difficulties of steering the country in any direction, the longing for homogeneity overrode the more modest maneuvering between different constraints. Republican politicians were late in realizing this, due to their relative success in stabilizing the country after the summer of 1923. This is a convincing picture, but it comes with some important gaps: working-class history is exclusively discussed through the prism of welfare, and political or intellectual history left of the Social Democrats is almost absent. John Bingham's contribution on the Städtetag, which is rather narrowly focused for a volume of this type, might better have been replaced by a chapter on political cultures in Germany's towns and regions, for this is where both the extant popular support for the republic and the search for a nationalist alternative had their basis, and where violent and civil forms of conflict competed with each other. Nonetheless, this “short history” is very good. It offers much to the scholar and should, perhaps in conjunction with a more chronologically structured book, be suitable for classroom use. It will therefore be useful to all historians interested in Weimar Germany.