“What is still to be said?” That is the question that stands at the beginning of Benjamin Carter Hett's new history of the fall of the Weimar Republic (9). What indeed? As Hett points out, countless scholars have tried to make sense of the downfall of Germany's first democracy, looking at the reasons for Adolf Hitler's rise from all possible angles. Hett claims that his book tells the story in a new way, by putting “German affairs into their international context” (10). This approach yields enlightening results—for example, when Nazism is described as part of a global “revolution against globalization” (114) that drew inspiration from Kemal Atatürk, Benito Mussolini, and an assortment of Russian émigrés, such as Lieutenant Piotr Shabelskii-Bork, who introduced the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion to Germany. A passage about the European “cult of irrationality” (194) that developed at the end of the nineteenth century and that shaped the Nazi propaganda of the 1920s and 1930s also provides important transnational context.

We do not get very much of this, however. Hett describes the downfall of Weimar democracy principally as a series of ever more intricate maneuvers by German politicians in their search for popular approval, parliamentary power, and workable majorities. This focus is reflected by the structure of the book: whereas the years from 1918 till 1929 are dealt with in one chapter and through the narrow perspective of the political careers of Hitler and Gustav Stresemann, the time from 1929 to the “Night of the Long Knives” in mid-1934 is stretched over six chapters. This focus is understandable, of course, for a book that wants to explain how Weimar democracy died, but it does put a lot of emphasis on the parliamentary deadlock that developed after the fall of the “grand coalition” in 1930. The main culprits in Hett's narrative are German conservatives, most prominently President Paul von Hindenburg, Chancellor Franz von Papen, and army leaders such as Kurt von Schleicher: their Faustian pact with the Nazis, who were supposed to give them the popular backing they needed for their reactionary politics, handed Hitler the reins of power.

The unfolding of this process, a series of backroom dealings accompanied by a crescendo of street violence, is well known and does not need to be repeated here. It is told masterfully in the book. Drawing on his considerable expertise in this field, Hett is an extraordinarily engaging guide through the complexities of Weimar politics: all chapters are introduced by short vignettes that transport the reader right back into to the mayhem of the 1929 May Day demonstrations or the Nazi attack in 1932, on communist inhabitants of the Felseneck garden colony. This sets the mood for the heavy lifting in the rest of the text. Protagonists from Hett's other books about Weimar, such as the communist lawyer Hans Litten and Marinus van der Lubbe, the person supposedly responsible for the Reichstag fire, also make appearances (Crossing Hitler [2008]; Burning the Reichstag [2014]).

Despite its many merits, there are some things that grate about the book. In the last chapter, conservative politicians, who schemed to get rid of Hitler when the Nazis proceeded to turn on them after they had crushed the socialists, are portrayed as upstanding democrats and even as early proponents of the European Union. The fact that their plans were steeped in their deeply elitist and antidemocratic convictions is not discussed in detail. Nor is the fact that, had they been successful, their victory would hardly have resulted in a return to Weimar's progressive constitutional arrangements,. There is also a tendency to make perfectly reasonable claims, only to undermine them later. For instance, Hett argues that “the answer to all questions about Weimar lies somewhere in the First World War” (11). But after the first chapter, which introduces the two conservative myths about the war that dominated Weimar's political culture (the “spirit of 1914” and the “stab in the back” of 1918), the war is hardly mentioned again in the rest of the book. Another example is the frequent reliance on Joseph Goebbels's diary, even if Hett himself points out in the introduction that many older accounts of German twentieth-century history had not been critical enough in their use of Nazi sources such as this one.

In sum, this is a highly engaging and deeply informed overview of Weimar's democratic collapse and the rise of the Nazis. Hett's take on this story is not, as promised, an entirely new one, but he tells it beautifully. Rather than the issue of “what is still to be said” about Weimar, another question comes to mind: who is the book's intended audience. For scholars, this account does not add much to the current state of the field. Already in 1996, Peter Fritzsche warned against turning “the 1920s into a political universe that revolves around the Reichstag on the Platz der Republik” (“Did Weimar Fail?” Journal of Modern History [1996]: 630). But Hett does not stray very far from the German parliament. For students, the book lacks information about scholarly disagreements and contentious points in the narrative. For example, Hett explains the Nazis’ successes at the voting booth with the “political confessionalization” of Weimar's political landscape, calling the term “a bit of historian's jargon” (87) but without discussing its problems and pitfalls.

The book is dedicated to “everyone who fights for freedom, human rights, democracy, peace, and tolerance,” which gives us a clue about the intended audience: it is aimed at a broader public, and a broader American public at that. This is evident in the way the Preußenschlag, the deposing of the Prussian government by Chancellor Papen in 1932, is described as “roughly comparable to an American president simultaneously removing the governors of New York and California” (150)—not necessarily a very helpful comparison for a non-American reader. It is also clear from the many allusions to the current political situation in the United States: although Donald Trump is never mentioned by name, passages such as Hitler's tirade against the loss of German manufacturing jobs through outsourcing, which Hett describes as leaping “from that time to ours” (108), are an obvious reference to the current US president's “America first” rhetoric. Goebbels's plan to build “a thick wall around Germany” (109) is another example.

Hett has never shied away from using his work to make political points: in his Litten biography, for example, he makes an explicit connection between the Nazis’ contempt for the rule of law and the violations of international law by the George W. Bush administration. Since Timothy Snyder's phenomenally successful book On Tyranny (2017), such activist uses of the past are in vogue, and Hett's book squarely fits into this trend.