CONTESTS over the term politics, over the boundaries that distinguishednpolitics from non-politics, were one of the distinguishing features ofnthe Weimar Republic. Not only did the disciplines of history, philos-nophy, law, sociology, and pedagogy each define this boundary in differentnterms, but participants in the debate also distinguished between ideal and realnpolitics, politics at the level of state, and the dissemination of politics throughnsociety and citizenry.n1 The fact thatWeimar began with a revolution, the abdica-ntion of the Kaiser, and military defeat meant an eruption of politicization inn1918–19, whereby political organs of state and civil society sought in unprece-ndented fashion to draw Germans into parties and parliaments, associations, andnactivist societies. “The German people would still consist of ninety percent unpo-nlitical people, if Social Democracy had not become a political school for thenpeople,”Otto Braun claimed in Vorwärts in 1925.n2 Politics and politicization gen-nerated not only political acts—votes, strikes, and vocal demonstrations—but alsoncultural milieus of Socialists and Communists, Catholics and liberal Democrats,nnationalists, and eventually Nazis. In Weimar Germany there was little roomnfor the “unpolitical” citizen of the prewar era, held up as a model in a famousntract of 1918 by Thomas Mann.n3
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