With a Passion for Reason: Celebrating the Constitution in Weimar Germany

摘要

InT has long been held that Weimar democracy lacked the symbolic appealnnecessary to bind collective sentiment and to win popular support.n1 Whilenrecent revisionist histories of Weimar politics and culture take their cuenfrom Peter Fritzsche’s argument that “Weimar is less a cumulative failure than anseries of bold experiments,”2 the turn toward new approaches and perspectivesnis uneven and incomplete even in those studies that avoid conflating the fragilitynof Weimar democracy with the overall lack or absence of democratic identifi-ncations. Detlev Peukert, while admonishing his readers not to minimize thenWeimar experiment in democracy, also argues that the first German republicnhad no founding ritual, and that this absence in national history attests to angeneral lack of legitimacy.n3 Eric Weitz, in his eloquent survey of the republic’snpromises and tragedy, has little to say about the proponents and forms ofnWeimar democratic culture. ThomasMergel, who shows that theWeimar parlia-nment was marked by a cooperative atmosphere of pragmatic republicanism, attri-nbutes to the republican Left a certain tendency “toward a rationalisticnunderstanding of politics, toward the underestimation of the emotional attach-nment to a flag.”4 This assessment is entirely in line with the earlier claim thatnthe rationalistic optimism (Gotthard Jasper) of the republican forces led to an“consequential underestimation of the integrative power of state symbols”n(Klaus Wippermann).n5