The Weimar Republic was the German state from 1918 to 1933, as it existed as a federal constitutional republic. The state was officially the German Reich, and was also referred to as the German Republic. The term "Weimar Republic" refers to the city of Weimar, where the republic's constituent assembly first took place. In English the country was usually simply called "Germany"; the term "Weimar Republic" did not become common in English until the 1930s.
Weimar culture was the emergence of the arts and sciences that happened in Germany during the Weimar Republic, the latter during that part of the interwar period between Germany's defeat in World War I in 1918 and Hitler's rise to power in 1933. 1920s Berlin was at the hectic center of the Weimar culture. Although not part of the Weimar Republic, some authors also include the German-speaking Austria, and particularly Vienna, as part of Weimar culture.
Walther Rathenau was a German industrialist, writer and liberal politician.
The Communist Party of Germany was a major political party in the Weimar Republic between 1918 and 1933, an underground resistance movement in Nazi Germany, and a minor party in West Germany in the postwar period until it was banned by the Federal Constitutional Court in 1956.
Gustav Noske was a German politician of the Social Democratic Party (SPD). He served as the first Minister of Defence (Reichswehrminister) of the Weimar Republic between 1919 and 1920. Noske has been a controversial figure because although he was a member of the socialist movement, he used army and paramilitary forces to bloodily suppress the socialist/communist uprisings of 1919.
These are terms, concepts and ideas that are useful to understanding the political situation in the Weimar Republic. Some are particular to the period and government, while others were just in common usage but have a bearing on the Weimar milieu and political maneuvering.
This Weimar Timeline charts the chronology of the Weimar Republic, dating the pre-history before the adoption of the actual Weimar constitution. This timeline stops when Hitler establishes the Third Reich.
The early timeline of Nazism begins with its origins and continues until Hitler's rise to power.
Hans Achim Litten was a German lawyer who represented opponents of the Nazis at important political trials between 1929 and 1932, defending the rights of workers during the Weimar Republic.
The Constituent German National Assembly, better known as the Weimar National Assembly, was the constitutional convention and de facto parliament of Germany from 6 February 1919 to 6 June 1920. The assembly drew up the new constitution which was in force from 1919 to 1933, technically remaining in effect even until the end of Nazi rule in 1945. It convened in Weimar, Thuringia, and is the reason for this period in German history becoming known as the Weimar Republic.
The Barmat scandal was a political scandal in 1924 and 1925 in the Weimar Republic which implicated the Social Democratic Party of Germany in corruption, war profiteering, fraud, bribery, and other financial misdeeds. The scandal provided right-wing political forces within Germany with a basis for attacking the Social Democrats and the republic itself. Antisemitism in connection with the scandal also featured prominently in Nazi propaganda, since the Barmat brothers were Jewish.
The Association of Persecutees of the Nazi Regime/Federation of Antifascists (VVN-BdA) is a German political confederation founded in 1947 and based in Berlin. The VVN-BdA, formerly the VVN, emerged from victims' associations in Germany founded by political opponents to Nazism after the Second World War and the end of the Nazi dictatorship.
Erich Mühsam was a German-Jewish antimilitarist anarchist essayist, poet and playwright. He emerged at the end of World War I as one of the leading agitators for a federated Bavarian Soviet Republic, for which he served 5 years in prison.
Gustav Sobottka Jr. was a German communist and the son of Communist Party functionary and trade unionist Gustav Sobottka. He spent several months in Nazi concentration camps, then left Germany, eventually living in exile in the Soviet Union. He was arrested by the Soviet secret police at the age of 23 and accused of being part of the so-called Hitler Youth Conspiracy. Sobottka died in a Soviet prison.
Karl Paul August Friedrich Liebknecht was a German socialist politician and theorist, originally of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and later a co-founder with Rosa Luxemburg of the Spartacist League and the Communist Party of Germany, which split from the SPD after World War I. He is best known for his opposition to the war in the Reichstag and his role in the Spartacist uprising of January 1919. The uprising was crushed by the SPD government and the Freikorps, which summarily executed Liebknecht and Luxemburg.
Jakob Dautzenberg was a German politician, member of the Communist Party of Germany, and resistance fighter against the Nazis. He was a member of the German Parliament during the Weimar Republic.
Bruno Frei was a political (Marxist) author and journalist. He was born in Preßburg which at that time was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and the family moved to Vienna in 1909. Following the frontier changes mandated in 1919, he spent much of his adult life and career in that city, although he spent six of the Hitler years exiled in Mexico.
Kurt Rosenfeld was a German lawyer and politician (SPD). He was a member of the national parliament ("Reichstag") between 1920 and 1932.
Ella Trebe was a German factory worker who became an anti-government resistance activist after 1933. She was charged with high treason but was then taken to Sachsenhausen concentration camp where she was shot dead, so that her case never came to trial.
Leopold Bauer was a German political activist and journalist, originally from Galicia. For reasons of race and politics he spent the twelve Nazi years in exile. That eventful period included more than one year locked up by the authorities in Switzerland where grounds for his conviction included "damaging [Swiss] neutrality". After 1945 he remained politically engaged. In 1953 he was deported by a military court in East Berlin to the Soviet Union for execution. In the event his sentence was commuted to a 25-year stretch in a Siberian labor camp. Then in October 1955, he was released to West Germany in the context of a general agreement between the governments in Bonn and Moscow for the return of surviving German prisoners of war. Leo Bauer later became a specialist advisor to Chancellor Brandt on East-West German relations ("Ostpolitik").
