Daisy was the only friend of mine who’d been in the Hitler Youth. Her formal name was Hannelore, and she’d grown up in Hanover, Germany. She said she’d attended the required meetings resentfully, which I don’t doubt. After the war, she worked for the Allied Occupation, meeting a British military officer with whom she fell in love and got married. They moved to the US, and I knew her, through my in-laws, as an elderly widow in Cleveland. She’d drive up to bring something she’d baked, independent at an advanced age, though over the next few years her health declined and she passed away.
I thought of Daisy while reading the excellent new history Weimar: Life on the Edge of Catastrophe, by Katja Hoyer (Basic Books). Weimar is the city where Germany’s post-World War I constitution was drafted, and so the resulting political system was known as “Weimar Germany” or the “Weimar Republic.” I’d assumed the book would be about that republic’s political and cultural life, and it is, but with a focus on the lives of people in the city during the interwar period, including after the Weimar Republic was displaced by Nazi Germany. Hoyer, a German-born historian living in the UK, masterfully interweaves such lives, many of people not well-known, with developments in politics, culture, economics and war.
The depictions of individual lives underscore Nazism’s evil in a way elusive to abstract discussions. Hedwig Hetemann was a kindly widow in her 70s who ran a toy store that included a “Doll Clinic” where she’d repair broken toys for children. It was Weimar’s last “Jewish-owned” shop, though she was a baptized Protestant. On Kristallnacht, storm troopers smashed her window and scattered her dolls in the street. She retreated from public life, wearing a yellow star and having lost faith in Weimar’s people, who’d shown little interest in her plight. She was deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto, dying in 1943.
The book opens with Carl Weirich, a stationery-store owner and bookbinder, staring at the crematoria of the Buchenwald concentration camp outside Weimar, on a tour forced by the occupying US Army as the war ended. Weirich was horrified by what he saw at Buchenwald, writing in his diary of “atrocious crimes committed by us” and “our German downfall.” Yet he’d also been, for a time, a supporter of the Nazi government and even a donor to the SS. Weirich’s life contained much tragedy, including the deaths of a young wife and two sons; he’s simultaneously a sympathetic character and a case study in how people of no clear-cut malevolence can become complicit in manifest evil around them.
The people discussed in Weimar were diverse in their situations and decisions. Harry Graf Kessler was a liberal aristocrat and diplomat, also gay, who watched the Nazis’ rise with horror and lived in exile once they took power. He had an odd friendship with conservative nationalist Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, sister of philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who built (and heavily edited) an archive of her late brother’s works in Weimar. Seeking to secure that legacy, she aligned her institution with the Nazis, despite some misgivings, before her death in 1935. (Hoyer presents Förster-Nietzsche with more nuance than some harridan-like depictions I’d read previously, though she remains a disreputable figure.)
Arthur and Rosa Schmidt were a married couple who ran the Hotel Hohenzollern. Among guests who stayed there was Adolf Hitler, early in his political career, though on later trips to Weimar he stayed at the fancier Hotel Elephant. Arthur and Rosa were skilled hoteliers who added a beer bar among other amenities. They hid the fact that her background was Jewish, but this eventually was discovered. Rosa was murdered at Auschwitz, and Arthur forlornly wrote to the extermination camp’s commandant asking for her ashes.
Baldur von Schirach joined the Nazi Party at 18, became close to the Führer and rose to become the Hitler Youth’s first leader, among other positions. He served a 20-year sentence for crimes against humanity and died at 67 in 1974.
Kurt Nehrling was a Social Democratic politician who formed a clandestine resistance circle in 1933. Arrested a decade later, Nehrling was executed at Dachau at age 44. The street on which he lived with his wife and children is now named after him.
Weimar was a city noted for culture long before the Nazis. The Ettersberg hill, outside the city, is where Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wandered while composing poetry; the hill’s now also known as the site of Buchenwald. The Bauhaus school of architecture was based in the city during the Weimar Republic. The Nazis had grandiose building plans for the city, which partly came to fruition. By war’s end, though, much of Weimar was in rubble.