The small town of Weimar is overladen with historical associations. Goethe spent more than fifty years there as an employee and friend of Duke (later Grand Duke) Karl August. After the last grand duke abdicated in November 1918, the National Assembly met in Weimar to draw up a new republican constitution for Germany. Other symbolically charged venues considered were Nuremberg (home of Dürer) and Bayreuth (because of Wagner), but it was Weimar that gave its name to the period of German history from 1919 to Hitler’s accession to power in January 1933.

Two new books by Victor Sebestyen and Katja Hoyer complement each other. Sebestyen provides essential background for Hoyer’s more innovative microhistory. His account of the Weimar Republic is, understandably, weighted towards its crisis-ridden first half. Compelling and well informed, his narrative begins in the autumn of 1918, when the German commanders, Hindenburg and Ludendorff, informed the astonished Kaiser that their armies could no longer fight. Like the general public, the Kaiser had been deceived by the confident briefings put out by the high command. Faced with a naval mutiny and the threat of social revolution, he eventually, with the utmost reluctance, abdicated on 9 November and fled to the Netherlands. The military collapse generated the myth of a ‘stab in the back’ by disloyal socialists and Jews. Hindenburg and other officers encouraged this legend in order to deflect blame for defeat away from themselves and onto civilian politicians.

From there, Sebestyen takes us briskly through the Spartacist uprisings in Berlin in early 1919; the procla­mation of a Bavarian republic by the far-left socialist Kurt Eisner, who was assassinated by a former officer just as he was about to relinquish power after electoral defeat; the short-lived Munich Soviet in April that year; and the unsuccessful putsch led by the extreme nationalist Wolfgang Kapp in March 1920, which was defeated by a general strike. Throughout these events a malign role was played by the army and the paramilitary units known as Freikorps. They suppressed left-wing uprisings with notorious savagery, and while the army refused to intervene against Kapp’s right-wing revolt, Freikorps units actually participated in it.

The army’s hostility to the Republic forms a leitmotif of Sebestyen’s account. Another is the politicisation of the judiciary, a self-perpetuating oligarchy of right-wingers who treated like-minded conspirators with leniency. After the failure of the Munich Beer Hall putsch in 1923, Hitler was sentenced to a mere five years’ confinement in a fortress but served only one, while his fellow conspirator Ludendorff got off scot free. Hitler’s indulgent treatment is illustrated by his being allowed, at his trial, to make an opening statement lasting four hours.

Besides being undermined from within, the Republic was weakened by vindictive demands for reparations, which postwar inflation made it impossible to pay. In January 1923, French forces occupied the industrial Ruhr region, meeting passive resistance, which increased inflation and impoverished Germany yet further. German propaganda claimed that the French used supposedly sexually incontinent African troops to humiliate the population, a legend Sebestyen firmly dismisses.

Gustav Stresemann, the Republic’s outstanding statesman, negotiated the withdrawal of French troops and oversaw a currency reform that ended hyperinflation and unleashed economic growth. After five relatively calm years, however, the Wall Street crash in 1929 led to an international depression made worse by tariff wars. The USA’s Smoot-Hawley Act in 1930 tried to protect domestic industry by introducing large-scale tariffs, apparently not foreseeing that other countries would retaliate; world trade fell by two thirds between 1930 and 1933. The stage was set for mass unemployment. By mid-1932, 6.1 million workers (31 per cent of the workforce) were registered as unemployed; a further 1.5 million were unregistered.

Hindenburg, elected president in 1925 and undeservedly venerated as a national hero, sidelined the Reichstag and governed by decree. As the ‘gravedigger’ of the Republic, he is more prominent in this narrative than Hitler. We end with the deluded right-wing politicians who, thinking they could use Hitler as a front man, appointed him Chancellor on 30 January 1933.

Sebestyen delivers a pacy, highly readable narrative, but doesn’t quite succeed in integrating it with an account of what we think of as ‘Weimar culture’, the explosion of avant-garde art, theatre, cabaret, film and fiction marked by such names as George Grosz, Bertolt Brecht and Fritz Lang. All these are noted, but as interruptions to the political narrative, so that the latter part of the book reads rather jerkily. Moreover, these phenomena, like political events, were centred on Berlin, so that most of Germany – apart from uprisings in Munich and the occupation of the Ruhr – appears only as background, inhabited by a silent majority unreconciled to or uneasy with the Republic. What was happening in the provinces?

For the state of Thuringia, whose capital was Weimar (replaced in 1948 by Erfurt), Katja Hoyer provides answers. Her archive-based history, running from 1918 to 1939, shows how events from defeat via inflation to the rise and consolidation of Nazi rule played out in the specific circumstances of Weimar. While her narrative, with a separate chapter for each year, occasionally threatens to become a shapeless chronicle, it gains continuity, as well as originality, by following the experiences of several individuals whose life stories are preserved. The most prominent is Carl Weirich, a bookbinder and stationer, whose copious diary, spanning at least sixty years, was acquired by the Weimar Town Archive just as Hoyer was beginning her research. Weirich’s experiences – poverty, bereavement, remarriage, prosperity under Hitler, bereavement again in 1947 – help to give Hoyer’s account its impressive human depth.

We also follow the fortunes of Rosa and Arthur Schmidt, who ran the Hohenzollern Hotel and hosted many Nazi gatherings. They successfully concealed Rosa’s Jewish descent until 1943, when she was discovered, taken to Auschwitz and murdered. Kurt Nehrling, a socialist, managed to survive underground until, his comrades having been picked off, he was denounced and executed in Dachau. Jutta Hecker, daughter of the archivist and eminent Goethe scholar Max Hecker, reluctantly compromised by joining the Nazi Party, but went on to a successful career as an academic and teacher in the GDR. Another major figure is Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, since the 1890s custodian (and sometimes falsifier) of her brother’s legacy, who ran the Nietzsche Archive with precarious funding until the Nazis adopted Nietzsche as a spiritual ancestor. She was an old-style conservative, never a Nazi, and her relations with the Nazis were polite but apprehensive. However, they were close enough to worry her friend Harry Graf Kessler, a wealthy artistic patron and superb diarist. With his gift for knowing everyone, picking up gossip and being on the spot at crucial events, Kessler provides both Hoyer and Sebestyen with ample material.

An emphatic and undeniable message of Hoyer’s book is that Thuringia, with Weimar at its centre, was exceptionally enthusiastic about Nazism. In 1924, Weimar hosted a ‘Conference of the National Socialist Freedom Movement’, with Ludendorff presiding and thousands of paramilitaries in attendance. Hitler was still in prison, but in 1925 he chose Weimar as the location for his first speech outside Bavaria. In 1930, Thuringia became the first German state to include a Nazi in its government: Wilhelm Frick, a Reichstag deputy notorious for anti-Semitic rants. And in 1932, having gained 42.5 per cent of the vote (44 per cent in Weimar itself), the Nazis took control of the province. Soon after Hitler became Chancellor, the Thuringian authorities arrested so many people, largely on political grounds, that to house them all they created in effect an early concentration camp at Nohra, on the outskirts of Weimar.

Weimar’s dismal pre-eminence in Nazi loyalty was confirmed when, in 1937, the nearby Ettersberg hill became the site of Germany’s third concentration camp, bearing the idyllic name Buchenwald (‘beech wood’). It followed Dachau, near Munich, and Sachsenhausen, near Berlin. Ironically, one of its architects was Franz Ehrlich, who had worked with Walter Gropius, been imprisoned in Sachsenhausen and was directed to apply his skills. The woods were felled except for one oak tree under which Goethe is said to have picnicked, and which was preserved between the camp kitchen and the laundry. 

Hoyer begins and ends with Buchenwald. She gives a picture not only of the filth and near-starvation in the camp, but of the arbitrary, unrestrained and savage violence to which the inmates were subjected. In Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, the narrator reports: ‘a transatlantic general has made the population of Weimar file past the crematoria of the nearby concentration camp.’ The general was George S Patton and the German witnesses included Carl Weirich. They were compelled to look at the instruments of torture, at the festering wounds on the emaciated bodies of inmates and at evidence of the gruesome sadism of the former commandant, Karl Otto Koch, and his wife, Ilse. Weirich wrote in his diary: ‘it took strong nerves to see the terrible things in the crematorium and also in the barracks, where a number of sick prisoners still lived.’ It takes some fortitude even to read the pages in which Hoyer, without sensationalism, recounts the horrors of Buchenwald. And, although some 56,000 prisoners died there from malnutrition, illness and violence, it was surpassed in horror by the extermination camps in occupied Poland.

Although Hoyer refrains from moralising, the two faces of Weimar, and the proximity of Weimar and Buchenwald, linger powerfully in the reader’s mind. So do the individuals whom we have got to know. This is humane history-writing at its best, even when it focuses on inhumanity.