Pluralizing Democracy in Weimar Germany

What is it about?

Far from being a democracy without democrats, the Weimar Republic had plenty of them. Not all of these democrats, however, were supporters of the Republic. Instead, they advocated many different visions of democracy, with a range of competing forms of political participation and divergent ideas of representing the will of the people circulating in Weimar Germany. Indeed, when using the term “democracy”, contemporaries typically did so in combination with adjectives such as “organic”, “German”, “social”, or “proletarian”. Democracy, then, had not one but many futures in post-1918 Germany. As early as the turn of the century, many contemporaries had come to believe that they had entered into “the age of the masses”, where political power, in one way or another, was to be derived from “the people”. If anything, the First World War had reinforced this view. In its aftermath, for the first time in German history, the principle of the sovereignty of the people was installed as the foundation of the political system and was accepted not only by the supporters of the Weimar Constitution, but also by many of its enemies.

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Why is it important?

The semantic ambiguities of the term “democracy” are widely acknowledged by historians of Weimar Germany, and yet, when it comes to the register of analytical concepts, there is a tendency to deploy the term “democracy” in a much less ambiguous way – one that conflates “Weimar democracy” and “democracy” tout court, or is based on a model of liberal, parliamentary, Western-style democracy. This approach does not merely banish right-wing “anti-liberal democrats” (to borrow Kurt Sontheimer’s phrase) from the frame of reference associated with the concept “democracy”. Most crucially, and most problematically, such an approach expels left-wing “anti-liberal democrats”, too.

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