Germany, World, European 

The rise of the Nazis in popularity and Hitler's appointment as the Chancellor in 1933 have overshadowed the larger history of Weimar Germany, especially the politics of the state called the "rivet" of the nation - Prussia - which paradoxically enjoyed a strong democratic government for 15 years before the Nazis' seizure of power. Orlow's first volume, "Weimar Prussia 1918-1925: the Unlikely Rock of Democracy", sought to explain why parliamentary democracy succeeded at the Prussian state level when it failed in the Reich; far from being "doomed" in all of Germany between the wars, democracy for most of the turbulent early Weimar period was vigorously alive in Prussia, Germany's largest state. Rejecting the view that the period after 1925 was little more that a prelude to the Papen coup, Dietrich Orlow in this volume shows how close Prussia came to realizing its goal of paving the way for a lasting democracy in the Reich as a whole. The years 1925-1933 cover both the zenith and the nadir of Prussian politics in the Weimar years. Orlow's analysis shows how Prussia's leaders - notably, Otto Braun and Ernst Heilmann - successfully used the parliamentary system to advance a strong democracy that became the most formidable bulwark against the Nazis, but also how Prussia ultimately failed to ensure its survival in the crisis years after 1930. Democracy in Prussia as well as in the Reich fell with the federal takeover of 1932 and the Nazis' seizure of power a few months later. Ironically, the earlier success of democracy in Prussia led its leaders to believe that despite the deepening crisis of the Depression they could isolate state politics from developments in the Reich - a fatal error of judgement. Yet the demonstrated power of Prussian democracy, however short-lived, also refutes reports of the "failure" of democracy in interwar Germany. - from Amzon