Germany in the 1920s
From Facing History and Ourselves:
Holocaust and Human Behavior, Chapter 3
Few events in history are inevitable. Most are determined by real people making real decisions. At the time, those choices may not seem important. Yet together, little by little, they shape a period in history and define an age. Those decisions also have consequences that may affect generations to come. Chapter 2 looked at the way three nations – the United States, France, and Germany – decided who belonged in the nineteenth century and who did not. It also considered the outcomes of those choices. This chapter marks the beginning of a case study that examines the choices people made after World War I. It highlights Germany’s efforts to build a democracy after the humiliation of defeat and explores the values, myths, and fears that threatened those efforts. It focuses in particular on the choices that led to the destruction of the republic and the rise of the Nazis.
The 1920s were a time of change everywhere in the world. Many of those changes began much earlier and were speeded up by the war. Others were linked to innovations in science that altered the way people saw the world. In 1905, Albert Einstein, a German physicist, published his theory of relativity. By 1920, other scientists had proved that time and space are indeed relative and not absolute. The theory quickly became a part of the way ordinary people viewed the world. As one historian explained, “At the beginning of
the 1920s the belief began to circulate, for the first time at a popular level, that there were no longer any absolutes: of time and space, of good and evil, of knowledge, above all of value. Mistakenly, but perhaps inevitably, relativity became confused with relativism.”1 No one was more disturbed by that confusion than Einstein. In a letter to a colleague, he wrote, “You believe in a God who plays dice, and I in complete law and order in a world which objectively exists.”2
Even as Einstein’s theory was changing people’s views of time and space, an Austrian physician named Sigmund Freud was altering their ideas about human behavior. His work conveyed the sense that the world was not what it seemed to be. Many came to believe the “senses, whose empirical perceptions shaped our ideas of time and distance, right and wrong, law and justice, and the nature of man’s behavior in society were not to be trusted.”3 In such uncertain times, people often look for simple solutions to complex
problems.
Although Germany was a unique place in the 1920s, the questions the German people faced then are similar to those confronting people today: Should all citizens be equal? How can a democracy maintain order without destroying freedom? Their decisions affected nations around the world, including our own.
Download Chapter 3 from Facing History and Ourselves: Holocaust and Human Behavior
Selected Readings from the Chapter
Notes
1 Paul Johnson, Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Eighties (Harper & Row, 1983), 4.
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid.
