Weitz, Eric D. Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. 432 pp. $29.95 cloth.

"Weimar Germany still speaks to us" (3): this is how Eric Weitz opens his elegantly written survey of Weimar culture, politics, and society. But what does Weimar say to us today? For Weitz, it serves as an inspiration and a warning, keeping alive the possibility of social change and revealing the continuing threats to the democratic tradition. Peter Gay, in Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (1968), used Weimar's Dichter und Denker to assert the superiority of high culture against the unholy union of youth rebellion and culture industry associated with the 1960s. And Frank Trommler and Jost Hermand offered up Die Kultur der Weimarer Republik (1978) as an unredeemed legacy for the Federal Republic under the shadow of the German Autumn of 1977. Common to all studies is the association of Weimar with the crises of classical modernity, a connection explored most famously by Detlef Peukert in Die Weimarer Republik (1987) under the influence of the postmodernist debates. But if every decade reads the inspiration...