André Keil

camp, but not a death camp. No, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I want to talk a little bit more about, uh, I guess that towards the end of the Republic, kind of what goes wrong, things sort of collapse and obviously give rise to Nazism. Uh, that's going to be in part two. Check out the book. the book. perfect. Yeah. Dictatorships and authoritarianism in modern German history. That's the book.

camp, but not a death camp. No, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I want to talk a little bit more about, uh, I guess that towards the end of the Republic, kind of what goes wrong, things sort of collapse and obviously give rise to Nazism. Uh, that's going to be in part two. Check out the book. the book. perfect. Yeah. Dictatorships and authoritarianism in modern German history. That's the book.

Yeah.

Yeah. and we can even go back to the Bolsheviks because obviously, yeah, they kill a lot of people in that civil war. And I think a big part of that, and actually not sure how true this is in Germany, but you probably know, um, a lot of it is that they don't have the prison infrastructure. If you're looking at like this big group of people and saying, right, these guys are like trying to, you know, shoot at us, we've captured them. actually didn't have anywhere to put them a lot of the time. So, know, it doesn't necessarily mean it's chill to kill all your POWs, but it's also sort of like you either have to let them go or build a prison today, or you're going to shoot everyone. And in the m…

Yeah. Because at that point you can start making an argument for stability from a place of power because these, these people who are, pursuing a more Bolshevik kind of model are, they, you know, they at least correctly understand that you do need to get rid of people who are presently in power to, meaningfully. Um, and now that's you. Oh no. Right. it's, I could see how it's a compelling argument to say, yeah, Russia's had this big civil war. It's been very bloody. What's a couple thousand people kill, you know? And, and I feel like there's a lot of very frightening kind of, um, mirrors of that throughout the 20th century. Right. Especially when it comes to anti-communist violence, there's…

Yeah. Right. Right.

Yeah. Right. Yeah.

sounds like they tried to toe kind of an impossible line and kind of got neither. Although I suppose to cut them less slack, because I like to be mean. Yeah, fair play. The, the maintaining of the position that all the elites, they, you know, the rock might not be their fault, but the hard place was a little bit, get what you know. you know. Yeah, of course. Yeah, and I guess we see the resistance to becoming something more like a Soviet Republic, at least amongst the leadership, in a lot of the political crackdowns that they do. Actually, I wanted to, you mentioned in your book that the press was quite supportive of a lot of this, including the killing of Rosa Luxemburg and Kara Liebknecht…

sounds like they tried to toe kind of an impossible line and kind of got neither. Although I suppose to cut them less slack, because I like to be mean. Yeah, fair play. The, the maintaining of the position that all the elites, they, you know, the rock might not be their fault, but the hard place was a little bit, get what you know. you know. Yeah, of course. Yeah, and I guess we see the resistance to becoming something more like a Soviet Republic, at least amongst the leadership, in a lot of the political crackdowns that they do. Actually, I wanted to, you mentioned in your book that the press was quite supportive of a lot of this, including the killing of Rosa Luxemburg and Kara Liebknecht…

This is, the SPD is often treated as like the archetypical betrayal when people, especially people on the left, they talk about sort of liberals being more willing to cozy up to people far to their right. Despite the SPD also growing out of the labor movement alongside a lot of other groups that are socialists and communists at this point, they do, as you say, they collaborate with the military, they repress a lot of political movements to their left, and so this is seen as kind of like, this day, when people, talk about the Labour Party, even here in the UK, or the Democrats in the US, and say like the electoral, kind of liberal left, they, you know, they'll take the Republicans or the Ref…

I think talking about turmoil in the 20th century in Germany, obviously, it's one of those statements that's almost inherently comical, because it's know, it's so I think if we look at Weimar, we're looking at a situation where this country is just coming out of World War I, where they famously didn't do super hot. There quite a lot of political repression. There was rationing. Of course, things were getting really dire in terms of, you know, getting access to food in the final stages of the war, especially. What we run into during the Weimar period is a gratuitous use of what they call emergency powers, right? But that kind of grows out of things that were already kind of in place that the…

I think talking about turmoil in the 20th century in Germany, obviously, it's one of those statements that's almost inherently comical, because it's know, it's so I think if we look at Weimar, we're looking at a situation where this country is just coming out of World War I, where they famously didn't do super hot. There quite a lot of political repression. There was rationing. Of course, things were getting really dire in terms of, you know, getting access to food in the final stages of the war, especially. What we run into during the Weimar period is a gratuitous use of what they call emergency powers, right? But that kind of grows out of things that were already kind of in place that the…

I think talking about turmoil in the 20th century in Germany, obviously, it's one of those statements that's almost inherently comical, because it's know, it's so I think if we look at Weimar, we're looking at a situation where this country is just coming out of World War I, where they famously didn't do super hot. There quite a lot of political repression. There was rationing. Of course, things were getting really dire in terms of, you know, getting access to food in the final stages of the war, especially. What we run into during the Weimar period is a gratuitous use of what they call emergency powers, right? But that kind of grows out of things that were already kind of in place that the…

met a Bismarckian before. That's exciting. his fans, yeah. sure, yeah. Yeah, true. And I think also there's been this kind of historical warping effect where that kind of comes before the Nazis, almost the, the, some of the edges can kind of get sanded off in popular historical memory. Certainly, a lot of what happens at Weimar, which we're going to mainly be talking about today, because I think there's a lot of, a lot of people who have a lot of, don't know, some of their maybe political hopes sometimes in that history. I think a lot of people on the left see that this is, I think, very understandably, a kind of a pivot point where things could have gone a different way. And to be fair, al…