The Coming of the Third Reich (115 page)

Weill, Kurt

The Silver Sea
(opera)

The Threepenny Opera

Weimar

Weimar Art Academy

Weimar Republic

collapse of

and origins of the Third Reich

violence on the streets

Ebert steers it into being

constitution

Reich President

power to rule by decree (Article)

Ebert’s hasty compromises

Hindenburg elected President

frequent changes of government

coalition government

strengths in foreign affairs, labour and welfare

federal structure

‘Weimar coalition’

Communists’ opposition to

Kapp putsch (1920)

blamed for Versailles

inflation

and the press

growth of antisemitism

enters its final turbulent phase (1932)

better freedom and equality for Jews

political divisions

Nazi attacks on

Wels defends its achievements

musical modernism

‘cultural Bolshevism’

‘Jewish-Bolshevist success’

press conferences

Nazi determination to destroy it

Weimar School of Arts and Crafts

Weimar state museum

Weiss, Bernhard

Weissenfels

welfare agencies

welfare system

Welier-ter-Meer

Wels, Otto

Weng, Landshut District

Wertheim brothers

Wessel, Horst

West Prussia

Westarp, Countess Heila von

Westarp, Kuno Graf von

Western Front

‘Western League’

Westphalia

Wheeler-Bennett, John

‘white terror’

white-collar workers

unemployment

and 1930 elections

‘Whites’

Wiefelstede, Weser-Ems constituency

Wiesbaden

Wilder, Billy

Wilhelm, Kaiser

Wilhelm, Kaiser

personality

and Bismarck’s resignation

annual proclamation (1918)

claims that army was stabbed in the back

abdication

war crimes issue

in exile

and German education

Wilhelmine Reich
see also
German Reich

Wilson, Woodrow

his ‘Fourteen Points’

Windthorst League

Wirth, Josef

Woltmann, Ludwig

women

suffrage

workers

and Italian fascism

Nazi Party membership

tendency to live longer than men

Woolworth’s

‘work-shy’

workers’ councils

working class

growing self-assertion

opposes antisemitism

impact of Versailles terms

and Marxism

industrial

Nazi Party members

support of Social Democrats

of Berlin

Working Community of Patriotic Fighting Leagues

World in the Evening
(
Welt am Abend
) newspaper

World League for Sexual Reform

World Stage, The (Die Weltbühne)

magazine

Worms

Wuppertal

Württemberg

Young German Order

Young Plan

Youth League of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party

youth movement

youth welfare

Yugoslavia

Zander, Elsbeth

Zanzibar

Zemlinsky, Alexander von

Zweig, Arnold

1. The pseudo-medievalism of the Bismarck memorial in Hamburg, unveiled in 1906, promises a revival of past German glories under a new national leader.

2. Antisemitic postcard from ‘the only Jew-free hotel in Frankfurt’, 1887. Such attitudes were a new phenomenon in the 1880s.

3. (
top
) The promise of victory: German troops advance confidently across Belgium in 1914.

4. (
middle
) The reality of defeat: German prisoners of war taken by the Allies at the Battle of Amiens, August 1918.

5. (bottom) The price to be paid: the skeletons of German warplanes scrapped in fulfilment of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles.

6. (
top
) Descent into chaos: a street battle in Berlin during the ‘Spartacist uprising’ of January 1919.

7. (
right
) Revenge of the right: a Free Corps lieutenant in charge of a firing squad photographs his irregulars with the ‘Red Guardist’ they are about to execute during their bloody suppression of the Munich Soviet, May 1919.

8. A racist cartoon in a German satirical magazine highlights the murders, robberies and sex offences supposedly committed by French colonial troops during the Ruhr occupation of 1923.

9. The hyperinflation of 1923: ‘So many thousand-mark notes for just one dollar!’

10. The balance-sheet of reparations, 1927: 14,000 suicides in Germany are the result, according to a satirical periodical, of economic hardship caused by the financial burden imposed on the country by the Treaty of Versailles.

11. The Roaring Twenties in Berlin: artist Otto Dix’s bitter view of German society in 1927-28; war veterans are forced out to the margins, while women of easy virtue and their clients live it up at a jazz party.