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Introduction
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- About
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About the lecture
This module gives a broad introduction to Weimar Germany (1918-33), including some comments on German society, the arts, the economy, and politics in the period.
About the lecturer
Benjamin Ziemann gained his PhD from the University of Bielefeld and joined the department in 2005. He has authored, edited and co-edited 15 books. In addition, he has published more than 100 journal articles and book-chapters. His articles appeared in leading peer-reviewed journals, including Journal of Contemporary History, Contemporary European History, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, German History, Central European History, Historische Zeitschrift and Archiv für Sozialgeschichte.
Benjamin's research covers a broad range of topics in German history during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and in post-1945 Western European history. He is a renowned expert in the comparative military, social and cultural history of the First World War, and continues to conduct research on the First World War and on mass-violence in the twentieth century more generally. In his second monograph, praised by one reviewer as ‘one of the most important studies in contemporary history published in recent years’, he has analysed the process of the ‘scientisation of the social’, taking the Catholic Church in the Federal Republic as an example. One of Benjamin Ziemann’s long standing research interests is peace history. He is director of the Centre for Peace History at the Department of History, founded in 2009.
His current work is a biography of Martin Niemöller (1892-1984), a navy officer and submarine commander during the First World who became a Protestant pastor and figurehead of the Confessing Church during the Third Reich. In this book, under contract with Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Benjamin Ziemann will not only offer the first primary-souce based account of the turbulent life of Niemöller, including his eight years in Sachsenhausen and Dachau Concentration Camps from 1938 to 1945 and his tireless campaigning for peace and disarmament in the decades since 1945. Through the prism of Niemöller’s life, the book will also offer a reflection on continuities in Germany’s twentieth century history and contested issues such as nationalism, religion, guilt and morality.
Benjamin Ziemann has received numerous grants and fellowships, among others from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the British Academy, the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the Heinrich Böll Foundation, the Gerda Henkel Stiftung, the Volkswagen Foundation and the Ministry for Schools, Science and Research in North Rhine-Westphalia. He has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Tübingen and a Visiting Scholar at Humboldt-University Berlin, at the University of York, the University of Bielefeld and at the Forum for Contemporary History at the University of Oslo.
My name is Benjamin Ziemann. I'm Professor of modern German history at the
00:00:03University of Sheffield and in this lecture, I will introduce Weimar Germany
00:00:06or the Weimar Republic, as it's usually called and known to a wider public in the
00:00:11UK. Weimar Germany is the period of German history from late 1918 right up to January
00:00:161933 when Adolf Hitler was appointed as Chancellor and then ushered into the Third
00:00:23Reich when the Nazis started suppressing democracy and their political opponents by
00:00:29use of political violence.
00:00:35Not only in the UK, the term or the name, Weimar Republic conjures up a lot of
00:00:37colourful and also contradicting images and connotations. There is the image of
00:00:43the new woman who walked the streets of the big cities with her bobbed haircut and
00:00:48her new dress. There is an explosion of a vibrant scene in modern art and culture
00:00:53with lots of innovations and conceptual advances in literature,
00:01:02music, film, theatre, and many other fields, perhaps best epitomised by the
00:01:07Bauhaus School for Art and Design, which was located from 1926 onwards in the
00:01:13vibrant and bustling industrial city of Dessau, but then there are also other
00:01:19images, such as the chaos and turmoil of the hyperinflation in 1923,
00:01:25when not only the German currency was devalued but also the world turned upside
00:01:30down, quite literally, when an inversion of moral values corroded the ethos of
00:01:35wider parts of German society. There are failed Putsch attempts in 1920 and again
00:01:44in 1923 and there's ultimately, obviously, the onslaught of the Nazis against
00:01:51the Republican system.
00:01:56In the following five chapters of this lecture I will focus on political
00:01:58developments and will try to reduce the complexity of these often contradicting
00:02:03and complicated developments in art, society, economy, and culture down to some
00:02:10core essentials of the political process, which I think are relevant for an
00:02:16understanding of this period.
00:02:21
Cite this Lecture
APA style
Ziemann, B. (2018, August 15). The Weimar Republic, 1918-33 - Introduction [Video]. MASSOLIT. https://massolit.io/options/the-weimar-republic-1918-33-6ff9a555-fe95-4c1e-8b46-28f3b342716f?auth=0&lesson=938&option=7525&type=lesson
MLA style
Ziemann, B. "The Weimar Republic, 1918-33 – Introduction." MASSOLIT, uploaded by MASSOLIT, 15 Aug 2018, https://massolit.io/options/the-weimar-republic-1918-33-6ff9a555-fe95-4c1e-8b46-28f3b342716f?auth=0&lesson=938&option=7525&type=lesson