The Weimer Republic (1919-1933) is a period of German history named after a state assembly that met at Weimer, where a constitution was adopted. A short time later, a social democrat declared Germany a republic from the balcony of the Reichstag, and fragments being what they are (in a democracy), a hand was played. Any chance of a constitutional monarchy was quashed.
Historians have had a lot to say about the Weimer Republic in the years that followed the Treaty of Versailles. For military historians, it is a lesson in never humiliating the defeated, something the U.S. understood when it "helped" to "rebuild" Germany and Japan after World War Two. For art historians, it is the boastful claim that the arts flourished under the Weimer Republic, even though some of that art came from unthinkable suffering (the picture up top is not an early work of serial minimalism, but documentation of the economic atomic bomb that was Weimer-era hyperinflation.)
Was Russia humiliated after the fall of the Soviet Union, in 1989? Seems many Russian and former Eastern Bloc people were happy to see it fall. Is Putin's effort to return Russia to the greatness he claims it deserves similar to what Hitler promised when he took power in 1933, when President von Hindenburg, under pressure from a gang of well-healed industrialists, handed him the keys to the country? In the ten years prior to Putin's 1999 election to prime minister, was there a cultural scene in Russia I don't know about?
A week ago I was in a conversation with a Russian friend, a cultural historian, who reminded me that in the 1990s one of the world's leading contemporary artists was a Russian -- Ilya Kabakov. Later that day I looked up Kabakov (who, in the 2000s, began a more explicit collaboration with his wife, Emilia), and learned that he was born not in Russia but in the Ukraine (Dnipro). Is that like saying he was born in Austria, if Putin's Russia was Nazi Germany? Of course not.
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