Philipp Scheidemann, now minister-president, stood before the National Assembly on 12 May 1919 and asked, "What hand should not wither that puts this fetter on itself and on us?" He resigned rather than sign. But after the Allies threatened to resume hostilities, the assembly voted to accept the treaty. The resentment it generated was not a fringe sentiment. It ran from the far right to the moderate governing parties to the Communists. And it gave every enemy of the republic a ready weapon: the men who signed Versailles were traitors, and the democracy they represented was the enemy's creature.

The republic's early years were a nearly unbroken crisis. Industrial production had fallen to the levels of the 1880s. Meat consumption in 1922 was less than half what it had been before the war. Between the armistice and the signing of the peace treaty, somewhere between a hundred thousand and a quarter of a million German civilians died of disease or starvation, the Allied blockade having continued until the treaty was signed. When the blockade finally lifted, many Germans expected a rapid return to normality. The food shortages continued. The contrast between expectation and reality made the hardship feel sharper than it had during the war itself.

Political violence filled the vacuum. In March 1920, a Freikorps general named von Lüttwitz marched his men into Berlin's government quarter and installed a right-wing civil servant named Wolfgang Kapp as chancellor. The legal government fled and called a general strike. The Reichswehr, whose commander General von Seeckt declared that Reichswehr would not fire on Reichswehr, simply stood aside. The Kapp Putsch collapsed within days when the civil service refused to obey the usurper's orders. But the army's neutrality had sent a message about where its true loyalties lay. Almost simultaneously, a workers' uprising in the Ruhr, put down with Freikorps brutality, left an estimated thousand insurgents dead.

The political assassinations that followed were carried out by a right-wing secret society called Organisation Consul. In August 1921, Finance Minister Matthias Erzberger, who had signed the armistice, was shot dead while walking in the Black Forest. In June 1922, Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau, who had negotiated the Treaty of Rapallo with the Soviet Union and who attracted particular hatred because he was Jewish, was shot and killed by two men in an open car. The republic passed a Law for the Protection of the Republic in response. The conservative judges left over from the imperial era handed down lenient sentences. The killings continued.

The reparations crisis came to a head in January 1923. France declared Germany in default on coal deliveries and sent troops into the Ruhr, Germany's most productive industrial region, seizing control of its mines and factories. The government in Berlin called for passive resistance: workers would strike, factories would idle, and the state would pay everyone's wages. Unable to fund the cost by any other means, it printed money. The result was the hyperinflation that would scar a generation's memory of the republic. By November 1923, the price of a loaf of bread had risen from three marks in 1922 to eighty billion marks. People rushed to spend their wages at lunch before the money lost further value by afternoon.

The classic emblem of the hyperinflation years was a man named Hugo Stinnes, who became known as the Inflation King by using the collapse of the currency to buy up debt-laden businesses at almost no real cost. By 1924 he controlled interests in over fifteen hundred companies. His empire collapsed the moment the inflation was stopped. The instrument of stabilisation was a new currency called the Rentenmark, introduced on 15 November 1923. One US dollar was worth four and a fifth Rentenmarks, and one Rentenmark was exchanged for one trillion of the old paper marks. The currency reform worked. The crisis passed. But the memory of savings wiped out overnight would poison German politics for a decade.

The same autumn that brought hyperinflation brought another threat from the right. Adolf Hitler, who had made himself chairman of the Nazi Party in July 1921, joined forces with the old wartime general Erich Ludendorff and a network of nationalist paramilitary groups. On 8 November 1923, they burst into a beer hall in Munich where the Bavarian state commissioner was holding a meeting and declared the national government deposed. The coup attempt, the Beer Hall Putsch, was stopped the following day when Bavarian police fired on the marching column. Hitler was arrested and sentenced to five years for high treason. He served less than eight months, dictating a book called "Mein Kampf" from a comfortable cell and receiving a daily stream of visitors.

By 1924, the republic had survived hyperinflation, two attempted coups, a wave of political assassinations and the occupation of its industrial heartland. What followed was something nobody had expected: five years of relative stability that Germans would later call the Golden Twenties. The foundation was an American-brokered rescheduling of reparations payments known as the Dawes Plan, which brought a flood of American loans into the German economy. The loans kick-started recovery. Real wages grew. Unemployment fell to under one per cent by early 1922 and remained manageable through the mid-decade.

The cultural life of the republic in these years was extraordinary. Berlin became one of the creative capitals of the world. Jazz bands and cabaret theatres drew crowds every night. The Bauhaus schools produced a new architecture of clean lines and geometric forms. Writers, filmmakers and painters pushed at every boundary. The American performer Josephine Baker was declared an erotic goddess by Berlin audiences who had never seen anything like her. Artists like George Grosz were fined for defaming the military in their work. Conservatives looked at the nightclub culture and the American fashions and saw the death of German values. What they were watching was democracy finding its own voice.

Foreign policy in the golden years was shaped almost entirely by one man: Gustav Stresemann, the foreign minister, who described himself as a monarchist of the heart and a republican of reason. He negotiated the Locarno Treaties of 1925, which settled Germany's western borders, cleared the way for French and Belgian troops to leave the Ruhr, and moved Germany steadily back into the community of nations. In 1926, Germany joined the League of Nations. The following year, the Allied commission that had been monitoring German disarmament departed. Stresemann won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1926. Three years later, in October 1929, he died of a heart attack at the age of fifty-one. Germany could not afford to lose him at that moment.

The stability of the golden years rested on borrowed money and borrowed time. The Weimar political system was structurally fragile: proportional representation with no minimum threshold produced a parliament of many small parties, some of them extremist, and made stable coalition government extraordinarily difficult. President Friedrich Ebert, the Social Democrat who had held the republic together through its worst early crises, died in early 1925 at the age of fifty-four. His successor, chosen in a popular election, was Paul von Hindenburg, the old field marshal who had helped spread the stab-in-the-back myth. Hindenburg was a monarchist conservative who had no love for the republic he now led. He swore to uphold the constitution. For a while, he kept that oath.

When the New York stock market crashed in October 1929, the American loans that had been sustaining the German recovery dried up almost overnight. Unemployment, which had been manageable, rocketed to four million by 1930 and would reach six million by 1932. The social welfare system the republic had built over the previous decade, including unemployment insurance introduced only in 1927, buckled under the strain. The political consequences were immediate. In the Reichstag election of September 1930, the Nazi Party, until then a minor irritant on the far right, won nineteen per cent of the vote and became Germany's second largest party. The Communist Party also surged. The centre was hollowing out.

The last chancellor to govern with genuine parliamentary support was Hermann Müller, a Social Democrat whose coalition broke apart in March 1930 over the question of how to fund unemployment benefits. His successor, the financial expert Heinrich Brüning, had no parliamentary majority at all. He governed instead through emergency decrees issued by Hindenburg under Article 48 of the constitution, the clause meant for genuine crises. Brüning's response to the Depression was severe austerity: cuts in public spending, forced wage reductions, and an internal devaluation that shrank prices, rents and salaries by a fifth. The policy deepened the crisis it was meant to cure.

Brüning's austerity cut unemployment benefits, reduced pensions and slashed public sector wages. For millions of Germans already struggling, the republic now meant the government that took away their savings and then took away their safety net. The Nazi Party and the Communist Party both offered simple explanations and radical remedies. Between them, they made parliamentary coalition government impossible. By late 1931, Hindenburg and his military confidant Kurt von Schleicher had begun to discuss replacing Brüning with something more radical. In May 1932, Brüning lost Hindenburg's support over a land reform proposal and resigned. He had governed for just over two years and had made things measurably worse.

Hindenburg then appointed Franz von Papen, a Catholic nobleman closely tied to the industrialist and landowning classes, as chancellor. Schleicher, now Reichswehr minister, handpicked the cabinet, which journalists quickly nicknamed the Cabinet of Barons. It continued to govern by presidential decree. One of Papen's first moves was to lift the ban on the Nazi paramilitary units, the SA and the SS, that Brüning had imposed. Political violence surged immediately. In July 1932, Papen used emergency powers to oust the elected Social Democratic government of Prussia, which contained over sixty per cent of the republic's population and the capital Berlin. It was one of the last genuine bastions of democratic resistance.

The Reichstag election of July 1932 gave the Nazi Party its highest ever share of the vote in a free election: thirty-seven per cent. They were now the largest party in parliament, though still short of a majority. Hitler refused to serve as a minister under Papen and demanded the chancellorship for himself. Hindenburg refused, on 13 August 1932, in a meeting that left Hitler humiliated and furious. A second election was called for November. The Nazi vote fell by two million. It looked, briefly, as if the party might have peaked. Then the manoeuvring behind closed doors accelerated.

Papen had become Schleicher's enemy after being forced from office in December 1932, when Schleicher replaced him as chancellor. Schleicher tried to split the Nazi Party from within and launched a public works programme that would eventually create two million jobs, but he could not build a parliamentary majority and his relations with his own cabinet were poisonous. By late January 1933, Papen was quietly advising Hindenburg that Hitler should be made chancellor, with Papen himself as vice-chancellor, and that together they would keep the Nazi leader under control. On 28 January, Hindenburg refused to give Schleicher the decree he needed to dissolve the Reichstag and survive. Schleicher resigned.

Hitler was sworn in as chancellor on the morning of 30 January 1933. Papen told a friend that evening that they had hired Hitler. Within two months they would understand what they had actually done. The Nazi Party held only two of ten cabinet seats. Hindenburg remained president. The constitution remained in force. Papen and his allies were certain that the old conservatives and the institutional weight of the state would contain the new chancellor. They were wrong about everything.

Within days of taking office, Hitler's government began banning meetings of left-wing parties and arresting Reichstag deputies. Then, on the night of 27 February 1933, the Reichstag building was gutted by fire. A Dutch council communist named Marinus van der Lubbe was found at the scene and arrested. Hitler blamed the Communist Party and used the fire to convince Hindenburg to sign the Reichstag Fire Decree the following day. The decree suspended, until further notice, the constitutional protections for civil liberties: freedom of speech, freedom of the press, the right to assembly, the sanctity of the home. It invoked Article 48. The emergency clause meant for genuine crises was now the foundation of a dictatorship.

The last multi-party election held in Germany for fifty-seven years took place on 5 March 1933. Even with the Communists suppressed and the full apparatus of state intimidation deployed, the Nazi Party won only seventeen million votes, a bare majority for the Nazi-nationalist coalition. The votes for the Social Democrats and the Catholic Centre changed little. Germany had not voted for Hitler in any decisive sense. But Hitler no longer needed votes.

In March 1933, Hitler submitted to the Reichstag a proposal for an enabling act that would transfer all legislative powers to the cabinet, and by extension to himself, allowing his government to act without reference to the constitution or parliament. Because it formally amended the constitution, it required a two-thirds majority. The Social Democrats, led by their chairman Otto Wels, voted against. Every other party voted in favour. The Communist deputies had already been arrested or driven underground. The Centre Party, persuaded by promises Hitler had no intention of keeping, gave him the votes he needed. On 23 March 1933, the Enabling Act passed with sixty-eight per cent of the vote. The republic had just voted itself out of existence.

The speed of what followed was breathtaking. Within months, every political party except the Nazi Party was banned or forced to dissolve itself. All trade unions were abolished. Every newspaper, radio station and film studio was brought under the control of the new Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. A snap one-party election in November 1933 gave the Nazi Party a hundred per cent of the parliamentary seats. In February 1934, all state parliaments were abolished. The constitution of 1919 was never formally repealed. It simply ceased to apply. The Reichstag met occasionally to serve as an audience for Hitler's speeches. It passed no meaningful laws.

The last obstacle to Hitler's complete dominance was the old president himself. Hindenburg was eighty-six years old and dying. The day before he died, the Hitler cabinet passed a law that would transfer the presidency's powers, including supreme command of the armed forces, to the new combined office of Führer and Reich Chancellor upon Hindenburg's death. Hindenburg died on 2 August 1934. The office of president was abolished. Every soldier in the German armed forces swore a personal oath of loyalty not to the constitution but to Adolf Hitler by name. The Weimar Republic was over in every sense that mattered.

The reasons historians give for the republic's collapse fill libraries, and no single cause is sufficient. The republic was born in defeat and immediately burdened with a peace treaty that even moderate Germans experienced as a national humiliation. The stab-in-the-back myth poisoned the well of democratic legitimacy from the very beginning, ensuring that the men who had actually saved Germany from a worse peace were branded as traitors. The republic never had a reliable base: the army treated it as a temporary inconvenience, the judiciary handed lenient sentences to right-wing killers, and the conservative establishment spent fifteen years looking for a way to replace it with something more authoritarian.

The constitutional structure had genuine weaknesses. Proportional representation without a minimum threshold produced a parliament of splinter parties that made stable government nearly impossible. Article 48, the emergency powers clause, was used so routinely that by 1930 government by presidential decree had become normal, and parliament had become largely decorative. The president's power to dissolve the Reichstag and appoint chancellors without parliamentary approval meant that the republic's last four leaders, including Hitler, were chosen by Hindenburg rather than elected by the people. The system that was supposed to protect democracy became the mechanism of its destruction.

The economic disasters were not inevitable, but they were devastating. The hyperinflation of 1923 wiped out the savings of the middle class and created a permanent association in millions of minds between democracy and financial ruin. The Great Depression arrived just as the republic had found its footing, and Brüning's austerity deepened the catastrophe rather than containing it. Six million unemployed by 1932 meant six million people looking for someone to blame. The Nazi Party and the Communist Party offered blame in unlimited quantities. The centre, which offered only the slow and unglamorous work of governing, could not compete.

Before it was destroyed, the Weimar Republic built something real. The revolutionary period of 1918 and 1919 introduced the eight-hour working day, the right to collective bargaining, press freedom, and universal suffrage including women. The constitution guaranteed civil liberties that were, on paper, among the most comprehensive in the world. Unemployment insurance was introduced in 1927. Maternity leave and accident insurance were reformed and expanded. Over two million new homes were built between 1924 and 1931. Public spending on social welfare more than doubled compared with the pre-war decade. The republic was, for a few years, one of the most progressive states in the world.

The cultural achievements were equally remarkable. The Bauhaus movement transformed architecture and design. German cinema produced works that influenced filmmakers for generations. The cabaret culture of Berlin, the jazz clubs, the experimental theatre, the avant-garde art that conservatives found so threatening: all of it was the sound of a society discovering what freedom felt like. It was precarious and contested and not universally loved. But it was alive in a way that the grey uniformity that replaced it was not.

The flag of that republic, the black-red-gold tricolour first raised in the revolutions of 1848, was abolished when the Enabling Act came into force in 1933. The Nazi regime replaced it with the imperial black-white-red and then with its own swastika banner. After the Second World War ended and Germany rebuilt itself, both the Federal Republic of Germany in the west and the Democratic Republic in the east readopted the black-red-gold. The coat of arms the republic had used, the imperial eagle redesigned in 1928, was readopted by the Federal Republic in 1950. The symbols survived what the republic itself could not.

The men who wrote West Germany's constitution in 1949 had watched the Weimar Republic destroy itself and were determined not to repeat the experiment. They introduced a five per cent threshold for parliamentary representation, eliminating the splinter parties that had made coalition government impossible. They required that a chancellor could only be removed by parliament if a successor was simultaneously elected, the constructive vote of no confidence, preventing the negative majorities that had paralysed the Reichstag. They made the basic rights of the constitution impossible to abolish by ordinary legislation. And they included Article 20, giving citizens the legal right to resist any attempt to overthrow the constitutional order.

The West German constitution was, in a real sense, a detailed autopsy of the Weimar Republic's failure, with each clause addressing a specific mechanism by which democracy had been dismantled. The emergency powers that had allowed Hitler to govern by decree were removed. The proportional system was reformed. The president's role was reduced to ceremonial. Everything that had been used as a lever to pry open the constitutional order was either eliminated or reinforced. It is a document shaped by catastrophe, and it has held.

The Weimar Republic lasted fourteen years, from the window proclamation of November 1918 to the enabling vote of March 1933. In that time it survived hyperinflation, two coup attempts, a wave of political assassinations, foreign occupation of its industrial heartland, and the worst economic depression the modern world had seen. It produced some of the most innovative culture, the most progressive social legislation and the most sophisticated constitutional thinking of its era. And then it was voted out of existence by the people it had given the vote to, in a parliamentary chamber where the opposition had already been arrested. It was described by its enemies, from the beginning, as a democracy without democrats. The tragedy is that they were not entirely wrong, and they made sure of it.

The Weimar Republic's deepest wound was not the hyperinflation or the Depression or even Hitler. It was the stab-in-the-back myth: the story that democracy itself had betrayed Germany, that the republic was the enemy's creation, that the men who had tried to govern honestly were criminals. That story was told loudly enough, and long enough, that millions believed it. The republic never found a way to answer it convincingly. It could point to the eight-hour day, the unemployment insurance, the two million new homes, the Nobel Peace Prize. But a lie told with fury will always travel faster than a truth told with caution, and the Weimar Republic, from its very first day, was governing against a headwind of fury it had not made and could not stop.