Overview

A modern democracy can keep its courts, its parties, even its elections-and still forget how to be free. This book follows the Weimar Republic collapse step by step, showing how Article 48 emergency powers became habit, how paramilitary politics replaced persuasion, and how respectable men convinced themselves that taming extremists was wiser than excluding them. It is a clear, unsentimental account of the rise of Nazism told through mechanisms, not myths. Written for readers who want rigour without jargon, it explains how economic shock, elite miscalculation, and aesthetic politics combined to turn law into an instrument of fear-from the Reichstag Fire to the Enabling Act. You will see why a celebrated Weimar constitution could not save a state governed by decrees, how Hindenburg and Papen mistook access for control, and why voters chose energy over expertise. - Understand the chain that links crisis to exception, exception to habit, and habit to regime - Learn the early signals of erosion in any system-fragmented coalitions, normalised emergency, and streets that act like parliaments - Gain a practical lens-drawn from Germany's Great Depression and its aftermath-for reading today's headlines This is for citizens, students, and leaders who ask not only ""what happened?"" but ""what should I watch for now?"" By the end, you will carry a tough, usable model of how democracies die-and a set of lessons for modern democracy that helps you recognise when the switch is being flipped from within.

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9789390349081

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Felix Brandt writes about the way democracies fracture from the inside out. Raised between old borders and new bureaucracies, he is drawn to the moments when laws still stand but meanings shift-when emergency becomes habit and habit becomes regime. His work is steeped in diaries, minor trials, and the unglamorous minutes of cabinet meetings, the places where grand narratives begin to move. Influenced by the scholarship of the Weimar era and the literature of Mittel-Europa, he approaches history as a set of living mechanisms rather than a museum of causes. Brandt's aim is simple and hard: to give readers a clear vocabulary for recognising when a republic is being unlearned, and a practical sense of what must be defended first.

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