1945 and 1914: Germany in a Nutshell

The story of the residents of Weimar during the rise and reign of Hitler.

Weimar – On the Edge of Catastrophe is written by Katja Hoyer.
The reader is Sian Thomas.
The abridger is Julian Wilkinson.
The producer is Lu Kemp.

Katja Hoyer’s Weimar – On the Edge of Catastrophe – is informed by the meticulous diary of Carl Weirach a bookseller who moved to Weimar in 1914.

It follows the lives of the residents of the town of Weimar – a town renowned for its cultural heritage as the birthplace of Goethe and a town beloved by Schiller, Bach, Liszt and Nietzsche.

Weimar is Germany in a nutshell, the former German president Roman Herzog once said ‘a town in which not only culture and thought were at home but also philistinism and barbarism.’

The episode begins in 1945 as Allied forces march the residents of Weimar to Buchenwald concentration camp to force them to face the atrocities that have happened just 8kms from their town. The Weimarers protest they knew nothing of what took place there.

And our story begins in 1914, when Carl Weirich moves to Weimar to set up a new life, taking over a booksellers in the centre of town.

Rosa Schmidt a woman of Jewish heritage is in Alexandria giving birth to her third child. She must battle across Europe as WW1 begins to return to her husband’s home town of Weimar.

Germany’s revolution following the first World War leads to the abdication of the Kaiser and the Grand Duke, and ushers in the first democratic ballot in history on the 19th of January 1919.

It also follows the fortunes of the Schmidt family, whose matriarch Rosa Schmidt was of Jewish origin. They return to her husband’s home town of Weimar in 1914 and look for an opportunity to set up a new hotelier business.

Weimar explores ‘the question of how and why a nation that prided itself on its culture and civility enabled the catastrophe of Nazism haunts us to this day because we fear a repeat.’ The book is about the tension between individual and collective responsibility and sounds a warning for our own times.

Katja Hoyer is a German-British historian, journalist and the author of the international bestseller Beyond the Wall as well as Blood and Iron. A visiting Research Fellow at King's College London and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, she writes for Bloomberg and Berliner Zeitung and is a commentator on German current affairs for many British newspapers. She was born in Germany and is now based in the UK.