A review of Victor Sebestyen’s 'Weimar Germany: Death of a Democracy'

 

(Source: The Spectator, Caroline Moorhead's review of Victor Sebestyen’s book )

In this week’s Spectator, a review of Victor Sebestyen’s Weimar Germany: Death of a Democracy offers a sobering reminder of how swiftly a modern society can drift from openness to authoritarianism. What struck me most was not the familiar litany of crises — inflation, humiliation, political violence — but the way Sebestyen reconstructs the texture of the years themselves, the sense of people living through turbulence without quite recognising its direction. It is a story that feels uncomfortably close to our own times, precisely because it shows how the erosion of a society and its shared values rarely announces itself until the ground has already given way.

Moorhead's review presents Victor Sebestyen’s new history of the Weimar Republic as a vivid, almost cinematic reconstruction of how a modern democracy can unravel with startling speed. Rather than writing with hindsight, Sebestyen aims to narrate events as they were experienced between 1918 and 1933—when many observers saw violence, anti‑Semitism and political extremism, yet few grasped the direction in which Germany was heading until it was too late.

He begins with the fragile birth of the republic after Germany’s defeat in the First World War: the Kaiser’s reluctant abdication, the drafting of a liberal constitution in Weimar, and the presidency of Friedrich Ebert. The new state granted civil rights, expanded suffrage to women, lifted censorship, and unleashed a cultural explosion—Berlin became a global capital of experimentation, with 149 newspapers, avant‑garde art, Bauhaus design, and a nightlife that drew figures such as Nabokov, Roth, Eisenstein and Isherwood.

But these freedoms coexisted with deepening instability. The Spartacist uprising and the murders of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht signalled the violent polarisation between left and right. The Versailles Treaty, described in the review as one of Sebestyen’s strongest chapters, left Germans humiliated and resentful; reparations, the French occupation of the Ruhr, and hyperinflation compounded the sense of national grievance. Even amid cultural brilliance, a backlash grew against “degenerate” modernity and foreign influence.

The late 1920s brought further shocks: the death of the stabilising statesman Gustav Stresemann, the Wall Street crash, mass unemployment, homelessness, and a surge in open anti‑Semitism. Paramilitary groups proliferated. Berlin, as one observer put it, became a “breeding ground for evil”.

Among the far‑right movements, Hitler’s Nazi Party proved the most disciplined and effective, aided by Joseph Goebbels’s mastery of propaganda. Hitler’s imprisonment after the failed 1923 coup gave him time to write Mein Kampf, which soon sold in vast numbers. Sebestyen reserves particular criticism for President Paul von Hindenburg, whom he portrays as a vain, evasive aristocrat unwilling to accept responsibility for his wartime failures yet eager to undermine the republic.

By 1932, Sebestyen argues, Germany was already functioning as an authoritarian state: government paralysis, judicial bias toward the right, rule by presidential decree, and widespread poverty left the country choosing not between democracy and dictatorship but between competing forms of autocracy—Hitler’s or Hindenburg’s. When Hindenburg finally appointed Hitler chancellor, he achieved what he had long desired: the destruction of the Weimar Republic, which died, in Sebestyen’s phrase, through “political suicide”.

Sebestyen ends his narrative with Hitler’s ascent to power, leaving readers with a stark reminder of how quickly democratic norms can collapse when institutions are weak, resentments are deep, and political actors choose expediency over principle.

Cartier Bresson and Eliot on the Nature of the “Moment”

 

This piece develops some of the reflections I first explored in my 2019 essay, The Rhapsody of Time Passing. I have been thinking of the phrase "unattended moment" and-the "moment in and out of time" in T S Eliot's Four Quartets. And the "decisive moment" as described by the photographer Cartier-Bresson. There seems to me to be a profound connection between these two descriptions of a moment in time. Here,  I take a wander around that connection.

The Rhapsody of the Instant

There are moments when time behaves itself, and others when it seems to slip sideways. I have long been intrigued by that small perceptual glitch when one glances at a wristwatch and the second hand appears to hesitate, or even move backwards, before settling into its steady march. It is a trivial experience, yet it unsettles something fundamental. The mind expects continuity; the eye reports a stutter. And in that stutter lies a reminder that our access to reality is never as clean or as linear as we imagine.

If time is made of units — seconds, nanoseconds, whatever smallest bead the physicists may one day name — then what occupies the space between the beads? A friend once described this as a kind of cosmic abacus, the universe clicking its way forward. But if that is so, then the gap between the clicks becomes strangely charged: a place where the mind, reaching for the next number, finds instead a moment of suspension. A pause that is not quite time and not quite outside it.

This question — what happens between the units — has stayed with me. It is the same question that animates so much modern literature and art: how to reconcile the measurable with the lived, the clock with the consciousness that resists being parcelled into equal slices.

Bergson's "Pure Duration" and Eliot's Uneasy Struggle

Henri Bergson tried to dissolve the problem by insisting on pure duration, a flow of experience that cannot be chopped into units without doing violence to its nature. Eliot knew Bergson’s thought well; he attended the lectures in Paris in 1910–11, absorbing the promise that time might be experienced as a continuous unfolding rather than a sequence of fatalistic beats. 

But in Rhapsody on a Windy Night, written soon after, Eliot turns away from that optimism. The poem’s speaker walks through the night accompanied by the mechanical tolling of hours — “Twelve o’clock,” “Half-past one,” “Half-past two” — while his mind dissolves into involuntary memories. The clock drives him forward; his consciousness drags him back. No pure duration here. Only the uneasy duet of habit and dream.

Eliot's "Unattended Moment"

And yet, years later, in Four Quartets, Eliot discovers something else: not Bergson’s flowing durée, nor the clock’s rigid divisions, but a moment that arrives unbidden — “the unattended moment, the moment in and out of time.” This is not a moment seized by perception but one that interrupts it. A moment that does not belong to the cosmic abacus at all. It is as if the gap between the beads opens, and something from beyond the sequence looks back at us.

Cartier-Bresson and Eliot - The Contrast: Within and Without

Cartier‑Bresson, working with a camera rather than a pen, found his own version of the charged instant. His “decisive moment” is not outside time but perfectly within it — a fraction of a second in which the world briefly arranges itself into meaning. A boy leaps over a puddle; a cyclist flashes past a stairwell; a gesture, a shadow, a geometry align. The photographer does not create this alignment; he recognises it. His art depends on a taut, almost instinctive attentiveness. The decisive moment is the instant when time, usually so indifferent, suddenly reveals its coherence.

Eliot’s moment, by contrast, reveals its transcendence. Cartier‑Bresson’s is the triumph of perception; Eliot’s is the suspension of it. One redeems time aesthetically, the other metaphysically. And yet both arise from the same human bewilderment: the sense that time is not simply passing but happening — that within its flow there are instants which feel more real than the rest.

Between the Beats

Perhaps this is why the second hand sometimes seems to falter when we look at it. Not because time has stumbled, but because our consciousness has. For a fraction of a second, the mind is caught between the unit and the duration, between the beat and the flow, between the world as it is measured and the world as it is lived. In that hesitation lies the possibility of both the decisive moment and the unattended one — the photographer’s poised readiness and the poet’s receptive stillness.

The instant, it seems, is never merely an instant. It is a threshold. A rhapsody. A brief opening in which time reveals its double nature: the relentless march of the hours, and the mysterious shimmer that lies between them.

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Postscript — Within You and Without You

It was only after settling on the heading The Contrast - Within and Without that I realised how close it sits to George Harrison’s song Within You Without You. The echo is accidental, but perhaps not entirely. Harrison had an instinctive feel for the doubleness of experience — the inner life unfolding at its own pace, and the outer world pressing forward with its demands. His song turns on that same tension: the self moving through time, and time moving through the self.

Harrison’s insight was not philosophical in the academic sense, yet it touched the same nerve that Bergson, Eliot, and even Cartier‑Bresson were probing in their different ways. He sensed that life is lived in two tempos at once: the measurable and the immeasurable, the outward rhythm and the inward drift. To live “within you and without you” is to stand, however briefly, at the threshold where those tempos meet.

Or perhaps he was just a very instinctive songwriter.

Robert D. Kaplan and The Waste Land Revisited

 

More than a decade ago I wrote briefly here about The Waste Land as a poem of seasonal disquiet — April as the month that promises renewal yet exposes the brittleness beneath. I reminded myself how Eliot’s lines feel like a diagnosis of spiritual exhaustion, a culture unsure of its footing. At the time, as I always do ( I have the Waste Land to heart, it helps) I also reminded myself of elements in the poem which hint at the possibilities of renewal - be they ever so distant. I find myself returning to that terrain now, not through poetry but through Robert D. Kaplan’s new book, The Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis, which feels like a companion volume to those anxieties I explored back in 2015.

Kaplan borrows Eliot’s title knowingly. Where Eliot mapped the inner desolation of the West, Kaplan surveys the outer landscape — the geopolitical world of the early twenty‑first century, cracked and shifting under our feet. His argument is that we are living in a kind of permanent Weimar, a global order so interconnected that every tremor becomes an earthquake, yet so weakly governed that no one can steady the ground.

What strikes me most is Kaplan’s insistence that history is not a machine grinding toward a predetermined end. ( Is this true? How about Paul Kingsnorth's view in "Against the Machine?). Personalities still matter. Decisions still matter. The follies and vanities of leaders can tilt continents. In a time when many writers speak of drift, decay, and the slow unravelling of shared narratives, Kaplan reminds us that chaos is not inevitable — but neither is progress.

He is equally sharp on the internal pressures of our age: the rise of ideological certainties that leave no room for dissent, and the swelling bureaucracies — public and private — that flatten human difference into procedure. These forces, he suggests, do not merely irritate; they suffocate. And suffocation breeds its own forms of extremism.

I’m struck by how Kaplan relects Eliot as they both circle the same question: what does it mean to live in a civilisation that feels stretched thin, pulled between hope and dissolution? Eliot answered with fragments shored against ruin. Kaplan answers with a call for vigilance, for the kind of disciplined hope that refuses both fatalism and naïvety.

If Eliot’s waste land was spiritual, Kaplan’s is political — but the two landscapes are complementary. Both ask us to look unflinchingly at the world as it is, and still to believe that renewal is possible. Not guaranteed, not automatic, but possible.

And perhaps that is the thread that ties my earlier reflections to this book: the sense that we are living through a long season of change and decay, one that many writers now recognise. Kaplan’s contribution is to remind us that the task is not to predict the future but to prevent the worst of it. To keep fighting for order without extinguishing freedom. To cultivate hope without forgetting history’s darker lessons.

In other words: to live alertly in the waste land, and still plant something that might grow.

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