Ritchie Robinson at Literary Review:
The small town of Weimar is overladen with historical associations. Goethe spent more than fifty years there as an employee and friend of Duke (later Grand Duke) Karl August. After the last grand duke abdicated in November 1918, the National Assembly met in Weimar to draw up a new republican constitution for Germany. Other symbolically charged venues considered were Nuremberg (home of Dürer) and Bayreuth (because of Wagner), but it was Weimar that gave its name to the period of German history from 1919 to Hitler’s accession to power in January 1933.
Two new books by Victor Sebestyen and Katja Hoyer complement each other. Sebestyen provides essential background for Hoyer’s more innovative microhistory. His account of the Weimar Republic is, understandably, weighted towards its crisis-ridden first half. Compelling and well informed, his narrative begins in the autumn of 1918, when the German commanders, Hindenburg and Ludendorff, informed the astonished Kaiser that their armies could no longer fight. Like the general public, the Kaiser had been deceived by the confident briefings put out by the high command.
more here.
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