Heartbroken : democratic emotions, political subjectivity, and the unravelling of the Weimar Republic, 1918-1933

Placeholder Show Content

Abstract/Contents

Abstract
This dissertation investigates how German intellectuals, activists, and elected officials wrestled with the relationship between emotions and democracy during the years of the Weimar Republic (1918--1933), Germany's tumultuous first democratic experiment. It upends long-held historiographical assumptions about the sober rationality of Weimar republicans, unearthing rather the startling extent to which Germans both imagined and cultivated particularly democratic feelings in the years after the First World War: erotic desire and neighborly love, nostalgia and solidarity and belonging and righteous anger. This dissertation both charts the emergence of this passionate democratic style and tells an unsettling story about how and why it finally vanished. The following dissertation argues that while this renunciation was not inevitable, it is does help to explain how Germany's interwar democratic culture came to be so brittle. In this way, the dissertation offers an alternative explanation for the unravelling of Weimar democracy in the early 1930s. Most broadly, by tracing shifting ideas about democratic emotions and human nature, this dissertation offers European historians as well as scholars of democracy a novel way of approaching the success and failure of modern democratic states.

Description

Type of resource text
Form electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource
Extent 1 online resource.
Place California
Place [Stanford, California]
Publisher [Stanford University]
Copyright date 2018; ©2018
Publication date 2018; 2018
Issuance monographic
Language English

Creators/Contributors

Author Beacock, Ian Patrick
Degree supervisor Daughton, J. P. (James Patrick)
Degree supervisor Sheffer, Edith
Thesis advisor Daughton, J. P. (James Patrick)
Thesis advisor Sheffer, Edith
Thesis advisor Baker, Keith, 1942-
Thesis advisor Hoffman, Stefan-Ludwig
Thesis advisor Press, Steven
Degree committee member Baker, Keith, 1942-
Degree committee member Hoffman, Stefan-Ludwig
Degree committee member Press, Steven
Associated with Stanford University, Department of History.

Subjects

Genre Theses
Genre Text

Bibliographic information

Statement of responsibility Ian Patrick Macdonald Beacock.
Note Submitted to the Department of History.
Thesis Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2018.
Location electronic resource

Access conditions

Copyright
© 2018 by Ian Patrick Beacock
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).

Also listed in

Loading usage metrics...