Heartbroken : democratic emotions, political subjectivity, and the unravelling of the Weimar Republic, 1918-1933 - Beacock, Ian Patrick; Daughton, J. P. (James Patrick); Sheffer, Edith; Baker, Keith, 1942-; Hoffman, Stefan-Ludwig; Press, Steven; Stanford University, Department of History ([Stanford, California] : [Stanford University], 2018)
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.
Submitted to the Department of History.
Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2018.
Rights: (c) Copyright 2018 by Ian Patrick Beacock
Rights: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
Keywords: theses; text