Political History Commons^™

The Weimar Republic And The War Of Memory, Madeline Dixon

The Larrie and Bobbi Weil Undergraduate Research Award

This paper is about the havoc World War I unleashed on Germany and its impact on the Weimar Republic. While the war dismantled Imperial Germany, a second war soon began to brew within the newly-formed republic. This war over the memory of the Great War was a key player in Weimar’s destruction, and was rooted in differing interpretations of the war’s meaning, which existed as soon as the declarations of August 1914. The first of such narratives was the “Spirit of 1914,” an exuberant celebration of the war’s conception that took hold of Germans and drove them and their celebrations …