Study title: Why, and with what effect, was the Weimar constitution so alien a concept to Germany?

Angus Bunyan, A-Level student (A Level, grade A)

Modern German History has always interested me, specifically the manifest failure of the country over a long period to establish a stable democracy and, further, the open hostility of many groups within society towards the whole concept of liberal democracy. Weimar seemed to provide the best illustration of these phenomena: it had the advantage of being relatively contained and would enable me to examine the specific historical context whilst, at the same time, I was able to broaden the study to include longer-term cultural, political and intellectual trends.

I wanted to avoid answering the stock exam question: ‘Why did Weimar democracy fail?’ The list of factors, which could be compiled, would fill a library, but it would have involved merely producing a wholly unoriginal synthesis of a myriad of textbooks. The title as it stands allowed a more considered thesis to emerge; it forced me to stand back and to examine Weimar’s demise as an example of the dominant illiberal, authoritarian mores of Germany rather than to simply approach the period as 12 years in isolation.

Further to the school library, I used my local public library, which, although not stocking the books I wanted, was able to get hold of' the desired volumes through the inter-library loan system. I started with a good survey book, Modern Germany Reconsidered (ed.) Gordon Martel, which contains a number of short introductory essays and, vitally, an extensive and annotated bibliography for each topic in the book. Thereafter, selecting and acquiring more specialist works became much easier, especially as the text of Martel's book included historiographical commentary on the work of the leading experts.

A coherent textbook account, Mary Fulbrook’s The Divided Nation, helped to get the more specialised works such as Fritz Stern’s The Politics of Cultural Despair in context whilst also providing basic background and factual information. I was aware that I ought not to read only one specialised work, which would almost certainly argue just one case, and thereby be led to accept that theory as the orthodox view. I used over 15 books in writing my study and I found it much easier to produce a balanced argument after absorbing a number of opinions.

My study took the form of an unbroken narrative; I rejected the idea of subheadings because, firstly, it would have been difficult to break the text up logically and, secondly, I think that divisions tend to make an essay look as though it’s being presented in ‘kit’ form. As I gradually digested the sources, I found that I had omitted to think sufficiently about the intellectual and cultural climate of the Weimar years. The prevalence of the ‘conservative revolutionary’ trend in Weimar held a key to understanding the mentality of much of the intelligentsia, whilst the cultural modernist movement, or more pertinently the reaction against it, served to illuminate the great irony of Weimar: that what was seen as progress and the expansion of horizons by some, was seen as decadence and dangerous liberalism by others. The decision to include these elements in the study was, I think, the right one as they balanced the political, social and military factors involved in the Republic’s history. The History of ideas may be less tangible and harder to deal with than the more traditional areas, but it would be folly to ignore its importance.