Vatlin A.Yu. The Weimar republic: history of a failed democracy

Abstract: This introductory article presents the results from the work of the conference held in Volgograd in 2014, the proceedings of which are published in this journal. The discussion entails the achievements in modern German studies by Russian and German scholars, as well as the issues that are still debated. The democratic potential of the German revolution of 1918–1919 was implemented only at the level of declarations and legal texts, yet it did not become the guiding line in policy-making neither for the active population, nor for the government agencies. The conference articles substantiate this conclusion on the example of the ideological climate of the Weimar republic, the conduct of its military and political elite, and of its diplomatic corpus. These articles address practically the whole range of topics and views comprising the modern historiography on Weimar Germany. The author underlines the thematic continuity and genetic inseparability of the Russian and Soviet scholarships in the study of the first formative years of Weimar history and at the same time focuses his attention on the newest trends in the modern perception of Germany after the end of the First World War. Some question that were previously actively discussed, above all the socio-economic transformation during the establishment of the Weimar republic, today have become of secondary importance and are not popular topics among the younger generation of scholars.

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