Introduction

The introduction to the Oxford Handbook of the Weimar Republic identifies key trends in the historiography on this period of German history and suggests that rather than using ‘Weimar’ as a cipher for the current problems of parliamentary democracies in the West, historians should focus on strategies to historicise the specific predicament of the first German democracy and the expectations and experiences of its citizens at the time. The first section charts the arguments and narratives of landmark general histories of the era by West German historians that were published during the 1980s and early 1990s. The second section discusses key historiographical trends since the 1990s, when historians reformulated the notion of a ‘crisis’ of the republic and applied different approaches to the Weimar Republic that offer a more open interpretation of Weimar's society and political processes. A final brief section explains the remit, structure, and selection criteria of this handbook. Ultimately, the formation of the Nazi dictatorship in 1933 was not a predetermined, but a contingent outcome, with alternatives open right up to the last minute on 30 January 1933, yet historians need to continue to account for the developments that led to this moment.