The greatest ‘if only’ of modern history… that the Weimar Republic had succeeded

Has it ever occurred to you that the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 might have won us the war? Until I read November 1918 it hadn’t to me. Now I know that between May and June that year, as German forces moved to within artillery range of Paris, a million of Ludendorff’s troops, half-starved owing to the British blockade, went down with the virus. Meanwhile, the better nourished British army, regrouping for the battle of Amiens, had a mere 50,000 sick. On such things history can turn.

Splendidly researched, and with a striking new thesis, Robert Gerwarth’s book warns against assuming that the way things turned out was inevitable. The British often think of the Weimar Republic as being bound to fail from the start: that Germany had already set out on a fatally different path from that mapped out by Britain and America. In Germany, too, there is a persistent belief, certainly among the liberal left, that the rotten old moderates doomed Weimar by foiling the supposedly true revolution.

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Gerwarth tells a different story, seeing Weimar not as a failed Anglo-Saxon democracy but as a heroic, and temporarily successful, attempt to buck the destiny of eastern Europe. In his view the ‘dreamland of the Armistice period between November 1918 and the early summer of 1919’ was the foundation by moderate, responsible politicians of the centre right and centre left of a genuine democracy which might have lasted.

The villains of the piece were the extremists on both sides who looked to the East.The communists were in direct contact with Lenin and Trotsky, who demanded a Bolshevik coup in Germany, while the irreconcilable Prussian militarists were fascinated by the success of the fanatical Red Army and, early on, even sent out secret feelers to Lenin with the view of standing together against the Treaty of Versailles (specifically to destroy the new, free Poland).