Does history repeat itself?
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Hopefully not. Although I wouldn't put it past Merz to still form a coalition with the AfD. But the SPD is usually pretty weak willed. He'll probably like that in a coalition partner.
I think the next four years will really show what German democracy is worth. I suspect that the last government was the last chance we had at starting a ban initiative.
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Only on a very surface level, as in "the far-right reached second place in an election again". But other than that, no, the situation in Germany is not very comparable to the late Weimar republic at all. Party militias aren't terrorizing the streets, there is no hyperinflation, we're not geopolitically isolated and our constitution is not as flawed and weak. Not to say the situation is rosy, but pretending we're literally at the inception of the fourth reich is not realistic or useful.
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East Germany never fully recovered after Soviet occupation and the desolation that resulted. Germany has invested heavily in rebuilding in the east, but there is a constant brain drain, causing western migration of every German capable enough. This has left the east in a poor state they still have yet to recover from. The people in that region know this, but it doesn't change the fact they don't feel good about it, which influences their voting behaviors heavily.
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The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters.
-Antonio Gramsci
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Only on a very surface level, as in "the far-right reached second place in an election again". But other than that, no, the situation in Germany is not very comparable to the late Weimar republic at all. Party militias aren't terrorizing the streets, there is no hyperinflation, we're not geopolitically isolated and our constitution is not as flawed and weak. Not to say the situation is rosy, but pretending we're literally at the inception of the fourth reich is not realistic or useful.
Another analog is that eastern Germany voted very differently than western and southern Germany.
One major difference, in 1930 the far right was anti-Russia, and today they are pro-Russia.
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Hopefully not. Although I wouldn't put it past Merz to still form a coalition with the AfD. But the SPD is usually pretty weak willed. He'll probably like that in a coalition partner.
I think the next four years will really show what German democracy is worth. I suspect that the last government was the last chance we had at starting a ban initiative.
It is a shame that SPD and Union did not work together in the last government to try to resolve some of the problems that cause the voters to move to the right.
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Another analog is that eastern Germany voted very differently than western and southern Germany.
One major difference, in 1930 the far right was anti-Russia, and today they are pro-Russia.
That’s on Russia, not Germany
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Russia and the US have bigger nazi problems.
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Another analog is that eastern Germany voted very differently than western and southern Germany.
One major difference, in 1930 the far right was anti-Russia, and today they are pro-Russia.
Eastern Germany has been voting differently pretty much all the time, or didn't it? Like definitely more counties voted right wing for like a decade or two.
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Another analog is that eastern Germany voted very differently than western and southern Germany.
One major difference, in 1930 the far right was anti-Russia, and today they are pro-Russia.
Geographical aspects are incomparable between 1930 and 2025. Germany is a lot smaller in 2025 than in 1930 and German division hadn't happened yet in 1930.
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WAIT, WHAT
There is an actual party in Germany called the NSDAP ?
And this is legal ???
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1933 2: Electric Boogaloo
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If they don't fuck up as badly, and it would be really hard to reach Wiemar levels of failure, probably not just like this.
Thalmann and the communists were going with accelerationism and straight up wanted Hitler to win, so they blocked every coalition they could. The SPD reacted by ruling by decree (something they could do in that system) and didn't even bother to pick popular decrees, so when a new president was chosen he basically just blocked that as well, and a crises ensued.
July 1932 was a snap election in that moment. More dysfunction ensued until November 1932's snap election (where Hitler actually lost ground), and then the famous Reichstag fire and Hindenburg pact stuff happened.
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No but it rhymes.
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If the communists start getting a lot more votes, then maybe you could make a parallel. Otherwise it's a very different situation.
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1933 2: Electric Boogaloo
Hitler was a WW1 who served and was gassed in the trenches. He had some combat training and was a pretty intense dude.
Elon is a rich kid who got booted out of most of his startups for cause, but made enough of a golden parachute to go around buying up other people's successful businesses, e.g. Tesla. He's never been in a real fistfight in his life.
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Yes. First as tragedy, then as farce. We're in the farce stage, for those not already aware.
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Hitler was a WW1 who served and was gassed in the trenches. He had some combat training and was a pretty intense dude.
Elon is a rich kid who got booted out of most of his startups for cause, but made enough of a golden parachute to go around buying up other people's successful businesses, e.g. Tesla. He's never been in a real fistfight in his life.
Elon was in a fistfight, actually. He got thrown down a staircase as a kid and was bullied so hard he was hospitalized in SA. Which explains a decent amount of why he turned evil.
He's essentially Syndrome from the Incredibles. Fingers crossed he starts wearing a cape to his rocket launches.
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If you think of history as often involving opposing material and social forces, then patterns will emerge. We are constrained by the material in what actions we can take to resolve a major conflict in interests, often escalating to, for example, war. So war has happened repeatedly. That's not quite history repeating itself so much as a consequence of historically common conditions.
Under this way of thinking, you could expect conditions that are even more similar to one another to lead to similar outcomes - though not necessarily identical. For example, the revolution in Russia that led to the first sustained socialist revolution had precedent in similar conditions jn the few decades prior, and for the same basic reasons (driving material forces): a rising but weak bourgeoisie, unpopular war foisted on the population, frustrations at capitalist oppression at home, and various unpopular domestic policies that were a holdover from monarchist ways of thinkinh that liberalism had made unpopular. During the prior revolution, the masses (and representative organizations) were too idealistic and believed establishing a Duma and some reforms would address these problems. They were wrong: the Tsar simply reversed most of the policy concessions once the people went home and were no longer organized, dragged his feet on the Duma, and eventually established one that was purely representative of ruling class interests. At the same time, the Tsar went after the organizations that had participated in the failed revolution, banning them and jailing their members.
And when similar conditions occurred and people became again colocated and agitated by these conditions, those organizations were back in force, grew rapidly, and learned their lessons. The group that won, the communists, correctly identified that even the current offered concessions were similarly false and that the defeat of the Tsarist-bourgeois ruling class required them to be fully deposed and that the time to do so was ripe.
So, the similar conditions led to a similar culmination (mass action, strikes, etc) but had a different outcome due to their differences (learning the lessons of the previous failure).
