The Collapse of the Weimar Republic: Political Economy and Crisis [Paperback]

David Abraham (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 1986

Analysing the conflicts within and between organised industrial and agricultural forces in Germany as well as those between capital and labour, the author shows how these conflicts made it impossible for a coherent political force to emerge to hold the democratic republic together and how, after a period of costly cooperation with labour, and faced with unacceptable alternatives, Germany's elites found unity in a dictatorship that removed the working class from politics and obliged the dominant classes to abdicate all but their economic interests.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Holmes & Meier Pub; 2 edition (August 1986)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0841910847
• ISBN-13: 978-0841910843
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.8 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,227,532 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Bogus controversy, July 22, 2005

By 

Terry Hammond (Oregon) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Collapse of the Weimar Republic: Political Economy and Crisis (Paperback)

A recent online interview with Ward Churchill, who has also been falsely accused of poor scholarship in order to discredit him, points out that the charges made by Turner against Abraham, a senior professor against a young professor, were due to the book coming out before Turner's grand opus on the subject, with conclusions that contradicted what Turner was trying to argue. Turner and others set grad students to comb through the sources line by line, finding errors in a few technical details, but nothing to discredit the substance of the findings or the integrity of the research. German historians have apparently sided with Abraham's account. The university press originally withdrew the book, then reinstated it once it became clear the charges were overblown. But Abraham's career as a historian was ruined.

9 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Erroneous & sloppy Marxist propaganda, January 14, 2004

By 

openmind (IL United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Collapse of the Weimar Republic: Political Economy and Crisis (Paperback)

In 1981 the Princeton historian David Abraham published The Collapse of the Weimar Republic. The book, which was initially well received in academia, sought to demonstrate a connection between "organized capitalism" and the rise of the Nazi party during the Great Depression. While Abraham avoided the simplistic equation of capitalism and fascism, his structuralist-Marxist approach could not accommodate the findings of the Yale historian Henry Turner, whose prior articles successfully disproved the suggestion that German industry, before 1933, supported Hitler to any great extent, either financially or ideologically. When researchers checked the accuracy of Abraham's evidence, they found a number of serious errors in his footnotes. Abraham cited documents that did not exist and turned paraphrases into quotes.

3 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting, March 3, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: The Collapse of the Weimar Republic: Political Economy and Crisis (Paperback)

Before reading this book, you may want to look into the controversy that surrounds it. When the book was first published there were numerous academic debates concerning it's content. It is something to look into.