PETER GAY ON THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC

These words, from Peter Gay's Weimar Culture: the Outsider as Insider, are one of the two epigrams for my novel, Angels of the Revolution:

. . . for a time the Republic had a real chance.  Whatever some derisive historians have said, if the end of the Republic was implied in its beginning, that end was not inevitable.  As Toni Stolper, a survivor and perceptive observer of Weimar, has noted, the Republic was marked by creativity in the midst of suffering, hard work in the midst of repeated disappointments, hope in the face of pitiless and powerful adversaries.  I might add that it is precisely this easy pessimism, which then saw (and still sees) the Republic as doomed from the start, that helped to fulfill the prophecies it made.