LITERARISCHER STREIFZUG NR. 113: JENS BISKY

When Gustav Stresemann, the successful foreign minister, died in October 1929, contemporaries wondered what would happen to the republic. A fascist coalition was just forming, which came to power in 1933; peasants were throwing bombs, public budgets were suffering from growing deficits and soon the parliamentary system seemed paralyzed. Democratic republic or fascist state - that was the alternative from the summer of 1930.

What followed - the rise of radical forces, the pulverization of the bourgeois milieus, the revolt of the middle classes, the overconfidence of conservatives and nationalists who imagined they could tame Hitler, impoverishment and fear of civil war - led to the most criminal dictatorship of the 20th century. Jens Bisky tells how the Weimar Republic was destroyed in a whirlwind of hardship and bitterness. Politicians and journalists of the time, exhausted social democrats, helpless liberals, nationalist desperados, writers, lawyers and officers have their say. How did they perceive the situation? What options did they have? - The great panorama of an extreme time that still casts its shadow over the present.

Jens Bisky, born in Leipzig in 1966, studied cultural studies and German literature in Berlin. He was features editor of the Süddeutsche Zeitung for many years and has worked at the Hamburg Institute for Social Research since 2021. He is the author of several highly acclaimed books, including "Geboren am 13. August" (2004), "Unser König. Frederick the Great and His Time" (2011) and "Berlin. Biography of a Great City" (2019). In 2017, the German Academy for Language and Poetry awarded him the Johann Heinrich Merck Prize for literary criticism and essays.

Herfried Münkler, born in 1951, is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Humboldt University in Berlin. Many of his books are considered standard works, such as "Die Deutschen und ihre Mythen" (2009), which was awarded the Leipzig Book Fair Prize, as well as "Der Große Krieg" (2013), "Die neuen Deutschen" (2016), "Der Dreißigjährige Krieg" (2017) and "Marx, Wagner, Nietzsche" (2021). In 2023, he published his latest book "Welt in Aufruhr. The order of powers in the 21st century"

"Die Entscheidung" will be published on 15.10.2024, 560 pages, by Rowohlt Berlin Verlag

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