Alongside familiar factors — the great depression, eye-watering reparation payments and hyperinflation — Jones highlights the less familiar pressures often reduced to footnotes. Particularly important: the French invasion and eight-month occupation of the Ruhr industrial area from January 1923 during which 130 people were killed.
This radicalised still further German public opinion, often drowning in self-pity and blame-shifting conspiracy theories over the first World War defeat and its consequences. The knock-out blow for Weimar democracy, Jones argues, came from the democratically elected politicians who gave up on it to do deals with fascist enemies of democracy.
With his fresh perspective and sometimes uncomfortable analyses of 1923, Jones has attracted attention — and raised some historian hackles — in Germany. History doesn’t repeat itself, but mistakes do. Correcting a century of lazy thinking, Jones gives Weimar back some belated credit as, with apologies to Harry Potter, the democracy that lived.