Seven states seceded from the Union before James Buchanan left office in 1861, and within months of Lincoln’s inauguration, the forces of slavocracy directly threatened the capital with the Confederate victory at Bull Run. Whatever one thinks of American democracy in 2025, it is not under any more dire threat than the one contained in the telegram Lincoln received informing him of that rout, just 30 miles west of the White House: “The day is lost. Save Washington and the remnants of this army.” 

Nevertheless, in the preface to German historian Volker Ullrich’s new history, Fateful Hours: The Collapse of the Weimar Republic, we hear that because “Democracies are fragile” and “can flip into dictatorships,” we should assess that “The future of American democracy has never been so uncertain since the declaration of independence almost 250 years ago.” Claims like this, which surround most of the last decade of discourse about Weimar Germany, named for the city where the post-World War I German constitution was established in 1919, have become a common refrain among European and some American liberals since the first election of Donald Trump. The clever panicmonger of course cannot claim that America is presently living under something comparable to Nazism, so drawing parallels between present-day America and the period immediately preceding Hitler serves to give a veneer of historicity to what is effectively nothing more than the expression of an unprovable prediction about the future, or a hyperbolic expression of personal disapproval that is not even meant to be read as literally true.

For a historian as eminent as Ullrich, also the author of two Hitler biographies from 2013 and 2020, it is disappointing to see him put his subject area expertise in service of current political exigency. But it’s a relief to find, then, that Ullrich’s brief analysis of 21st-century politics is merely a hook for his riveting account of the politics of Germany from the November Revolution of 1918 to Adolf Hitler’s ascent to the chancellorship in 1933. Yes, this is well-trod ground, but Fateful Hours does two things to approach the story........

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