Monarchism in the Weimar Republic

by Dr. Walter Kaufmann

Overview

“The present essay is a pragmatic study of monarchism as a political factor in Germany during the period of the Weimar Republic. It seeks to illuminate the history of that period by concentrating on the most powerful opposing force with which the democratic republic in Germany was confronted during the major part of its existence. It also aims at an answer to the question why the fall of the Weimar Republic did not bring about a restoration of the monarchy but, on the contrary, destroyed monarchism together with democracy.

“In tracing monarchism during the Weimar Republic, we shall distinguish two main periods. During the first, until 1923, monarchism was the core of a violent rightist opposition to the republican form of government. During the second, from 1923 to 1933, monarchism adopted a more moderate policy. It became an oppositional movement in the republican state in whose government it participated at various times, while it gradually became outflanked by a non-monarchistic rightist movement—National Socialism.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781789121087
Publisher:	Arcole Publishing
Publication date:	03/12/2018
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	258
File size:	869 KB

About the Author

Walter Arnold Kaufmann (July 1, 1921 - September 4, 1980) was a German-American philosopher, translator, and poet. A prolific author, he wrote extensively on a broad range of subjects, such as authenticity and death, moral philosophy and existentialism, theism and atheism, Christianity and Judaism, as well as philosophy and literature. He served for over 30 years as a professor at Princeton University.

He is renowned as a scholar and translator of Friedrich Nietzsche. He also wrote a 1965 book on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and published a translation of Goethe’s Faust.

Born in 1921 in Freiburg, Germany, Kaufmann was raised a Lutheran. At age 11, finding that he believed neither in the Trinity nor in the divinity of Jesus, he converted to Judaism. He subsequently discovered that his grandparents were all Jewish. He left Germany and emigrated to America in 1939 and began studying at Williams College, where he majored in philosophy and took many religion classes. Although he had the opportunity to move immediately into his graduate studies in philosophy, and despite advice not to do so by his professors, he ultimately joined the war effort against the Nazis by serving in U.S. intelligence.

During World War II, he fought on the European front for 15 months. After the war, he completed a PhD in the philosophy of religion at Harvard University in only two years. His dissertation was titled “Nietzsche’s Theory of Values” and eventually became a chapter in his Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (1950).

Kaufmann spent his entire career thereafter, from 1947 to 1980, teaching philosophy at Princeton University, where his students included the Nietzsche scholars Frithjof Bergmann, Richard Schacht, Alexander Nehamas, and Ivan Soll.

Kaufmann became a naturalized citizen of the United States of America in 1960. He died in Princeton, New Jersey in 1980 at the age of 59.