Book Review: ‘Vertigo’ by Harald Jähner

I read this book on the strength of Harald Jähner’s excellent earlier book Aftermath. Aftermath explored events in Germany following the country’s defeat in the Second World War; Vertigo explores events in the same country following defeat in the First World War, taking us through the years of the Weimar Republic to the rise of Hitler.

As with its predecessor, Vertigo is a compelling mix of political and social history, placing considerably more emphasis on the latter. It begins by exploring the struggle for power in Germany in the immediate aftermath of the war; the unexpected establishment of the Weimar Republic; and how hyperinflation set in as the country struggled to pay costly war reparations.

After runaway inflation was curbed through a change in currency, many people sought certainty in conspiracy theories, clairvoyance, psychokinetics, stamp-collecting, Far-Eastern religion, naked bathing, herbal diets, arts and crafts, cults, free love, and other fads. The book explores artistic movements; the advent of female office workers; the growth of traffic in cities; dance culture, jazz and gigolos; amusement parks; cinema; naked athletics; clubs and veterans’ associations; gender identity; the 1929 Stock Market Crash and the Great Depression; growing dissatisfaction, especially among rural people, and its exploitation by the nascent Nazi party; the romantic desire of city-dwellers to return to the countryside; and the decline of newspapers and other ‘main-stream media’, and the rise of radio.

On the political side, Jähner describes German President Paul von Hindenburg’s initial ill-conceived concessions to the rising political Right; the subsequent rioting in Prussia; the Nazis’ increasing popularity in local and national elections; Hindenburg’s failed attempts to avoid appointing Hitler as Chancellor; and, once they had gained a political foothold, the phenomenal speed with which the Nazis abolished democratic institutions such as the free press, and destroyed the rights of Jewish people and other minorities.

The book ends with the constitutionally illegal establishment of the Enabling Act that allowed Hitler to make new laws without needing to gain approval from the German parliament. In a moving epilogue, Jähner describes the fates of many of the major and minor characters mentioned earlier in the book under the Nazi regime.

The parallels between events in Germany in the early decades following the First World War and international developments in our shining new post-truth era are patent and alarming. The Right is running rampant; political institutions are under attack; the news cycle is under the control of the algorithms of multi-billionaires; facts have become a matter of opinion; information sources are filled with bullshit; and all the wrongs of the world are being blamed on vulnerable minorities.

We live in depressingly familiar times.