People always talk knowingly about Weimar, a period of extremes: artistic and socio-sexual depravity, democratic liberalism and radicalism on the left and right, before Germany’s descent into Hitler’s hell. The city as a symbol, near the site of the former Buchenwald concentration camp, is back in the news, well, at least on the op-ed pages of the Western press.
That’s rarely a good sign. “The new crisis (in Germany) seems unfamiliar because, in some ways, it resembles the one that hit the Weimar Republic a century ago,” Katja Hoyer, the author of the book. Weimar: Life on the Brink of Catastrophehe wrote in Bloomberg.
I leave it to academic commentators to grapple with the return of Weimar as a political metaphor and its implications for the future of Germany and Europe.
Those of us from Asia should reflect more on something similar but often overlooked: the Taisho period in Japan. This liberal but unstable period coincided with Weimar and was essentially the Japanese version of it. And, of course, it was followed by the Early Showa period, which was characterized by fanatical militarism that eventually turned much of Asia into a living hell.
Today, after a long period of peace, Japan’s Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi and his right-wing cabinet openly. embracing arms and restructuring. Going nuclear may once again be on the political agenda. All of this threatens a regional arms race, both cheered by the United States and the European Union.
But it looks like a rerun of the Taisho episode before all hell broke loose. It is not surprising that Japan’s neighbors are not afraid.
