Weimar Germany: Death of a Democracy with Victor Sebestyen

Victor Sebestyen presents a definitive account of how Germany’s interwar republic led to the birth of Nazism.

About the event

The Weimar Republic was Germany’s postwar experiment with democracy, and a time of unprecedented cultural, intellectual and artistic freedom. Berlin was at the cutting edge of quantum physics and psychoanalysis; its nightlife showcased grand opera and dissolute cabaret. Bauhaus architecture and modernist painting flourished, and it rivalled Hollywood as a capital of film. But beneath the surface was a deeply polarised society of extremes plagued by economic disasters, populist leaders fuelling culture wars, and an uneasy political settlement that would soon spawn the horrors of Nazism.

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About the speaker

Victor Sebestyen is the acclaimed author of Twelve Days, Revolution 1989, 1946, Lenin the Dictator and Budapest. Sebestyen was born in Budapest and was a child when his family left Hungary as refugees. As a journalist, he has worked for numerous British newspapers, including the Daily Mail, The Times and the Evening Standard. He reported widely from Eastern Europe when Communism collapsed and the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 and covered the wars in former Yugoslavia and the breakup of the Soviet Union. At the Evening Standard he was foreign editor, media editor and chief leader writer. He was an associate editor of Newsweek.