I had a very exciting moment this week when an email from my publisher informed me that my next book Weimar - Life on the Edge of Catastrophe had been chosen by the British book shop chain Waterstones for their pre-order promotion of books to be published in 2026. It doesn’t even have a cover yet!
We’re also still in the middle of copy-editing. This means I have no real conception yet of my book as a physical object. I’m in a strange twilight phase between the end of the writing and the physical manifestation of the book. So this first major interaction of a real-life bookshop with Weimar was a very welcome reminder that we’re getting there.
I thought it might also be a good opportunity to introduce you to the central themes and figures of my book and give you a ‘behind-the-scenes’ glimpse into the research process, which was at times deeply rewarding, at others disturbing and frustrating.
When I first thought of the idea of writing a book about the German interwar period, my central motivation was to find a way to make this period more graspable. People use words like ‘fascist’ increasingly lightly in political discourse; things get compared to the German 1920s and 1930s in all sorts of simplistic ways, often to score political or moral points.
Germany itself believed for a long time that thorough education about the Weimar Republic and the Nazis would inoculate young Germans against repeating the mistakes of their forebears. But even as we studied it in school, I remember classmates feeling detached from that history. They were certain they wouldn’t have acted the same way many Germans did back then. I don’t think we are fundamentally different people today. The crucial, if deeply uncomfortable, question is: why did ordinary people enable such terrible things?
So my plan for this book was to approach the matter differently. Was it possible to reduce the distance between past and present conceptually? Could I perhaps place readers right into a specific place, surround them with real people from various backgrounds and let them observe what happened between 1919 and 1939? I thought so if I chose that place and those people well.
I started with place, and quickly ruled out Berlin. Much like any other capital city, it had and has a very distinct demographic and culture. Besides, even by 1933, only 30 percent of Germans lived in large cities. An alternative would have been a town or village with a very good archive, and to go down the route of a ‘case study’. But that didn’t sit right either. No place is ever truly universally representative of a nation, especially not of one as large and fragmented as the German one. I also wanted readers to have a ringside seat to the major political events of the era. A bog-standard small town or village would, of course, have been affected by them, but not always immediately and directly.
The town of Weimar seemed ideal. It would allow me to take readers right into what many deemed to be the cultural and spiritual heart of the nation. Former German President Roman Herzog once called Weimar ‘Germany in a nutshell’. He summed it up well: ‘a town in which not only culture and thought were at home but also philistinism and barbarism.’
In the interwar period, Weimar came to symbolise the high idealism of the era, with the foundation of the republic itself and of the Bauhaus movement there, for instance. And it rapidly became an epicentre of the rise of the Nazis due to the political conditions there and Hitler’s personal affinity for Weimar. Later on, Weimar was transformed into a Nazi ‘model town’, complete with SS barracks and a vast concentration camp on its doorstep.
Weimar isn’t so much a case study but a place where many of the turns Germany took between 1919 and 1939 happened earlier or sharper than they did across the country. So my ‘scene’ was set. My next task was to assemble my ‘cast’.
At some point in 2022, I contacted the town archive in Weimar to inquire about individuals who resided in Weimar between the two world wars and for whom they might have exceptionally detailed records. When I next visited Weimar, the archivist invited me to a picnic he was having with his friends in the park by the Schloss – the former grand ducal palace in Weimar – and we had a thorough chat about my idea in person. Soon, I had an overwhelming amount of options for my book: a Hungarian actress, the Grand Duke’s official baker, a registrar who later found himself processing fake death certificates for the victims of Buchenwald…
It was a daunting, at times overwhelming, task to sift through all the options. Then I met another archivist from the Thuringian State Archives, also based in Weimar, who opened yet more research avenues. She showed me the records of various influential societies and clubs based in Weimar, from the Crossbow Society (in whose rooms the Hitler Youth would later receive its name) to a naval lobby group which seemed so out of place in a small town in the middle of Germany, hundreds of miles from the sea.
There were times that drove me close to despair. How was I ever going to find a way to make sense of this vast array of people and documents? Besides, I still didn’t have a ‘protagonist’ on whom to anchor the book.
Then Providence took pity on me. The town archivist told me he had just acquired the diaries of a bookbinder and stationery shop owner, Carl Weirich. They weren’t even catalogued yet. So if he hadn’t kindly shown them to me then, they would have sat in their box untouched, waiting patiently for their signature and to be shelved.
When I next visited Weimar and the archive, there they were ready on the reading desk: A4-sized, bound books that contained the story of one man’s life. They are a curious mixture, part scrapbook, part diary. Carl collected newspaper clippings that were of interest to him, often pertaining to his trade. There were postcards, photographs, handwritten letters and notes. But the diary itself is a typed version of the meticulous notes in which Carl documented his own life as it unfolded.
I quietly thanked Carl for having been a stationery and book geek. His love for typewriters (which he sold in his shop) shines through at various times in his diary entries, especially when he struggles to buy and sell them during hyperinflation in 1923. It was clearly the same love that inspired him to type his notes and bind them into a neat book.
Born in 1885 and arriving in Weimar in 1914 to run a shop right in the old town centre, Carl seemed the perfect lynchpin for my story. He was literally in the middle of things, an observer of events, but also deeply and — often tragically — involved with them. Weimar’s answer to Samuel Pepys.
With the human cornerstone of my research laid, it was easier to build the rest around it. I chose a few more ordinary Weimarers, living very different lives and in different parts of town. There is a young and idealistic Social Democrat afflicted by a terrible case of tuberculosis. There is a German-Jewish couple running a hotel. There is the young daughter of a prominent Goethe scholar who becomes one of the first girls to study at a former boys-only grammar school so that she can go to university.
But Weimar also wasn’t short of key players, people who had – or could have had – a profound impact on history. The book features Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s sister, who ran an archive in Weimar to preserve and spread his intellectual legacy. I knew a bit about her story, but seeing a picture of her shaking hands with Hitler at her Weimar villa was still a chilling sight.
I studied the detailed letters she wrote over the years. She had famous friends, like the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch, best known for his 1893 work The Scream, but he also painted Elisabeth and her brother when he hung around in Weimar around the turn of the century, often so depressed that he got drunk by himself at the Hotel Russischer Hof (there is even a self-portrait of him doing just that).
Intriguingly, Elisabeth was also close friends with Harry Graf Kessler, a liberal Anglo-German writer, publisher, diplomat and art collector. Harry had a villa and a printing business in Weimar. He was one of the great movers and shakers of the era, but also an astute observer and diarist. He is a fascinating character in his own right – gay and left-leaning yet friends with many powerful right-wingers and nationalists – but his long friendship with Elisabeth is particularly intriguing.
And then there are the outright Nazis. Because Weimar became such an early epicentre of the movement, an unusually high number of local supporters were on board early and would therefore later rise to prominence in the regime. A central character in the book is Baldur von Schirach – a Weimar boy who idolised Hitler as a teenager and later followed him to Munich to become leader of the Hitler Youth. Martin Bormann, later in the powerful position of private secretary to Hitler, also went to school in Weimar and began working for the Nazi Party there.
Piece by piece, a varied human mosaic of Weimar between the wars was beginning to emerge – made up of real people with all the idiosyncrasies that come with that. I hope they will enable readers to approach the crucial interwar era from a different perspective. It’s a story that’s usually told from the bird’s-eye standpoint of hindsight. It’s something other people did in another era. But to understand why and how one of the darkest chapters of human history came about, we need to break down that distance a bit, as uncomfortable as that may be.
If we are to learn from the mistakes people have made in the past, we must seek to understand why they were made in the first place. Name-calling, labels and simplistic comparisons are not the way to draw meaningful lessons from the past. I hope Weimar can make a small contribution to our discussions in the present.
Back in the mundane world of shameless self-promotion, let me give you some hints as to where to find the book and when:
UK — Allen Lane / Penguin; 7 May 2026; Currently with 25% off from Waterstones.
US and Canada — Basic Books; 9 June 2026.
Germany — Hoffman & Campe; 7 May 2026; public launch in Berlin on 20 May 2026 and Weimar on 21 May 2026.
Netherlands — Querido Facto, Spring 2026.
Others to follow.
Looking forward to reading this. Thanks for the rundown in it and your serendipity in the research.
I once heard Jeffrey Archer of all people talking about the writing process, he hand writes his drafts but then again he doesn't have to visit the archives. Very much looking forward to this epic tale ,I believe, and yes I pre ordered .