Weimar: Life on the Edge of Catastrophe

Coming soon

Weimar before the First World War

If you go to the website of Penguin Books as of this weekend, you’ll find a new book listed. It doesn’t have a cover yet, and it will still require just a little more work to become a physical reality. However, its manuscript is complete and has been submitted to the publisher.

My new book Weimar: Life on the Edge of Catastrophe will be out in bookshops from 7 May 2026.

That moment when an idea in your head, years of research and words on your computer turn into a physical and public thing for anyone to read and discuss is pure magic for any author, and I want to share it with you on ZEITGEIST.

Writing is, in essence, a solitary process. Yes, many people accompany you on the journey. I am fortunate to have a brilliant editor in Casiana Ionita, the Publishing Director at Penguin Press. In Weimar, the director of the town archive, Jens Riederer, was a font of knowledge, without whom I’d never have found the “protagonist” of my book. Family and friends tell you when you’re running ragged. Fellow historians help out when you have a niche question that concerns their field of expertise.

Yet, ultimately, nobody is there when you make a breakthrough or encounter something that only you find amazing, when you don’t know how to finish a certain paragraph, when you feel sad that someone died too young or when you laugh at a joke someone made a century ago in their private diary.

In rainy Weimar last year.

I found this feeling of being in a different world that nobody else could see particularly strong and sometimes disturbing with Weimar. Because this book involved so much primary research, directly from personal historical sources like people’s diaries, letters and documents, I had their voices running through my head as I walked through Weimar. I knew where my “subjects” sent their kids to school, which hospital they had a hernia treated in, which streets they lined to cheer Hitler, where the few brave souls lived who tried to fight fascism as it took hold early in Weimar.

In the archive, searching for traces of my “protagonists”.

One of the locations of the Thuringian State Archive is the Marstall, the former ducal mews. This was also the building complex that the Gestapo used to incarcerate and torture political opponents in the 1930s. It felt odd sitting there, combing through dusty documents, knowing what horrors had taken place in the same building less than a hundred years ago.

On one of my visits, I stayed at the Hotel Elephant in the town centre, which was demolished in the Nazi era and reconstructed with a purpose-built apartment for Hitler. The Führer balcony still projects into the market square below.

At the Hotel Elephant.

I walked through a street named after someone who risked everything fighting the Nazi regime and wondered if the current residents knew the story of the man whose name they were writing on their letterheads.

On a free afternoon, I walked through Weimar’s cemetery, where I found the tombstones of some of the people whose lives I was studying – their stories were in my head as I read the condensed version as one-sentence epitaphs on their graves.

At Weimar Cemetery.

So the moment when the synthesis of this intense process appears in print will be a special one, opening the world I have tried to make sense of, the world of the town of Weimar between the two world wars, to readers around the world.

It will enable me to discuss the lives and choices presented in the book with others. What responsibility did Weimarers, from the ordinary to the illustrious, bear for the hopes and the horrors that unfolded in their town, in their country and on their continent? What can we learn from their lives, actions and inaction?

How did a town and a nation that prided themselves on their high culture fall so low so quickly? I hope my book can make a small contribution to these ongoing discussions and considerations, which remain as relevant as ever in the world we live in today.

“Bauhaus came fled from Weimar” - Visiting an exhibition about the complex relationship between the Bauhaus movement, which originated in Weimar, and Nazism, which took hold there early.

More on all of this soon. For now, here is a preview of the book and its content:

Weimar looms large in German history: a crucible of democracy and dictatorship. This ancient town nestled in the heart of the country was home to some of Europe's greatest thinkers, Goethe and Schiller, Liszt and Nietzsche among them. It gave its name to the ambitious Weimar Republic crafted in the aftermath of the First World War. But it was also where fascism took hold. Where Bauhaus architects first experimented with new ways of living, Buchenwald was dug out of a beech forest.

Weimar shows us a town and its people on the edge of catastrophe. Drawing on a wealth of new archival research, it takes us from 1919 to 1939 as it tells the stories of the men and women who lived through the new republic and Hitler's regime. We encounter a vividly drawn cast of characters, from bookbinder Carl Weirich and hotel owners Rosa and Arthur Schmidt, to Friedrich Nietzsche's sister Elisabeth. Here are fascists and socialists, artists and workers, politicians and citizens, who, as the events of history swept them up, became witnesses, perpetrators, victims and bystanders.

An unforgettable picture of lives and choices in extraordinary circumstances, Weimar takes us deep into the heart of the storm – to the town that dreamt of a better world, and woke up to tyranny.

More information and pre-order links can be found here.