In Europe

World War – to the League, but failed to give this new institution the power to implement decisions. The United States withdrew from the League at the very last minute, even though President Wilson considered the organisation to be the summit of his life's work. Once the war was over, the two other initiators, France and England, focused primarily on internal affairs. On every front, the League of Nations lacked all the necessary clout.
    Jean Monnet, the former cognac dealer, was only thirty when the League was established. He became its deputy secretary-general. ‘We achieved results,’ he wrote later. ‘We overcame crises … we used new methods to administer territories, we stopped epidemics. We developed methods of cooperation between countries which had until then known only relations based on the advantage of power.’ But at the same time, he admitted, he and his fellow diplomats severely underestimated the problem of national sovereignty. ‘At every assembly the people spoke of common interests, but that was always forgotten again in the course of the discussion: everyone was obsessed with the impact a possible solution could have on them, on their country. As a result, no one really tried to solve the problems at hand: their greatest concern was to find answers that would not damage the interests of everyone seated around the table.’The right of veto – by which any state could block any decision – was, he said ‘both the symbol and the cause’ of the League's inability to rise above national interests.

    Today, one of the permanent exhibits at Berlin's Jüdische Museum is a clip from the film
Menschen am Sonntag
, a unique collage of Berlin street scenes from summer 1929. We see a calm, prosperous city with busy sidewalk cafés, with children playing in the streets and relaxed people out for a walk, with young people sunbathing on the shores of the Wannsee, and a little parade by the
Reichswehr
along Unter den Linden – with, and this is striking, many dozens of civilians marching along with the soldiers down both sides of the street.
    Those summer Sundays of 1929 were Berlin's last peaceful moments. After 1924 Germany had grown calm. Politics had become an orderly affair, wages rose, food was good, and things could have stayed that way forever. ‘From 1926 on, there was really nothing worth talking about,’ Haffner recalls. ‘The newspapers had to go looking for their headlines among events abroad.’ Street life was marked by ennui, and everyone was ‘most heartily invited’ to be happy in his or her own fashion. The only problem – and one remarked upon as well by Rathenau before his death – was that, generally speaking, no one responded to that invitation to respectability. The young people of Germany had grown addicted to political excitation, unrest and sensation.
    Later, the sociologist Norbert Elias would provide yet another explanation. In his view, the deep dissatisfaction with the Weimar Republic had everything to do with the abrupt transition from the semi-absolutist regime of Wilhelm II to a modern parliamentary democracy. That process usually takes a number of generations, but in Germany the change came within two to three years.‘The personality structure of the German people was focused on the absolutist tradition that had governed them for centuries without interruption,’ Elias wrote. This was accompanied by the military order and obedience that had long permeated Prussian society, a way of thinking that is relatively simple in comparison with the complicated demands posed by life under a parliamentary democracy. What is more, the rules of a multi-party democracy emphasise precisely thosevalues held in low esteem within military tradition. Like every parliamentary democracy, Weimar required a complicated culture of negotiation, self-restraint, mediation and compromise. The old, semi-absolutist Germany, however, abhorred the happy medium, it cried out for honour, loyalty, absolute obedience and firmness of principle. It created, in Elias’ words, ‘a landscape marked only by bans and rules’. And as the Weimar years wore on, many Germans felt a growing nostalgia for that old world.
    This process was a slow one, and modern, intellectual, artistic Berlin had no idea what was going on at first. Dr Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's Gauleiter in Berlin from 1926, went almost unnoticed during the first Weimar years. His newspaper,
Der Angriff
, sold scarcely 2,000 copies a