Twenty years of unresolved consequences — Weimar, the rise of fascism, the Depression, and the appeasement that followed.
9 topics · 8 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Demands of the Annamite People
Ho Chi Minh · 1919
A young Ho Chi Minh's petition to the Versailles peacemakers, arguing that Wilsonian self-determination should extend to French Indochina and listing…
+1 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Homage to Catalonia
George Orwell · 1938
A firsthand account of fighting for the POUM militia in Spain, arguing Republican infighting and Communist suppression of rival leftist factions did…
+1 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
Hitler: A Study in Tyranny
Alan Bullock · 1952
Argues Hitler was above all an opportunist without fixed convictions beyond power itself, who exploited Weimar's weaknesses and rivals'…
+3 more at this level
8 works
Ho Chi Minh
A young Ho Chi Minh's petition to the Versailles peacemakers, arguing that Wilsonian self-determination should extend to French Indochina and listing the specific civil rights denied to its colonial subjects.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Neville Chamberlain
Declares the Munich settlement has secured 'peace for our time', arguing that conceding the Sudetenland to Germany removes the immediate cause of war in Europe.
link checked 17 Sept 2026George Orwell
A firsthand account of fighting for the POUM militia in Spain, arguing Republican infighting and Communist suppression of rival leftist factions did as much to doom the cause as Franco's army.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Umberto Eco
Identifies fourteen family resemblances shared by fascist movements even where they lack a coherent common ideology, arguing 'eternal fascism' can reappear in new disguises long after 1945.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Alan Bullock
Argues Hitler was above all an opportunist without fixed convictions beyond power itself, who exploited Weimar's weaknesses and rivals' miscalculations rather than executing any long-laid master plan.
Nikita Khrushchev
Khrushchev's own denunciation of Stalin to the Party Congress, arguing that mass terror, the cult of personality and the purges betrayed Leninist norms rather than fulfilling them.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Detlev J. K. Peukert
Argues Weimar's crisis was not simply political but a crisis of modernity itself, in which the same welfare and social reforms that made Germany modern also generated the anxieties fascism later exploited.
Ben S. Bernanke
Argues from cross-country evidence that how long a country stayed on the gold standard predicts how deep and long its Depression was, making monetary policy the central mechanism.
link checked 17 Sept 2026