Weimar Germany

Sebestyen reminds us once again why he is one of the best historians writing today ANDREW ROBERTS, author of Churchill: Walking with Destiny

In the years after the First World War, Berlin was - as Vladimir Nabokov described it - a place of dangerous glamour and worldliness, of tawdry cynicism, where art and riot flourished side by side.

The Weimar Republic was Germanys 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 glamour 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.

Covering fifteen years from the end of the First World War to Hitlers appointment as Chancellor in 1933, Weimar Germany tells the definitive story of Germanys interwar republic and descent into fascism. Featuring an extraordinary cast of characters including Vladimir Nabokov, Albert Einstein, Marlene Dietrich, Adolf Hitler, Billy Wilder, Thomas Mann, Joseph Goebbels, Christopher Isherwood and Rosa Luxemburg, Weimar Germany is a gripping and evocative account of how the fledgling German democracy died.