First off a request - I've recently been watching the Babylon Berlin TV series set in Berlin just before the Great Depression, and I really liked it. So does anyone have any suggestions on Weimar Germany or the Weimar republic, preferably not focusing too much on the Nazis.

Anyway managed to get 2 books finished but both were short (reviews are copied and pasted) -

Finished Confronting Leviathan: A History of Ideas by David Runciman

>3.5/5 going to be a bit harsh and round down for Goodreads. I got a hardcover new on clearance for £5 and for that I am happy with it. Maybe worth a read if you can find a reasonably priced copy but not a must read.

>The book is 260 pages long and summarises/explains the author's interpretation of 12 important thinkers and their works. The main theme the book focuses on is the idea of the state and state control. In terms of scope the book begins with Hobbes' 'Leviathan' and ends with Fukuyama's 'The End of History'. Each chapter has a brief biography of the individiual and explains the historical context they were writing in, then explains their ideas and ends with a bit on how this applies to the 21st century (mainly COVID related). Of the 12 works chosen there are two anti-colonial works (Gandhi and his 'Hind Swaraj' and Frantz Fanon's 'The Wretched of the Earth', I found Fanon more interesting) and two feminist ones (Wollstonecraft's 'Vindication of the Rights of Women' which was an interesting chapter and Catherine MacKinnon's 'Towards of a Feminist Theory of the State' which I found rather boring). The rest of the book is mainly political thinkers like Arendt, Weber, Tocqueville etc. At the end of the book there is a further reading section for each chapter which always includes a watch/listen like lectures on Youtube or podcasts as well as books.

>Personally I enjoyed the chapters on Hobbes, Wollstonecraft, Tocqueville, Marx and Weber the most.

>To me the author's interpretations seemed fine but I am very much an amateur on the subject. I haven't listened to the author's Talking Politics podcast this book was based on and apart from Marx and Engel's Communist Manifesto I haven't actually read any of the works mentioned. So I am basically assuming the author's takes are reasonable rather than knowing for certain.

A Brief History of The Birth of the Nazis: How the Freikorps Blazed a Trail for Hitler by Nigel Jones. I think for ebooks it is called Hitler Heralds.

>4/5 Worth reading if interested in immediate post-WWI Germany and definitely worth reading if you are interested in the Freikorps or the German rightwing paramilitary groups after WWI as there doesn't seem to be much else in English.

>The book is short at 280 or so pages and mainly covers the period from the end of the First World War to the failure of Hitler's Beer Hall Putsch in 1923. The book is fairly easy to read in my opinion and doesn't feel like it needs much background knowledge. Despite the name of the book the Nazis don't really get mentioned till the last chapter (my guess is publishing gimmick as including Nazis and swastikas on the cover would boost sales). The topics that are included are the formation of the Freikorps, their use by the SPD government to fight the far left, the anti-government activities of the Freikorps (the Kapp Putsch gets a good chapter) and the nationalists and the political violence and murder campaigns once the large scale fighting had stopped. The book then ends with a relatively large (but still good) chapter on Hitler's rise to prominence in Bavaria and his attempted coup at the end of 1923. The author is sympathetic to the left (fair enough considering the subject) and does often point out the blatant bias of the authorities on behalf of the right, for example the average sentence for a leftwing political murderer was 15 years, for a rightwing murderer it was 4 months. Or that out of 354 rightwing political murders, 326 went unpunished. There are two appendices - the first is a list of all the main Freikorps, their leaders, size, dates of operation, eventual fate and any symbols. The second a biographical list of any Freikorp member who eventually became prominent within Nazi Germany or who had a major falling out with the Nazis.

>My main complaint is that the Freikorps' Baltic Campaign - offering to help the new Latvian and Estonian governments against the Bolsheivks then trying to turn these areas into German colonies, was only covered in one brief chapter. I wanted more about that topic. Additionally I felt that sometimes the more military focused bits felt like just lists of names and units.

>There is a decent further reading list but this is a book that originally came out in 1987 and was republished in 2003 so all of the books mentioned will be rather old and possibly out of date researchwise.

I'm now reading The Pike: Gabriele D'Annunzio Poet, Seducer and Preacher of War by Lucy Hughes-Hallett about an Italian proto-fascist poet who captured the city of Fiume (Rijelka) and turned it into an independent city state because he was upset about the amount of territory Italy was going to get from the post-WWI peace negotiations. Personally I have mixed feelings about the book so far, it's not bad but I'm about halfway through it (300 pages or so) and it is just about his literary work (fair enough for a biography of a poet), his financial difficulties and who he was sleeping with - it hasn't even gotten to the beginning of WWI yet and rather little on politics so far.

Heard about the book on this podcast which is probably the better choice than reading the book as it gets to the key points -

https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/194-the-first-fascist/id1537788786?i=1000565720363