Unlike the case of the early French Third Republic, the rise and fall of the Weimar Republic in Germany has long been at the very center of theoretical attention among comparative-historical analysts of democratization. The reasons are clear. First, the fact that German democracy failed despite the country's high degree of economic, social, and cultural development has long struck observers as theoretically puzzling. Second, the history of the fifteen years of Weimar democracy is undeniably dramatic, including multiple coup attempts and uprisings led by both the extreme right and left, economic challenges ranging from hyperinflation to stubbornly persistent unemployment, and a long series of international crises with direct implications for the future of the German state. Indeed, that the Weimar constitution managed to survive so many early storms and to produce a seemingly stable democratic order by the late 1920s makes its ultimate failure even more tragic. Finally, no scholar can forget that the fall of Weimar Germany generated a genocidal Nazi Party dictatorship responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of people in the Holocaust and World War II. Understanding why Weimar failed is thus inextricably connected to debates about how humanity might prevent another Hitler from coming to power.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the unusually high stakes involved in this debate, scholars have yet to reach a consensus about the main causes of Weimar's collapse.