Weimar democracy fell because an economic crisis let constitutional design and working-class weakness converge.

Evidence

In his first exile publication, an article on The Decay of German Democracy', which appeared in the Political Quarterly at the end of 1933, he diagnosed the situation: The system had been set up on the ground between socialism and capitalism, and could only survive so long as economic crisis did not intervene.’ When the crisis came, All the reactionary parties concentrated their efforts on a single goal: the destruction of parliamentary democracy as the constitutional platform for the emancipation of the workers. And they succeeded because the framework and practice of the constitution made it easy for them, and because the Social Democratic Party and the trade unions, the only defenders of the Weimar system, had been weakened. 214 The defeat of reformism was just as unavoidable as it was self-inflicted. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 247

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the Frankfurt School material on why the workers’ movement failed to resist fascism and the Institute’s diagnosis of the reformist defeat.