Ludwig Haas (1875-1930) was a Jewish German patriot, decorated war veteran, founding father of the parliamentary democracy of the Weimar Republic, Reichstag member, and leader of the left-liberal German Democratic Party. The Weimar Republic was a bold experiment in liberal democracy but ultimately a tragic failure. Ludwig’s story and that of his family echoes the experience of many German Jews who pinned their hopes on the new Republic only to see them threatened and finally destroyed by the rise of the Nazi Party. Thanks to a project sponsored by today’s Bundestag and the Jewish Museum in Berlin, Ludwig Haas’s memory has been revived in a book of essays by German historians on his life and times, together with the story of his family, prosperous middle-class Germans and loyal citizens, and what befell them as the Nazi era approached. From the viewpoint of today’s robustly democratic Germany, the essays confront the reasons for this failure and the rising tide, never far distant, of anti-Semitism in the Germany of the 1920s and 1930s.Now Ludwig’s story has been made available to a wider audience through this English-language edition published in New Zealand. It includes a chapter on the extraordinary journey that Karl Haas, Ludwig’s only son, made from law student in Germany to New Zealand sheep farmer, and how Ludwig’s passionate commitment to liberal democracy and active citizenship lives on through his descendants in this country. The English language edition also includes many notes by the translators explaining terms which may be unfamiliar to non-German readers. … a fascinating, sad, but in the end still optimistic story of German-Jewish history in the last century, certainly not free of contradictions, but founded in a long tradition of democracy and humanity. So if you want to read a first-hand account about how and why Germany went into the abyss before WW2, how some of the victims of this miserable story fared afterwards, but also why democracy has a much longer and stronger history in Germany than is usually acknowledged, this is your book. - Prof. Werner Jann, University of Potsdam.
