Weimar Cities—The Challenge of Urban Modernity in Germany, 1919-1933

This volume explores urban development and its politics across Germany during the Weimar era, viewing cities both as active agents as well as symbols of social and economic modernization. He discusses how the founding of the Weimar Republic created a new constitutional, economic, and financial environment that severely undermined the cities' abilities to set their own policies and maintain healthy finances, the efforts of the cities to influence the central government through the Deutsche Stadtetag (German Congress of Cities--DST), the activities and characteristics of other communal associations of towns and counties, the impact of the redrafting of the administrative map in the Rhineland in 1929 and what it reveals about urban-rural tensions, and the generally unimplemented proposals for reforming Reich financial and legislative administration proffered by the DST in the late 1920s. Annotation c2008 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Weimar Cities explores Germans’ efforts after the First World War to come to grips with their great cities and, by extension, measures the feasibility of the postwar experiment that was the Weimar Republic.