When Bullets Speak Louder than Ballots: Weimar Lessons for the Present Times
ALSO AVAILABLE AS AN E-BOOK WITH EXTRA MATERIALS | Political Assassinations and the Erosion of Democracy: 1920s Europe to 2025.
"The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born: in this interregnum the most varied pathological phenomena occur" — Antonio Gramsci. Italian Marxist philosopher, political theorist, imprisoned by Mussolini's fascist regime
A spectre is haunting Europe—and the United States too: Weimar.
For at least three years, the ghost of the Weimar Republic has been evoked in Germany. A bad headline, a worrying election, and someone says: It’s the Weimar Republic all over again. Weimar: the fragile German republic after WWI, the antechamber to Nazism.
In February 2025, 82.5% of Germans went to the ballots, the highest turnout since reunification. Many of us voted in fear of being thrown back a century, into the Germany of 1925. And four years from now—when we vote again—will it be 1929? We live in confusing times.
The temptation of the comparison is strong. “Weimarer Verhältnisse”, we call them in German: the Weimar conditions.
Now the habit is spreading to the United States. Is 2025 the new 1925? Or are we already living in the early 1930s? A few weeks ago, billionaire hedge-fund manager Ray Dalio told Financial Times that today’s America resembles the 1930s: gaps in wealth and values, a collapse of trust, politics drifting into extremism. Trump’s America, he warned, is sliding toward “a 1930s-style autocracy.”
What Dalio says is indisputable. But Weimar was much more than parliamentary chaos or inflammatory speeches.
It went far beyond the heckling of the AfD in German regional parliaments. It transcended the obsessive debates on migration, attempts to control universities, or the proximity of technological elites to power.
The Weimar Republic was born in civil war—streets filled with revolutionary attempts and their bloody suppression. It continued with starving people lying on sidewalks, forced to beg for survival. It ended with SA troops marching with torches and the Reichstag engulfed in flames.
The Weimar Republic was fragile from its inception. Lasting only fourteen years, it lacked any genuine democratic tradition. It was despised by the elites and distrusted by large segments of the population.
The Federal Republic is 75 years old. It has weathered crises, built prosperity, and forged a culture of compromise. Labor unions sit on company boards. Four Große Koalitionen (“Grand Coalitions”) have governed at federal level—three under Merkel—and many more at the state level. Consensus is messy, but it works.
In Weimar, by contrast, parties couldn’t find common ground. Twenty different cabinets in fourteen years. The last democratic government collapsed over a fight about 0.5% in unemployment insurance contributions. Out of that deadlock came new elections—and the sudden rise of the Nazi Party.
Unemployment was Weimar’s great plague. By 1932, nearly 30 percent of Germans were out of work. Six million people. Hunger riots, despair.
Economic turmoil sealed Weimar’s fate. Hyperinflation in 1923 wiped out savings. Debts and credits dissolved into air. Families were thrust back to bartering within months. No wonder today’s European Central Bank obsesses over its 2% inflation target. Today's obsession stems from yesterday's trauma.
Five years after hyperinflation came another blow: the crash of 1929. The Dow Jones lost almost 90% of its value by 1932. German markets collapsed too. Savings and hope vanished.
No, we are not Weimar. But the story is not so black and white. Institutions can still slip.
The European Central Bank was modelled after Weimar's painful lessons: designed to be completely independent from political power. In 1933, Hitler transformed the Reichsbank into an instrument of war. During the same period, Roosevelt tied the Federal Reserve to his New Deal policies.
Europe vowed: never again. Yet critics persist. In 2013, the AfD party was founded specifically as an anti-Euro, anti-ECB, anti-Draghi movement. In Italy, government officials continue to criticize the ECB—despite Draghi's measures having rescued Italy from financial crisis. Meanwhile in the U.S., the Federal Reserve's independence faces increasingly open challenges.
Checks and balances are fundamental. The strongest European constitutions—Germany, Austria, Italy—were deliberately crafted as bulwarks against Nazi-fascism. West Germany's 1949 Grundgesetz directly addresses Weimar's shortcomings. Similarly, the Italian Constitution was intentionally designed with anti-fascist principles.
But: Even the strongest constitution can be undermined when elected leaders deliberately hollow it out from within. The eight years of PiS Party rule in Poland until 2023 and Orbán's "illiberal democracy" in Hungary are the living proof that paper barriers are not enough.
Justice is crucial. In Weimar, the judiciary was deeply biased. Many judges were Imperial holdovers, openly hostile to the republic. Their verdicts betrayed them: left-wing assassins were punished harshly, right-wing killers often walked free. This told extremists that violence would be tolerated, even rewarded. It was democracy’s death sentence. Today, German, European, and U.S. courts are still largely independent. But when judicial neutrality is undermined—or attacked—the warning lights should flash red.
So, are we safe? Are Europe and the U.S. in 2025 far enough from the Weimar cliff? Institutions are not indestructible. Central banks can be captured. Media freedom can be chipped away—sometimes subtly, sometimes brutally.
Last week, German public broadcaster NDR removed conservative journalist Julia Ruhs after hundreds of colleagues denounced her work. Supporters cried censorship, critics pointed to breaches of journalistic standards. Her reporting had critically examined migration issues in Germany. Too critically?
Around the same time, across the Atlantic: In the U.S., ABC suspended Jimmy Kimmel Live after remarks about Charlie Kirk's assassination and its instrumentalisation. The FCC hinted at reviewing the network's licence. Once institutions yield to political pressure, their independence is never guaranteed. When satire is cancelled, regardless of whether it is in good or bad taste, something no longer works.1
Which brings us to the darkest chapter. A topic often missing from today's Weimar analogies, but one that cuts to the bone of how democracies die: one bullet can silence a man. Many bullets can silence a democracy.
A series of political assassinations in the 1920s and '30s undermined democracy across Europe.
These killings eroded trust, emboldened extremists, and ultimately destroyed democratic institutions. While Europeans often know only their own national cases—Rathenau in Germany, Matteotti in Italy, Gabriel Narutowicz in Poland—these events form an interconnected European narrative. Each assassination offers crucial lessons—lessons that are much needed today.
Weimar´s Germany: A Republic Bleeding Out
The Weimar Republic was born in blood. The blood of millions who died in the First World War, and the blood that soon stained German streets. As the republic was proclaimed from the windows of the Reichstag, cities filled with veterans returning from hell to nothingness.
1919 brought revolts and experiments in workers’ self-government, inspired by the Soviet model, from the shipyards of northern Germany to the factories of Munich. These uprisings were turbulent but not especially bloody. The repression, however, was merciless.
The new Social Democratic government of Friedrich Ebert saw these councils as a mortal threat to the fragile republic. To crush them, it made a pact with the devil: the Freikorps. These were not ordinary war veterans. Often still young, they had known only war and killing. Their officers carried the experience of colonial massacres in Africa, including the genocide of the Herero and Nama—atrocities that foreshadowed Europe’s own future.2
The first act in Weimar’s long tragedy of political assassinations came quickly. On January 15, 1919, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht—leaders of the newborn Communist Party—were seized by Freikorps soldiers. After the Spartacist uprising in Berlin was drowned in blood, with over a hundred killed, Luxemburg and Liebknecht were beaten, shot, and dumped like refuse.
Munich too became a killing ground: civilians had not seen such slaughter since the Thirty Years’ War.
The murders of Luxemburg and Liebknecht, and the brutal crackdowns that followed, opened a wound that never healed. The SPD was blamed for tolerating—if not ordering—the assassinations. To this day, when the Berliner left gathers every January 15 at their cenotaph, SPD politicians are neither invited nor welcome.
That division proved fatal. It crippled any chance of a united front between Social Democrats and Communists against the rising extreme right. The Weimar Republic entered the 1920s already weakened, bleeding from within, divided against itself.
1921: “He received the reward he deserved as a traitor to the fatherland.”
The pact with the devil soon backfired. The first wave of bloodshed in 1919 had struck the far left. But by 1920, the guns of right-wing terror turned on the very moderates who had built the Republic.
The Freikorps were officially disbanded. Their mission of suppressing leftist uprisings was complete. However, the men refused to disperse. Instead, they regrouped under a new name: the Organisation Consul (O.C.).
This was no secret society. It was openly ultranationalist, antisemitic, sworn to “destroy the Republic and replace it with a right-wing dictatorship.” Its statutes proclaimed a war “against all anti-nationalists and internationalists, Judaism, social democracy and the radical left.” Judges, bureaucrats, noblemen, industrialists—many quietly sympathized.
The fuel was already there: the conspiracy theory of the Dolchstoßlegende—the “stab in the back.” According to this myth, Germany had not lost the First World War on the battlefield but had been betrayed by Jews, socialists, and liberals at home. Now those very “traitors” were running the state. In modern terms, a “deep State”.
Murder became reframed as justice. Political killings were called Feme—acts of vigilante punishment3. In courtrooms, assassins of the right were often acquitted, or handed sentences so light they sounded like apologies. Judges themselves, relics of the Imperial era, despised the Republic. Reading their judgments today sends chills down the spine.
And then came August 26, 1921. Matthias Erzberger, deputy of the Catholic Centre Party, was walking in the Black Forest when O.C. gunmen ambushed him. He tried to run. They fired a dozen bullets into his back.
Erzberger had signed the armistice of Compiègne in 1918, ending the war. Later, as Reich Finance Minister, he led the most ambitious tax reform in German history: higher income and inheritance taxes, a one-off wealth levy, measures of social justice to rebuild the nation’s finances. To nationalists, he was the “November criminal” who surrendered the army. To industrialists, the man who wanted to tax their fortunes. In short: a marked man.
The country reeled in shock—but not everyone mourned. In university towns, nationalist students celebrated in the streets: “Now thank God for this brave murder. Bury the arch-scoundrel; holy shall the murderer be to us, under the black-white-red flag.” An East Prussian paper wrote: “Erzberger… has received the reward he deserved as a traitor to the fatherland.” In Munich, a then-obscure agitator named Adolf Hitler seized the moment, railing against the dead man.
1922: “Slay that Walter Rathenau, the goddamned Jewish sow!”
"Even Rathenau, that Walther, / Will not reach old age, / Shoot down Walther Rathenau / The God-damned Jewish pig!" Verses from a song circulating among the Freikorps.
Walther Rathenau was many things: industrial heir, thinker, politician, liberal patriot. Son of Emil Rathenau, founder of AEG, he was born into wealth, educated in science and philosophy, and always aware that despite his success, in Germany he would forever be an outsider. He was a Jew.
In World War I, Rathenau helped organize Germany's war economy—first in raw materials, later in broader administrative roles. After the war, he turned his efforts to rebuilding: he helped found the German Democratic Party, pushed for industrial reform, and believed Germany must deal honestly with its obligations under Versailles, while negotiating its way back into respect and stability among nations.
In February 1922 he was appointed as Germany's Foreign Minister. This was too much for the Nationalists, who saw in him a traitor rather than a true German.4
Yet the decision proved smart: In April 1922, Rathenau represented Germany at the Genoa Conference, the first major economic and financial conference after the World War. There, he pulled off a surprising coup by concluding the Treaty of Rapallo with the Soviet Union, breaking Germany's international isolation. The agreement, however, offended many: internationalists mistrusted the Soviets; nationalists saw betrayal.
Rathenau's Jewish identity made him doubly vulnerable. To his enemies on the right, he embodied everything they hated: Jewish, elite, cosmopolitan, liberal, willing to collaborate with socialists. Hate poems circulated in pamphlets. Public figures and fringe groups alike spread conspiracy theories: that he was secretly pushing Marxism, undermining Germany from within, or "selling out" its national honor.
On the morning of June 24, 1922, Rathenau was traveling in his car from his home in Grunewald to the Foreign Office in Berlin. Another vehicle passed him. Three men from Organisation Consul opened fire. Rathenau's car slowed; he tried to dodge into the road. More than a dozen bullets struck him. He died.
The murder of the leading democratic politician drove millions of people onto the streets throughout Germany. They demonstrated in support of the Weimar Republic and democracy. Hundreds of thousands lined the streets as Rathenau was carried to his grave in Berlin.
The republic's enemies hoped for riots on the fringes of the funeral procession, but that did not happen. Nevertheless, Rathenau's killing served as a warning shot to proponents of liberal democracy: an act of terror declaring that the Republic wasn't safe, even for its most accomplished citizens. In the extreme right narrative, however, this was simply another step in the right direction: eliminate the nation's enemies one by one and destroy liberal democracy.
In fact, over 350 political murders scarred Weimar between 1919 and 1923.
The courts revealed their bias: of 354 right-wing killers, most went free. Leftist attackers were punished with brutal severity. Political violence in Weimar Germany rapidly spread across Europe
1922: “President Elected by the Minorities, not by Poles”
Poland, 1922. Just four years after regaining independence, Poland was fragile—vulnerable not only to external threats but also to internal divisions. The "Battle of Warsaw" in 1920 had saved the nation from Bolshevik takeover, but deep fault lines around national identity, ethnicity, and religion were fracturing society.
One-third of the population consisted of ethnic minorities: Jews, Ukrainians, and Germans. While some Poles advocated for an inclusive, civic understanding of national identity, others demanded an ethnically pure nation. To these nationalists, minorities weren't fellow citizens but threats to Polish sovereignty.
Into this volatile environment stepped Gabriel Narutowicz—a respected civil engineer and technocrat known for his thoughtful approach. In early December 1922, following legislative elections, Poland's National Assembly elected him President. His victory hinged on crucial votes from ethnic minority blocs within the electoral assembly, a fact that immediately provoked the nationalist right's fury.
The right-wing press and nationalist parties swiftly launched a vicious hate campaign against the new president. They declared his election illegitimate, portraying it as a "Jewish invasion" of Poland and repeatedly branding him a "tool of the Jews." Nationalist parties, newspapers, and university students also accused him of being a Freemason, an atheist, and a puppet serving non-Polish interests.
December 16 1922, just five days after taking office, Narutowicz attended the opening of an art exhibition at Warsaw's Zachęta Gallery. Eligiusz Niewiadomski, a painter and radical nationalist, approached him and fired three shots at close range. The president died almost immediately.
At his trial, the killer made no attempt to deny his actions. Instead, he justified the assassination as a symbolic act—a strike against what he saw as a Poland no longer "owned" by ethnic Poles and a state corrupted by minorities. He framed his murder as part of a righteous fight for "Polishness."
The public reaction was deeply divided and toxic. There was horror, mourning, and condemnation. But there was also celebration. Right-wing nationalists hailed the assassin as a hero. Some newspapers praised the killing; students in certain towns cheered (if you have read this post until here, you might have noticed this pattern: university students praising terrorism and killing—does it not ring a bell?). The murder was reframed not as a heinous crime but as a corrective, even patriotic sacrifice.
The assassination undermined democratic legitimacy. A president elected with minority support was seen not as democratic but treasonous. Democracy became defined in ethnic, exclusionary terms. Trust vanished. Moderates feared for their safety. Those who incited hatred saw its political effectiveness. Poland became entrapped by its own contradictions.
1924: The Murder of Giacomo Matteotti
Italy’s descent into dictatorship was not the product of ballots, but of violence. From 1921, Benito Mussolini’s Blackshirts spread terror—burning union offices, breaking strikes, beating and killing opponents. Their “March on Rome” in 1922 was less a revolution than a threat of civil war. King Victor Emmanuel III yielded, and Mussolini became prime minister. Political violence had proven its power.
The elections of April 1924 confirmed it. The Fascists claimed victory through intimidation and fraud. But one man dared to say so openly: Giacomo Matteotti, leader of the Unitary Socialist Party.
On May 30, he rose in the Chamber of Deputies and denounced the vote. With courage that silenced the room, he declared that no Italian had voted freely under the shadow of an armed militia. It was a direct challenge to the regime’s legitimacy—and his death sentence.
Eleven days later, on June 10, Matteotti was kidnapped and murdered by a Fascist squad. His body was dumped in the countryside outside Rome. The shock was immediate. Fascist pins vanished from lapels overnight. Mussolini’s antechamber, once crowded, stood deserted. The regime seemed shaken.
The opposition took the moral high ground. They withdrew from parliament in protest, staging the so-called “Aventine secession,” invoking the plebeians of ancient Rome who had once walked out against patrician rule. But this proved a fatal error. They believed the King would act, dismiss Mussolini, and restore legality. Instead, Victor Emmanuel chose passivity. Fear of civil war—and of the Blackshirts—outweighed loyalty to democracy.
The judiciary followed the same path. The trial of the assassins was a farce. Most were acquitted or sentenced lightly, only to be amnestied and freed. The message was clear: Fascist violence would never meet real punishment.
Sensing weakness, Mussolini struck back.
On January 3, 1925, he delivered his infamous speech, taking “political, moral, and historical responsibility” for all that had happened.
It was not a confession but a coronation. He placed himself above the law, daring anyone to challenge him. No one did.
The Matteotti affair marked the real birth of the Fascist dictatorship. Opposition was silenced, non-Fascist ministers were cast out, the press was muzzled, and a secret police was created. Giacomo Matteotti was not only murdered—he was weaponized. His death revealed the emptiness of Italy’s democratic institutions, and gave Mussolini the chance to tighten his grip. One man silenced, one democracy lost.
1927-1934: Austria's Spiral into Violence
The First Austrian Republic was born from the ashes of empire, but it was already fractured at its core. On one side stood Red Vienna, the jewel of Social Democracy with its vast municipal housing projects, cultural vibrancy, and the Republikanischer Schutzbund as its defender. On the other side, the conservative countryside rallied behind the Heimwehr, a paramilitary movement that began as local militias but evolved into a right-wing, anti-Marxist, and increasingly fascist force. Austria wasn't a country at peace—it was a powder keg waiting to explode.
The spark came in Schattendorf, 1927. During a demonstration, the right-wing Heimwehr members opened fire, killing an elderly man and a child. When a Vienna jury later acquitted the shooters, public outrage erupted. On July 14, furious crowds flooded the capital. The Palace of Justice was torched, a symbol of the legal system's corruption going up in flames. The state's response was merciless: police and army units opened fire, killing 89 demonstrators and wounding 600.
The message was unmistakable. In Austria, the state no longer stood above the conflict—it had chosen sides. Right-wing killers walked free while left-wing workers were gunned down in the streets. The judiciary and police had abandoned their role as neutral arbiters. They had become weapons wielded by one camp against the other.
After 1927, violence was no longer a byproduct of politics—it became politics itself. The Heimwehr grew in power, openly rejecting democracy and embracing fascist models by 1930. By February 1934, confrontation was inevitable. Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss, allied with the Heimwehr, unleashed artillery against Vienna's workers' districts. Shells pounded the Karl-Marx-Hof, the pride of Red Vienna's social housing, as the Schutzbund fought desperately with outdated rifles. The rebellion was crushed. The Social Democratic Party was banned, 10,000 Austrians imprisoned, and Austrian democracy extinguished.
There was no need to assassinate heads of state, ministers or courageous parliamentary members: the massacred civilians were enough, and the state apparatus quickly aligned with the program of dismantling the young republic step by step on the path to dictatorship.
1933 - 1938 From Fire to Pogrom: When the State Burns Itself
Back to Germany, we enter the 1930s—when the spiral of political violence culminated in fire and pogroms.
On 27 February 1933, just weeks after Hitler became chancellor, flames engulfed the Reichstag. A young Dutch communist, Marinus van der Lubbe, was caught at the scene, quickly tried, and executed. Whether he acted alone or was framed remains debated. What mattered, however, was not who lit the fire—but how the Nazis exploited it.
The Reichstag Fire became the founding crime of the dictatorship. Hitler and Göring immediately declared it proof of a vast communist conspiracy. Within hours, President Hindenburg signed the Reichstag Fire Decree, suspending civil liberties, permitting arbitrary arrests, and silencing the press. In a single stroke, democracy was gutted under the pretext of defending it from terror.
Five years later, in November 1938, another act of violence was seized upon—this time to target Jews. In Paris, 17-year-old Herschel Grynszpan, desperate after his family's brutal expulsion from Germany, shot German diplomat Ernst vom Rath. His act was not a plot or an attempt to reshape politics—merely the desperate action of a persecuted refugee.
The Nazis weaponized this incident. Joseph Goebbels, master propagandist, stood before party loyalists and declared the murder proof of a Jewish conspiracy. His speech was less commentary than coded command. That night, stormtroopers and SS units unleashed Kristallnacht—the "Night of Broken Glass."
The toll was devastating: 7,500 shops destroyed, 1,400 synagogues burned, at least 96 Jews murdered, and 30,000 men sent to concentration camps. To complete the humiliation, the Jewish community itself was fined one billion marks for the damage inflicted upon it.
These events marked the transition from political violence to state terror. In the early 1920s, assassinations of figures like Luxemburg, Erzberger, and Rathenau were carried out by extremists against the state, testing its resilience. By the late 1930s, the state itself had become the extremist. It had captured the courts, police, and press. The regime could now burn parliament to destroy democracy and exploit a teenager's bullet to justify the first pogrom of the Holocaust.
This was the ultimate lesson of Weimar's collapse: once democratic institutions are hollowed out, even a single spark—or a single gunshot—can be weaponized into a national bloodbath.
Today, tomorrow: the US and Europe
The spiral of political violence may seem distant, but is it really?
Look closer: patterns emerge. Ideological manipulation. Double standards in judging violence based on perpetrators. The celebration of bloodshed—once in newspapers, now on social media and even in universities. Universities, colleges, campuses: this may represent the greatest failure of our liberal dream: that education would foster a reasoning, tolerant society.
From a European perspective, one aspect of America remains shocking: how a democracy has coexisted with political assassination for centuries, almost as an accepted element of the system.
Four presidents killed in office: Abraham Lincoln (1865), James Garfield (1881), William McKinley (1901), John F. Kennedy (1963).
At least ten presidents attacked or nearly killed: Theodore Roosevelt (1912), Harry Truman (1950), Gerald Ford (twice in 1975), Ronald Reagan (1981), Donald Trump (2024).
And countless activists silenced by bullets: Huey Long (1935), Medgar Evers (1963), Malcolm X (1965), Martin Luther King Jr. (1968), Robert F. Kennedy (1968), Viola Liuzzo (1965).
For decades, these tragedies never appeared to undermine the stability of U.S. democracy. But now, the list grows—with shorter intervals, higher frequency, and sharper polarisation:
2011 – Gabby Giffords: U.S. Democratic Congresswoman gravely wounded in Arizona mass shooting; six others killed.
2020 – Ashli Babbitt: Shot by Capitol Police during January 6th. Became a martyr for the far right; the event was an attempted coup.
2020 – Garrett Foster: Shot during a Black Lives Matter protest in Austin. A case of racialised and political violence.
2020 – Aaron Danielson / Michael Reinoehl: Danielson, a far-right supporter, shot in Portland; Reinoehl killed by police days later. Reciprocal, polarised killings.
2021 – Paul Pelosi: The husband of Nancy Pelosi, attacked at home by an intruder with political motives. An example of violence spilling into private life.
2022 – Jeff German: Investigative journalist stabbed to death by a former politician he had exposed.
2025 – Melissa Hortman & husband, members of the Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party: Shot dead at home; the killer carried a list of targeted politicians and activists. Explicitly political targeting.
2025 – Charlie Kirk
Nobody seems willing to stop this trend. Quite the opposite.
Scholar Arie Perliger warns that political assassinations come in waves. Each one legitimises the next. Each bullet suggests violence is now an acceptable political tool. "This will not end here," he cautions, adding that campuses—once safe havens for debate—have become battlegrounds where discussion yields to hostility. Without swift action from leaders across the spectrum, history may mark this as a critical turning point. His interview is worth reading in full:
But what about Germany? What about Europe? Are they still safe havens? Hardly. A brief look at the past decade reveals:
Germany 2015: Henriette Reker stabbed on the eve of her mayoral election in Cologne, targeted by the extreme right for her refugee policy. She is now the Mayor of Köln.
UK 2016: Jo Cox, British Labour MP, murdered by a far-right extremist.
Germany 2019: Walter Lübcke, CDU politician, shot by a far-right extremist for defending refugees.
UK 2021: David Amess, Conservative MP, stabbed during a constituency meeting by an ISIS sympathiser.
Slovakia 2024: Robert Fico, Slovak PM, shot and critically wounded.
Denmark 2024: Mette Frederiksen, Danish PM, attacked in Copenhagen.
Europe is not immune. The difference is that we too often miss the broader European perspective. We frame each incident as a "national tragedy"—rarely as part of a continental pattern. This is an illusion.
Europe's reaction to Charlie Kirk's assassination reveals a troubling pattern. A wave of emotion swept through our media, treating the killing of an American activist with minimal European relevance as our own tragedy. Why such intensity? Perhaps because, at a fundamental level, this response serves a purpose: deepening polarisation and widening societal divisions.
No—we are not Weimar. Not yet. But the slide in that direction requires less than we might think. Stay vigilant. And learn—from the past, and from the present.
The attachment includes supplementary materials to this post: three book recommendations — sorry, only one in English — and an appendix containing quotes collected after Charlie Kirk's assassination. For our future memory.
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