Deutsches Historisches

Today during our afternoon off, Kate, Alex and I decided to check out the Deutsches Historisches Museum, or German Historical Museum. We only had a couple hours, so I cherry-picked from the different eras I found most interesting, as the museum is organized in sections of about 20-year time spans. The most fascinating was definitely the section on the interwar Weimar Republic. I spent some time studying it last year in one of my comparative poli sci courses on modern democracies. We read this really intriguing book called The Nazi Seizure of Power, which followed the NSDAP's rise in a single German town called Northeim. The interwar section of the museum was full of election posters from the famous 1932 election in which the NSDAP began their takeover, photos from political rallies and tons of other memorbilia. Those objects really served as reminder that although it was a seriously flawed, the political system under which Hitler was able to build up his power was at least nominally democratic. It's one thing to read about that process in a book, it's another to see the tangible evidence that it actually occurred.