With his reconstruction of the “gradual elimination, disempowerment, and destruction” (reviewer's translation) of the Weimar parliament, Philipp Austermann, an expert on state and European law both in theory and practice, tries to reach two goals at once: to present a “reference for anyone interested in learning more about the work of the Reichstag” during the last three years of the Weimar Republic and a passionate “plea for liberal parliamentarianism” addressed to the people and politicians of today (13).

As to be expected, these two goals contradict each other. Epistemologically it seems counterproductive to assess the Reichstag at a time when its legislative power was already limited by the various states of emergency issued by the executive powers. As Austermann rightly points out, from 1930 to 1933 the republic underwent a change from a parliamentary democracy to a presidential system. But according to Austermann, the fate of Weimar's democracy lay in the hands of a few “wrong m[e]n” (164): the Chancellors Heinrich Brüning, Kurt von Schleicher and Franz von Papen, as well as Reichspräsident Paul von Hindenburg, serving as Hitler's “Steigbügelhalter” (224).

Reproducing the classical plot of Weimar as a tragedy, Austermann opens his “drama” (91) with a parallelization of Germany in the 1920s and the 2020s, based on the popular, but premodern assumption that history could repeat itself. In chapter two he repeats the list of “fatal” continuities between the Weimar Republic and the German Empire (47). Consequently, in chapter three, the Reichstag's productive work in the “Golden Twenties” is presented only to highlight Weimar's “permanent mode of crisis” (15). Finally, the focus shifts to the last and “lethal phase of the crisis“ (15): the parliament's “semi”, then “anti”, and finally “sham existence” (98, 167, 261), before the author closes with an outlook on the violent aftermath of the burning of the Reichstag and Hitler's Enabling Act.

The approach to depict the Reichstag as a reflection of the republic' fate is less innovative than the book's back cover suggests. In sharp contrast to the nuanced picture painted by Thomas Mergel in Parliamentarische Kultur in der Weimarer Republik (2002), Austermann's teleological portrayal of the Weimar Republic as a ‘democracy born to die' even falls short of scholarly conceptions of the 1950s and 1960s, when learning from the “failures” of Weimar was supposed to guarantee Bonn's success. While Fritz René Alleman famously declared that Bonn is not Weimar (1956), Austermann repeatedly wonders why Weimar was not like Bonn. He accuses the Reichstag of not having acted as consensually as the Bundestag, for instance—despite the fact that the compromise-oriented manner in which the new “people's parties” interacted with one another after World War II was one of the many lessons learned from Weimar. Why this anachronistic form of historical judgment might be useful for delivering a verdict but renders the actual historical processes invisible is convincingly explained in Friedrich Balke and Benno Wagner's volume Der Fall Bonn Weimar. Vom Nutzen und Nachteil historischer Vergleiche (1997).

Austermann's intention to combine the genres of textbook and political pamphlet leads to many more contradictions, concerning, for instance, the role of the media in the 1920s. With the aim to warn against the disruptive effects of social networks today, Austermann condemns the party press of the 1920s as “hostile to democracy and parliament” (13). However, he is also convinced that “Brüning should have used more modern media” to reach the people (164). Another paradox resulting from blending genres and contexts undermines Austermann's central argument: from the very beginning, he underlines the Reichstag's “unwillingness to compromise” (91). In the end, he claims the opposite: It was not the Reichstag, but rather the Reichskanzler who acted irresponsibly. The Parliament could have formed a majority, passed laws effectively, and saved Weimar's democracy—if only the incapable and “weak . . . Ersatzkaiser” would have let it (98-100, 122-124).

After all, the misleading mixture of statistics and explanations of election results within each chapter as well as in the appendix, framed by alternative speculations about Weimar's future and the destinies of its central figures, could only be bookended by truisms such as “votes for radicals are never a good idea” (14) or “a voice for extremist parties with populist slogans is always a wrongly used voice” (269).