Writing about Weimar and (Neo)Nazism from Mexico: Paul Merker and Vicente Lombardo Toledano

Abstract

In 1944 appeared in Mexico La caída de la República de Weimar, translation into Castilian of the first part of the book Deutschland, Sein oder nicht Sein, written by Paul Merker, German communist exiled in Mexico. The book includes two interesting prefaces written by Merker and by Vicente Lombardo Toledano, a key figure of Mexican socialism in the twentieth century. Those introductory texts are interesting in order to understand the different ways into socialism that, by the middle of the 1940s, were put into practice in Europe and Latin America. Merker’s book also represents a critical history of the Weimar Republic, conceived as a “laboratory” of authoritarian and violent strategies against bolshevism. His vision is at odds with the idealized perspective –today predominant– of the Weimar Republic as the first German democracy and a glorious episode in the history of its social democracy.