From women in the workplace to traffic lights, from yo-yos to dance culture, Jahner tracks the 15 chaotic years of the Weimar Republic with his characteristic verve and attention to detail. This is one of the most gripping accounts of an era spanning war defeat, humiliation and failed revolution in 1918 to the violence, intimidation and propaganda of the Nazis' rise to power in 1933. It contains many lessons for the world now. * John Kampfner, bestselling author of Why the Germans Do it Better * Vertigo is outstanding. Harald Jahner's gift for illuminating the big picture with telling detail gives the reader an uncanny sense of what it was actually like to be present in Germany during the Weimar Republic. This is history at its very best. * Julia Boyd, bestselling author of Travellers in the Third Reich and A Village in the Third Reich * Wonderfully written and compulsively, electrifyingly readable. The Weimar Republic and its chilling fall is - like Shakespearean tragedy - an enduringly fascinating, profoundly human story. And with consummate skill and a rich breadth of research, Harald Jahner makes us look again at what we thought we knew and gives this history new, extraordinary depth. Taking us through the neurotic violence of the 1918 German revolution, and the neon flowering of Weimar art and culture, thence to the dark rise of Hitler, Jahner deftly overturns many old assumptions about economics and politics along the way. And against this backdrop, he also invites us to explore everything from nude gymnastics to modernist architecture, fast cars to dance halls and, fundamentally, love and loss and the cold horror of hate. * Sinclair McKay, bestselling author of Berlin and Dresden * Any decent centrist will shiver at this wonderfully illustrated account of how Weimar's heady metropolitan progressiveness failed to cope with loss of national pride, technological modernism, social change, early globalisation and financial crash. The confidence of the middle classes was lost, readying them to accept wild conspiracy theories: a new fusion of hard left and hard right, National Socialism, was swept to power by Germany's flyover country, with disastrous results which the traditional elites only saw too late. A priceless lesson for anybody interested in Germany then - or the world today. * James Hawes, bestselling author of The Shortest History of Germany *

Harald J hner (Author) Harald J hner is a cultural journalist and former editor of the Berliner Zeitung. He was also an honorary professor of cultural journalism at the Berlin University of the Arts. His book Aftermath- Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich was shortlisted for the 2021 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction in the UK and won the Leipzig Book Fair Prize for Non-Fiction in his native Germany. Shaun Whiteside (Translator) Shaun Whiteside is an award-winning translator from French, German, Italian and Dutch. His most recent translations from German include Aftermath by Harald J hner, To Die in Spring by Ralf Rothmann, Swansong 1945 by Walter Kempowski, Berlin Finale by Heinz Rein and The Broken House by Horst Kr ger.