"The political and cultural lessons drawn from the collapse of the Weimar Republic are invoked in order to understand contemporary threats to democracy. The contributors challenge the validity of these lessons, the extent to which they reflect political agendas, and how they are brought to bear on contemporary political problems"--

1. Why Weimar? Richard Ned Lebow and Ludvig Norman; 2. An unheroic but understandable failure: German social democrats and the collapse of the Weimar Republic Douglas Webber; 3. Bonn's Weimar Peter C. Caldwell; 4. The paradigmatic example of Weimar and postwar political science: the case of Otto Kirchheimer Peter Breiner; 5. Swedish social democracy and Weimar: engineering the democratic population with the Myrdals Ludvig Norman; 6. Our past, Weimar's present: democracy's defense and the inversion of an historical lesson Amel Ahmed; 7. Weimar on the Potomac? Leo Strauss goes to Washington William E. Scheuerman; 8. Shadows of Babylon and shreds of artificial silk: cultural and political legacies in the contemporary television series 'Babylon Berlin' Jill Suzanne Smith; 9. Militant democracy: a (supposed) Weimar lesson revisited Jan-Werner Müller; 10. Weimar and modernity Richard Ned Lebow and Ludvig Norman.