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What everyone gets wrong about Weimar
Speech wasn't so free. But that's only half the story.
Jonathan M. Katz
February 21, 2025
Yesterday I wrote about JD Vance’s claim to have been merely defending “free speech” in his Munich address.1 (You can read that piece here.) Today I’m doing part 2, evaluating the claim, put forward by Margaret Brennan on CBS’s Face the Nation, that the problem with this was that he did so while “standing in a country where free speech was weaponized to conduct a genocide.”
Not exactly. This is a myth that’s so widespread it has a nickname — I’ll talk more about that in a second. But, contrary to some who tried dunking on her, she was touching some real currents in both the history of the rise of the Nazis and fascist rhetoric before and since. I plan to talk about both of those at length in my upcoming book. But given the precarious point we are at in history, I think it’d be useful to share some of it now.
The knee-jerk response to Brennan’s comment was voiced immediately by her guest, Secretary of State Marco Rubio: “Free speech was not used to conduct a genocide … There was no free speech in Nazi Germany.” Brennan didn’t bother countering that, and the interview ended right after, so it’s impossible to say what she was thinking. But if I had to guess, it would have gone something like: No, Mr. Secretary, I was talking about the rise of the Nazis, not what they did once they were in power.
I say that because, generally, that’s what people mean when they make that argument, not that the Nazis loved free speech so much they killed the Jews with free speech or whatever nonsense Rubio and conservative columnists think they heard. But a big problem remains: namely that the Weimar Republic — the German system from 1918 to 1933 in which the Nazis formed, rose, and ultimately seized total control — was not the free-speech wonderland that people raised on popular fiction and productions of Cabaret might imagine …
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