17 February 2013: Connecting Family and Society, Part 1



Schloss Biebrich
Augusta's Wiesbaden home

 Where the classroom and role play begin to mix is at the point where I needed to bring some distinct detail to Augusta's personal history.  The basic teaching according to Virginia Standards of Learning for this period (WHII.11b and WHII.11c) do not actually require any great deal of depth on Weimar.  Indeed, the word "Weimar" does not appear in any SOL related documents found on the Virginia DoE website.  However, understanding Weimar is crucial in understanding the Third Reich.

There is more openness in the IB curriculum that I teach.  One of the topic options is "The Rise and Rule of Single Party States" and while we don't formally teach this one at my school, it does relate to the "Causes, Practices, and Effects of War" topic.  So I tend to wrap the two in together, as the resolution of World War 1 is a contributing factor to the start of World War 2.  Therefore, I can put much more time and detail into teaching Weimar at this level.

In my own classroom, I have found students of both 9th grade World History 2 and 12th grade Twentieth Century Topics to be fascinated by the question, "How did someone like Hitler get into power?"  And it's an important question, not easily satisfied by simply telling them that things were bad after World War 1.  Important questions are often not easily explained either, like many core questions we are asked to teach.  Any society has a multifaceted complexity to it, so the next step was to find out what happened to the different strata of post-WW1 German society, and make sure that Augusta's backstory was reflecting that appropriately.

There is an abundance of generalized evidence for how the overall German economy impacted people's lives after the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles were imposed.  But as is the case with most of history, the generalizations do not tell the complete story, and won't adequately answer the question. 



Augusta in a
1920s day dress



 Choices I had made in various roleplay sims set up my choice of Augusta Maria Carolina von Nassau-Weilburg, as previously discussed.  What I began to do was to look for resources to facilitate my knowledge of how the upper classes in Weimar dealt with their changed status.  To many today, it appears that the landed elite suffered very little change, however this was far from the truth under the surface.  There is a lot more to Augusta that lies under the surface she portrays in Berlin.

They still held much of their traditional land, although significant portions of their holdings had to be transferred to the state.  Officially, there was to be no more privilege of rank in German society; German political culture retained the traditional stratification and expectations between social strata.  Outwardly, the landed elite appeared to maintain their high standards of wealth.  In reality, the upper classes were hit just as hard by the hyperinflation of the early 1920s, retaining non-liquid sources of wealth that could not be easily transferred to "real money" that could be spent.