![]() This commonly involves the search for parallels between that time and today, as though such correspondences might predict humanity’s future. Weimar is much invoked nowadays, by pundits and experts alike. Weimar Germany-poised between the catastrophe of World War I and the even greater calamity of Nazism and the Holocaust-has been portrayed as the quintessential “society in crisis.” Above all, it is Weimar Germany-poised between the catastrophe of World War I and the even greater calamity of Nazism and the Holocaust-that has been portrayed as the quintessential “society in crisis.” Perhaps no part of the historian’s guild is better placed to ponder the meaning of crisis than historians of Germany, a nation whose atrocities and traumas, and willingness to grapple with their meaning, are unsurpassed in modern times. Historians are well suited to address such questions, given their training in alertness to context, eye for continuity and change, and ornery eagerness to question the terms of debate. CARL DE SOUZA/JOHN THYS/SAKIS MITROLIDIS/KEREM YUCEL/AFP via Getty Images ![]() Scenes from 2020’s crises, clockwise from left: Activists in Brazil dig 100 mock graves symbolizing deaths from COVID-19 in Rio de Janeiro on June 11 to protest against Brazil’s governance during the pandemic the Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg takes part in a Youth Strike 4 Climate protest march in Brussels on March 6 migrants wait on the Turkish side of the Greece-Turkey border on March 2 and a couple hugs and cries next to a makeshift memorial to George Floyd, near the site where he died in police custody, in Minneapolis on June 6. How is it, then, that the term “crisis” should apply across so many fields-foreign affairs, domestic politics, climate, culture, economics, to name only a few? Does “crisis” have any meaning, beyond just a catch-all term for “trouble”? Is there any logic, or novelty, to the constant proclamations of crisis? None of these problems can be isolated each extends into other domains embroiled in their own dysfunction, with the result that the world feels entangled in overlapping and intersecting crises. ![]() Yet these problems, as awful and intractable as they are, add layers to an already familiar crisis atmosphere: There is also the environmental crisis, the health care crisis, the energy crisis, the housing crisis, the drug crisis, the debt crisis, the migrant crisis, the education crisis, and the marriage crisis. ![]() A “crisis of legitimacy,” perhaps even a “crisis of emergency powers,” looms on the horizon. And Americans move nervously toward a presidential election whose results, regardless of the outcome, will be thrown into doubt by accusations of foreign meddling or partisan hijacking. Journalists speak of a “crisis of police violence” against Black people in the United States, a slow-burn tragedy that sparked a “crisis of civil unrest” after the killing of George Floyd. Crisis nearly always describes the coronavirus pandemic and the economic turmoil it has unleashed. It has named the “impeachment crisis” and the “constitutional crisis” many thought it revealed, themselves signs of the “crisis of polarization” in U.S. No word is invoked more to characterize the current era than “crisis.” The term has been wielded incessantly in 2020-already the most tumultuous year since 1968 and still only half over-to designate a series of new and ongoing plights.
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