Frank McDonough

Frank McDonough read history at Balliol and took his doctorate at Lancaster, and has spent his career on Germany between the wars. The Weimar Years, published in 2023, covers 1918 to 1933 and stands as the prequel to his two-volume history of the regime that followed. His argument is parliamentary before it is anything else: that the republic's real failure was the inability of its elected assembly to produce a stable government, that public confidence drained away as cabinet followed cabinet, and that by the end the Reichstag had been sidelined by presidential decree long before the change of government in January 1933. He gives the culture of the period as much room as the politics. His earlier books include a study of the secret police and a life of Sophie Scholl, and he writes for a general readership rather than for the seminar.