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This is a synthesis and evaluation of the complex historiography of the Weimar Republic and the rise of Hitler. It explores the major themes and debates and draws widely on research, particularly that of German scholars. Three distinctive approaches to the history of the Weimar Republic are identified: the perception of Weimar democracy as being crippled at birth by the survival of pre-modern elites and structures embedded in German society; the claim that the Republic fell as a result of a crisis of capitalism; and the representation of the failure of the Weimar Republic as emanating from the "crisis of classical modernity". The tensions between these different approaches continue to exercise historians and run through this work.