Katja Hoyer for Weimar

'A fresh and gripping account of the interwar years seen through the lens of Germany's most legendary town. Brilliantly researched, this is history at its very best' - Julia Boyd, award-winning author of Travellers in the Third Reich.

From bestselling historian Katja Hoyer comes a gripping story of life during the rise and reign of Hitler through the eyes of the people of Weimar.

Weimar looms large in German history: a crucible of democracy and dictatorship. This ancient town nestled in the heart of the country was home to some of Europe's greatest thinkers, Goethe and Schiller, Liszt and Nietzsche among them. It gave its name to the ambitious Weimar Republic crafted in the aftermath of the First World War. But it was also where fascism took hold. Where Bauhaus architects first experimented with new ways of living, Buchenwald was dug out of a beech forest.

Weimar shows us a town and its people on the edge of catastrophe. Drawing on a wealth of new archival research, acclaimed historian Katja Hoyer takes us from 1919 to 1939 as she tells the stories of the men and women who lived through the new republic and Hitler's regime. We encounter a vividly drawn cast of characters, from bookbinder Carl Weirich and hotel owners Rosa and Arthur Schmidt, to Friedrich Nietzsche's sister Elisabeth. Here are fascists and socialists, artists and workers, politicians and citizens, who, as the events of history swept them up, became witnesses, perpetrators, victims and bystanders.

An unforgettable picture of lives and choices in extraordinary circumstances, Weimar takes us deep into the heart of the storm - to the town that dreamt of a better world, and woke up to tyranny.

Katja Hoyer is a German-British historian and journalist. She is a Visiting Research Fellow at King's College London and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Her debut book Blood and Iron was well received by academics and critics. Her second book Beyond the Wall was a Sunday Times bestseller and long-listed for the prestigious Baillie Gifford Prize.

She is currently a columnist for the Berliner Zeitung. She is a regular contributor to Bloomberg, The Spectator, The Daily Telegraph and UnHerd and has also worked as a columnist for The Washington Post. She occasionally writes for a range of other newspapers such as The Financial Times, The Times, The Guardian and Die Welt on current political affairs in Germany and Europe as well as history and books.