*chop flashbacks ensue

I would like to point out that you did point out that Hindenberg appointed Hitler as Chancellor. He also gave the Chancellor emergency powers soon after in the Enabling Act. These were actions he was allowed under the Weimar constitution.

As with anything, causes are complex and numerous. The economic crisis was causing lots of instability, but Hindenberg did not have to do either of these things. It could be said that because the Republic was set up with the President with some certain powers, the Republic was "doomed" because if that person made one bad decision with no checks or balances, the whole thing would most certainly collapse.

It didn't "fail", it was destroyed. It was not a foregone conclusion that it was going to collapse. If the nazis hadn't been let off so light after the Beer Hall Putsch it's possible the Weimar Republic would never have gone down or been overthrown.

Germany indeed was one of the largest economies in the world but the reparations where so high that it was almost impossible to pay them while this trouble was going on especially in the early years. Germany paid the last installment in 1989, so it wasn't only the willingness that lacked.

The Treaty of Versailles was meant to prevent the Germans from ever having the power to start another war of that scale again (mostly by the French). No one wanted the Weimar Republic to fail, as that would concentrate power with a few individuals.

The problem of reparations can be seen in two lights: willingness to pay, and ability to pay. Germany was one of the largest economies in the world, so the ability to pay shouldn't really be questioned. It was the willingness to pay that was the problem. Who are you going to tax to raise the reparation funds? No one was willing to pay a tax for the war that Germany had been winning right until the end. So they printed money and borrowed foreign currency in international markets.

It was in 1932 when the Americans called in those loans to Germany. This essentially crashed their economy again and made Hitler look like a prophet (he stated that the Americans were not their friends and would financially ruin Germany only months before). Hitler fully intended to do away with the republic if elected, and did it within weeks of becoming Chancellor. It wasn't a guaranteed failure, but it was an explicit goal of the Nazi party.

You can't act much differently than they did. It was an armed uprising attempting to overthrow the government and introduce a communist dictatorship in Germany.

> two Viking sagas...known collectively as the Vinland sagas

Hey wait a minute

Yes, but what I'm saying is that if the SPD would have acted differently in 1918/19, then the KPD might have either been an even smaller party because the SPD would have integrated more of their voters into itself, or not felt the need to simply become a Muscowian puppet party.

>Under the leadership of Ernst Thälmann from 1925 the party became thoroughly Stalinist and loyal to the leadership of the Soviet Union, and from 1928 it was largely controlled and funded by the Comintern in Moscow. Under Thälmann's leadership the party directed most of its attacks against the Social Democratic Party of Germany, which it regarded as its main adversary and referred to as "social fascists"; the KPD considered all other parties in the Weimar Republic to be "fascists".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Party_of_Germany

That’s not what I said at all. What I meant was that the SPD split up into two parties shortly before the Weimar Republic was created, the SPD and the USPD, who would later become the KPD. If the SPD would have at least managed to keep a working relationship with the USPD, the Reichstag could have continued to function and there would have been no need for the Notstandsgesetze.

Sure the Weimar Republic had huge problems from the get go. Mostly due to the Versailles treaty demands they had no say on this at all. Every German felt backstabbed. But the first years up till 1923 the republic was blooming right until the Beurskrach though in 1929. After that it went downhill and became a rich soil for extreme parties. The money they where borrowing from the United-States just stopped.

1924 is a good example of how the Weimar was modestly solid in the earlier years. Hitler’s first grab for power completely failed in that year, due to misjudging the whole situation.

Sure, everything would've been fine had Germany just allied with Stalin who were murdering millions way before Hitler got going.

It didn't go down, it was put down through intimidation, violence and murder.

Gudrid’s name appears in two Viking sagas: specifically, The Saga of the Greenlanders and The Saga of Eirik the Red, known collectively as the Vinland sagas.

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>Unlike Kings/Queens in the West, the Japanese Emperor is a descendant of the Sun God Amaterasu

The British Royal family trace lineage on their German side to Wotan (Odin), so it's not all that exceptional. Also, there were Japanese willing to go to war against their Emperor, so deification had its limits. The rest of your answer does a good job of summarizing the significance of the Meiji restoration. But I think it was less important than you might think. The samurai, which had been the most powerful land-owning class, simply transformed into banks and companies of which many today still share their roots. On the surface, everything changed. But underneath, not as much.

It's why if you visit today, Japan seems westernized. But actually, it has retained its culture. The reason the Japanese are happy to build KFC restaurants and French patisseries is because they don't feel threatened by a foreign cultural invasion, as they're so assured in their own. There's a comforting permanency to living in a place like that, but being slow to change also means people are still stuck in an almost feudal mindset (shakkei, feminism, racism, and so on). You're right that Sakoku, where Japan closed its borders for 200 years, is probably the reason they were late to adopt nationalism. But its ironically also how the Japanese have maintained a coherent and shared cultural identity. Specifically, its not just Sakoku but being protected from external threats. Being an island alone is not enough. The Mongol invasion was famously thwarted by the Kamikaze, but there weren't many other threats. You compare that to an island nation like Britain that was successively invaded or threatened by Anglo-Saxons, Norse, and Normans, the Spanish, the French and Germans, and its easy to see why Sakoku wasn't an option in Western Europe.

It's not news to be, but still, any time I read about how vikings interacted with native americans, it blows my mind.

To a large extent voting laws were based off land ownership. The man voted because the land was in his name, but it was viewed as the vote of the family.

In the west , more than most other places, you had many single women who owned land and ran businesses. It just made sense that these women, as land owners, should vote.

Many of these states biggest cities were brothel towns that were left after the hell on wheels. Leading to many of their founders and philanthropists being women who owned or use to own brothels: https://youtu.be/fMycRBIXTWk

Dan Carlin did an insanely great podcast on this whole thing called ‘supernova in the East’. I suggest it to everyone but I am now suggesting it to you. It’s 5 episodes at 3-4 hours a piece and super interesting.

Another reason was that living out in the wilderness of the West was quite difficult and everyone had to work for the community and that included women. There was no time for gender norms as survival takes precedence. This led to women doing lots of work and being seen as men's equals.

Ummm... as a Utahn I hate to correct you but Utah was made a state in 1896. Women did have the right to vote in the territory of Deseret from 1870 but that right was removed by congress in 1887. It was restored when Deseret became the state of Utah. It was written into the state constitution. So they missed the election of 1892.

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It also very much didn’t help that the SPD antagonised the far-left forces right from the get-go and used the military on them.

The Weimar was against the odds from the beginning. Germany was previously just a group of principalities followed by a short term monarchy. The Weimar was foisted upon the German people by the winners of WWI so it wasn't even a government of their own choosing. Still...it may have been successful had it not be for war reparations and the Great Depression. France in particular was still exacting their pound of flesh which made life difficult, manageable but difficult. But then the Depression more or less doomed the country and made German society ripe for extremism. An extremist, in the form of Hitler, who played on age long bigotries against jews...telling the German people what's wrong and who to blame for their lot in life. Mainly...the former allies holding back German nationalism and the 'jewish problem' which was rotting German society from within.