BOOK REVIEW: Vertigo (The Rise and Fall of Weimar Germany)

By Harald Jahner, translated by Shaun Whiteside. Basic Books, New York. Hard cover, 454 pp.

For the first time in two decades, according to a recent study by the political science faculty of the University of Gothenburg, there are more closed autocracies in the world than liberal democracies. The democratic decline, according to the report, has been most dramatic in the Pacific region, Eastern Europe, Central Asia, Latin America, and the Carib…