Scheidemann had already declared a Republic in Berlin the previous November, against Ebert's wishes, and Ebert had a point that this may have been premature. Then there came an election and the Republic was declared again, but not in Berlin. It was in Weimar.
Weimar was supposed to symbolise a rebirth of German Occident-facing Kultur, against Prussian militarism. The Prussians and militarists chose to interpret this site as an insult. As Gerwarth warns us, we cannot let 1930s propaganda influence our assessment of 1919. Still.
HBDChick is another source Gerwarth should have used and didn't. She could explain how the divisions across the Elbe are real - real before the Berlin Wall.
1919 Weimar is the ancestor to Bundesrepublik Bonn.
I commend the French to "thank" that the Bundesrepublik didn't form at the time, perhaps even including the Germanophone pieces of now-defunct Austria. (No less a liberal than Ebert was promoting Anschluss in 1919.) I recall somewhere - Belloc maybe - a claim that Clemenceau the laïcist nixed at Versailles the possibility of a [Catholic] German state along the Rhine. Further research points otherwise, for instance McCrum "French Rhineland Policy at the Paris Peace Conference, 1919" (1978), doi 10.2307/2638928 - one more article Gerwarth didn't read. Abel and Bryant record how the French cut off the Rhineland as a "separate state" under French occupation. It wasn't that the French opposed a Rhineland Catholic state... it's that the French tried to create one, by force.
These Germans truly desired autonomy from Berlin, and may have accepted independence; but not at the pleasure of Paris.
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