Today 100 Years Ago: April 26 , 1925

Looking Back a Century

Every morning in 2025 my news feeds are stuffed with AI-generated headlines and real-time drone footage. But what caught the world’s eye on this very date in 1925? Let’s crank the calendar back exactly one hundred years and step into a Europe still nursing the wounds of World War I—and about to make a decision whose ripple effects would define the next generation.

1. Germany Elects Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg as President

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Berlin, Sunday, 26 April 1925.
Polling stations opened under gray spring skies while nervous Weimar officials prayed the fragile young republic would hold together for one more day. The ballot pitted centrist Chancellor Wilhelm Marx—backed by Social Democrats and liberals—against Paul von Hindenburg, the 77-year-old First World War hero lionized by conservatives and monarchists.

💬 Even the posters felt like a referendum on history: Marx promising pragmatic renewal; Hindenburg wrapped in the aura of imperial nostalgia.

When the votes were tallied that night, Hindenburg secured roughly 48 % to Marx’s 45 %, becoming the second President of the Weimar Republic. Newspapers across Europe hailed a “return of the old order,” while worried editorialists in Paris and London feared that elevating a septuagenarian general might embolden Germany’s radical right.

Why It Mattered

• Hindenburg inherited sweeping constitutional powers—Article 48 allowed emergency rule by decree.
• In eight short years, he would appoint Adolf Hitler chancellor, setting the stage for the Nazi dictatorship.

2025 Lens

• Germany today is on its third woman chancellor, coalition politics are the norm, and voter turnout still hovers near 75 %—a testament to lessons painfully learned after 1925.
• The idea of electing a wartime field marshal at 77 feels ordinary in an era where multiple G7 leaders are septuagenarians, but the stakes in 1925 were existential for a democracy on life support.

Quick Glimpse: What Else Filled the Front Pages?

While the Hindenburg victory dominated headlines, Paris fashion circles buzzed about the imminent opening of the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs (two days away), and American tabloids followed an obscure Tennessee schoolteacher quietly breaking the state’s new anti-evolution law. Both stories would bloom in the days ahead—but April 26, 1925 belonged to Germany’s ballot boxes.

Closing Reflection

One hundred years on, the Weimar election reads like a cautionary tale in slow motion: a divided electorate, nostalgia for “strong leadership,” and constitutional loopholes ripe for exploitation. As we debate algorithmic misinformation and voter apathy in 2025, the ghosts of 1925 remind us that the future often hinges on an ordinary Sunday at the polls.