Today: Headlines from March 30, 1925

A Century in the Rear-View Mirror

Every morning in 2025 feels turbo-charged by AI feeds and quantum-tinged headlines, but pause for a moment and ask: what had the world buzzing exactly one hundred years ago?
Today we rewind to the spring of 1925, when radio was still magic, Europe nursed war wounds, and the word “television” sounded like science fiction.

1. Germans Queue for History – First Direct Presidential Election (29 March 1925)

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One day before our calendar’s “today,” voters across the Weimar Republic stood in long, orderly lines outside schools and beer-halls that had been hastily converted into polling stations. It was the first time in German history—and one of the earliest occasions anywhere—that a nation chose its head of state by direct popular vote.

• Why it mattered: President Friedrich Ebert’s death in February left a leadership vacuum in a fragile democracy still staggering under hyper-inflation’s shadow. Roughly 77 % of eligible Germans cast ballots—a turnout modern democracies would envy.

• The front-runners: Conservative Karl Jarres topped the first round with about 39 % of the vote, trailed by centrist Wilhelm Marx and Social Democrat Otto Braun. Communist firebrand Ernst Thälmann siphoned off the radical left. Because no one crossed the 50 % threshold, a runoff loomed. Within days, right-wing parties swapped Jarres for a living legend: Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg. That strategic switch would redefine German—and ultimately world—politics when Hindenburg won the second ballot a month later and later appointed an obscure agitator named Adolf Hitler as chancellor.

• Then vs. now: In 1925 campaigns relied on posters, newspaper editorials, and stump speeches crackling over primitive loudspeakers. Fast-forward to 2025 and Germany’s presidents are elected in parliament, but campaign messaging is sharpened by micro-targeted social media and fact-checking bots. One constant endures: the search for leaders able (or unable) to guard democracy from its own extremes.

Quick Glance Down the Time-Tunnel

Had you opened a newspaper on 30 March 1925, this election dominated the international pages, with smaller columns about a new Tutankhamun exhibit in London and rumors of a sensational “talking picture” technology coming out of Hollywood. It was a world teetering between the Jazz Age’s optimism and the storm clouds of economic and political upheaval.

From our 2025 vantage point—where counting ballots can involve blockchain audits and drones deliver the morning coffee—the spectacle of millions of Germans marking paper slips under gaslight reminds us that democracy’s nuts and bolts haven’t changed all that much.

Thanks for traveling back with me. Tomorrow’s news may be written in algorithms, but yesterday’s echoes are never far away.