I am currently at the preliminary stages of some Weimar research and was hoping if some fellow historians could help me avoid the "feeling around in the dark" phase of the literature hunt. Thus far I have found that quitea lot of the literature seems interested in finding a path to the 3rd Reich rather than a in-depth analysis of political composition of the time. Anywho thanks in advance!
there unfortunately is a tendency in Weimar historiography to emphasize "all roads lead to Hitler" and it is present even in texts that try to break away from this paradigm. But here's some suggestions:
Detlev Peukert's The Weimar Republic has a justly deserved reputation as a classic in the field. Although the Third Reich teleology is present, Peukert explains how the Republic fell apart in a concise manner.
Weimar Publics/ Weimar Subjects:Rethinking the Political Culture of Germany in the 1920s edited by Kathleen Canning, Kerstin Barndt, and Kristin McGuire is an anthology of current scholarship on a diverse array of subjects ranging from cinema to economics.
Anthony McElligott's Rethinking the Weimar Republic: Authority and Authoritarianism, 1916-1936 inverts the standard narrative of failure of Weimar by showing the degrees of continuity between Weimar and the Third Reich. McElligott uses the concept of authority and its various Weimar discourses about it to parse out the how the Republic's minds sought out total solutions to the problem of authority.
Finally, Beyond Glitter and Doom: The Contingency of the Weimar Republic edited by Jochen Hung, Godela Weiss-Sussex and Geoff Wilkes sounds right up your alley. It's based off of current German research and as it says on the tin, the anthology treats the Weimar Republic on its own terms. Unfortunately, the anthology has no US publisher that I am aware of, so ordering from the UK or an academic library would be the way to get access to this text.