Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy

"There are a lot of books that serve as general histories of the Weimar Republic. Weitz’s book is one of the more recent ones. It’s about ten years old, and it picks up on many of the things that I mentioned earlier: not reading Weimar history backwards, trying to acknowledge—as the title suggests—some of the promise and some of the achievements, while also, of course, acknowledging that, particularly in the period after the Great Depression, there was an unravelling of democracy. I think Weitz gets that balance right. It is excellent on the artistic and literary scene, particularly on the cultural scene in Berlin. There’s also an excellent chapter called ‘Walking the City’, in which the author becomes a kind-of flâneur himself, playing with that prominent genre of the interwar period, where writers scribble down their impressions as they walk a cityscape. “The Bauhaus had a lasting impact on modern architecture and design around the world—so Weimar is still with us in many ways” It’s both very accessibly written and a great general introduction to the subject matter. I think it has a lot to offer, particularly for those who are interested in art and culture. Weimar culture is something that still speaks to us today in many ways, some aspects of it more obvious than others. Weimar paintings hang in galleries around the world, from George Grosz to Max Liebermann and many others, and fetch pretty steep prices at auction. The Bauhaus had a lasting impact on modern architecture and design around the world, from high-end products to IKEA furniture, which follows the philosophy of the Bauhaus—form follows function. Weimar is still with us in many ways. Also if you think about Weimar philosophy, Martin Heidegger’s work Being and Time is one of the most important philosophical works of the 20th century. It inspired many post-1945 philosophical debates in a really fundamental way, notably existentialism , but also post-modernism, with its focus on the human condition in modern times. And yet, Heidegger became a Nazi sympathiser and rector of his university after 1933, in spite of the fact that, in earlier years, he had famously had a romantic relationship with Hannah Arendt , his student, who was Jewish. These contradictions are described very well. I think that, more generally, Weitz captures Weimar’s contradictions very well, its modernity and the adversaries of that modernity. That’s a very interesting question. Many of the modernist movements precede World War I. So, in some ways, Weimar is the culminating point of classical modernity. Imperial Germany as a political entity was obviously not the same as the Third Reich, and the arts flourished before the Great War. Cultural modernist movements already had quite a lot of room for expression prior to 1914. Under Weimar, the political and economic crisis that hung over it seems to have acted as an additional stimulus for the literary scene and for creative artists. Many of the writers and artists of the time were politically engaged and certainly, initially, welcomed the birth of a democratic republic. That’s one of the big things I feel is often overlooked. If you read a book that’s a general political history of the Weimar Republic, you could get the impression that this was a very male society, when in reality, as a result of the war, there’s a very strong female demographic surplus of about two million. And, in 1918, when German women get the vote after the revolution—it’s actually the first highly industrialised country where women get the vote—they use that right proportionately more than men. But, of course women, like men, voted for different parties across the political spectrum, from the far left to the far right. They are not an homogeneous electoral group. Women are very politically involved in the 1920s. There are still far more male than female parliamentarians, but women certainly use their active right to vote. Feminism had existed as a political movement in Germany long before World War I, but 1918 marks the year in which one of the movement’s key demands, equal voting rights, is realised in Germany. Already, during the war, many women took up employment in what were traditionally considered to be male professions, because the men of fighting age tended to be at the front. There were growing opportunities in the sense that women were able to earn their own income and were less economically dependent on their male relatives than had been the case previously. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . This changed in 1918 when many of the men came back from the front, but there were also new employment opportunities for women, from department stores to creative professions. The early 1920s was the beginning of the golden age of advertising, the movie industry, et cetera, which is actually why I have suggested Irmgard Keun’s The Artificial Silk Girl as my second book, because it deals with some of these issues around new opportunities for women, but also the related pitfalls."