Robert Gerwarth's Reading List

"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."

"My selection of books is highly subjective, partly because I’m really interested in subjectivity as a historical phenomenon, but also because I felt I should highlight a couple of books that are probably lesser known to a general readership in the English-speaking world. I could have obviously chosen Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin in order to talk about the art and cabaret scene of the early 1930s. But I picked this one, first of all, because I think it’s important that we have at least one important contemporary female author on the list, and also because of the subjects that are discussed in the novel. Keun is from Charlottenburg, the part of Berlin that I am from. I walked past the plaque marking the home she lived in as a child many times when I was a teenager, which sparked my interest in her writing at an early age. She became one of the most significant female authors of the late Weimar period, a very prominent representative of the Neue Sachlichkeit —the New Sobriety—style in literature. Her books were commercially successful as well. This particular novel was published in 1932. The protagonist is Doris, an eighteen-year old woman from a small town who wants to be famous and make it in the movie industry, in the big smoke. It’s worth bearing in mind that the Ufa Studios in Babelsberg, just outside of Berlin, were one of the major hubs of the international film industry in the 1920s and early 1930s. Fritz Lang’s Metropolis was produced there and so was The Blue Angel that catapulted Marlene Dietrich to fame. That’s the historical backdrop to the story. “In some ways, Weimar is the culminating point of classical modernity” Doris arrives in Berlin on an overnight train wearing a stolen fur coat, with high expectations for a great career. But she finds out that all the supposed glamour of late-1920s Berlin is not quite what it seems. She doesn’t find fame and fortune, but basically encounters lots of seedy, exploitative characters. She works in seedy bars and has affairs with men who offer her money because success is not really materialising. This is, ultimately, a tragic novel that deals with crushed hopes and expectations, but also a really good corrective to the slightly cliché-ed image that emerges from reading about the Roaring Twenties in Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin . I think that would be a spoiler. I should have said: there are obviously other important books written by female authors in that time period. I was quite tempted to nominate Vicki Baum’s Grand Hotel for various reasons. Baum, originally from Austria, was one of the most widely read female fictional authors in Germany, but also had a major international career in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Ten of her novels became Hollywood movies or Broadway musicals. Grand Hotel is probably the most widely known of them and offers an excellent take on a broken society. It is set in the Grand Hotel in Berlin during the Golden Twenties, which turn out to be less than golden in reality. The novel revolves around people working in the hotel and their guests. You have various characters that represent different sections of society and behind the glamorous façade of the hotel, they all turn out to be psychologically damaged. It is very critical of modern society and written in a very elegant way. The novel was published in 1929. The film came out in 1932. There’s a real flourishing of literature in the late twenties, early thirties."

"I’m a huge fan of Roth’s writing, not just his novels, but also his journalism. He was obviously a key figure in interwar Europe’s literary scene. He was Jewish, originally from Galicia and spent a lot of the 1920s in Germany where he worked as a journalist. In fact, he was one of the most widely known literary journalists of the 1920s, and one of the best paid. Apparently, he received the princely sum of one Mark per line, which was a lot of money in those days. The Spider’s Web was his first novel. Far more people know his nostalgic work, The Radetzky March , about the late Habsburg Empire. But I think this earlier novel, which was first serialised in a newspaper at the very beginning of the 1920s, is extremely insightful, even prophetic in a way. The main character is a man, Lieutenant Theodor Lohse, who’s a decommissioned veteran of World War I. He returns home in late 1918 to a world turned upside down. He is a nationalist. He hates Jews and he hates socialists and he also finds himself in difficult personal circumstances. His mother and sister, with whom he’s now forced to live again, don’t seem particularly pleased to see him. There’s a great line in the novel where Lohse reflects on that and realises that a dead war hero would have generated a pension for the family and that would have been much more welcome than the return of a broken man, who’s unemployed and an extra mouth to feed when there’s no money. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter He looks for work and tries to get a job at his former school. He’s keen to get a job as a teacher. But the director is sceptical about returning soldiers. He suspects they’re all Communists and he refuses to give him a job. So Lohse is forced to work as the private tutor to the kids of a wealthy Jewish family. He obviously despises this because he is an anti-Semite and now has to live off handouts from Jews. He gradually gets sucked into this parallel universe of right-wing underground organisations and secret societies, with honour killings and that kind of thing. What is remarkable about it is that Roth wrote this novel before Hitler’s putsch of November 1923, his failed attempt to gain power. When the book was serialised in a newspaper, the last instalment appeared on 6 November 1923, three days before Hitler’s putsch attempt. Roth is obviously interested in this ultra-nationalist, anti-Semitic milieu that is percolating. It’s still on the margins of politics but, nonetheless, it exists. It’s a very important novel in which he plays with themes that would become much more prominent in the late 1920s and early 1930s. You have a whole range of little underground sects and clubs on the political right. The right is just as fractured as the political left. Lots of these groups couldn’t stand each other. There are monarchists. That’s a relatively small group of people in the 1920s, largely diehard conservative ex-officers and aristocrats, who want the return of the Kaiser, which the vast majority of Germans do not want. The arch-conservative German Nationalist Party was partly monarchist. But you also have groups that are not fundamentally dissimilar to the Nazis, but which don’t necessarily work together with them, who are striving for some kind of right-wing dictatorship. There’s a putsch in 1920 called the Kapp Putsch, which is carried out by Freikorps soldiers and some small groups of the extreme right who want to overthrow the Weimar Republic. “Roth is obviously interested in this ultra-nationalist, anti-Semitic milieu that is percolating” The putsch collapses because, for once, the Communists and the Social Democrats come together and call for a general strike, which brings public life in Germany to a complete standstill. It’s the biggest general strike in German history and the putschers are forced to give up quite quickly. That’s the historical context in which Roth becomes interested in these themes. But also, of course, as a Galician Jew and someone who thinks very nostalgically about the bygone Habsburg Empire, in which Jews had legal equality, he is very concerned about the rise of nationalism in Europe more generally. He thinks that these nationalist successor states that treat minorities rather poorly are a real threat, and this is something that influences his general work. He wrote a very powerful book called The Wandering Jews about Jewish refugees, who are basically trying to escape from all these pogroms taking place in Eastern and Central Europe in and around 1918. Many of them moved to Germany and, particularly, to Berlin to find safety. He’s very interested in their plight and that is also one of the sub-themes of The Spider’s Web in which one of the characters, the ambiguous Benjamin Lenz, hails from the city of Lodz and lives among Jewish refugees. They are not the most fully developed characters. Lohse quickly leaves his job there to join a right-wing underground organization led by Ludendorff and then re-joins the army. But Jewish characters are present throughout the novel. The Jewish population in Germany was about one per cent of the overall population. It was a relatively small, but very diverse, group. Some of them were orthodox, others not religious at all. The cliché of the far right was that they were all extremely wealthy, that they were the wire-pullers behind what was often referred to as ‘The Golden International’—capitalism. But, in reality, they were a very diverse group and there were far more poor Jews living in Germany than extremely wealthy ones. The relationship with his employers is that he despises them in private, but he is obviously reliant on that income. So, he has an ambivalent relationship with them. They are generous enough to him, but there is a clear relationship of dependency. They are the employer and he needs the money. Absolutely. It’s highly contradictory. The only thing that holds these two conspiracy stories together is a kind of chaos theory—the Jews are trying two different tacks to bring chaos to the world. One is through communism and the other is through capitalism. And, of course, the ultimate objective of that Jewish world conspiracy is to enslave Christians and to rule the world. That’s a very prominent theme in right-wing thinking. It’s interesting that simultaneously with the rise of anti-Bolshevism you had the remarkable success of the forged ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’, which were translated into almost every language and became this massive phenomenon. They were forged by Tsarist offices and their key theme was how these ‘Elders of Zion’ were plotting to bring about Jewish world domination. They were a huge success with the German right, but also in other countries. They were first published in Russian before the war, but their international publication success story really starts afterwards, in the 1920s, despite being exposed as a hoax in 1921. It’s quite remarkable. People like Henry Ford, for example, in the United States, subsidised their translation and distribution to keep the price down, so that people would be well informed about this alleged world conspiracy. It obviously found a receptive audience."

"Here I was tossing up between Fallada’s Little Man, What Now? and another novel about ‘small people’, the more well-known Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin, but I felt it was important to have a contemporary novel on my list that deals with the fallout of the Great Depression , which was the big game-changer in Weimar history. If you look at the general elections in Germany in 1928, they ended with a victory for the Social Democrats, who were returning to power. The new Chancellor, Hermann Müller, who was leader of the SPD, published a book that year which dealt with the 10-year anniversary of the November Revolution. And the tenor of the book was, ‘We’ve made it. This has become a success story against all the odds.’ Then, one year later, the situation completely unravelled. Germany was particularly badly affected because the temporary recovery of the German economy in the mid-1920s was heavily dependent on short-term American loans and they started being recalled. On top of that, there was a massive banking crisis of unprecedented proportions in 1931, which actually saw a number of Austrian and German banks go bust. The German government tried to fight the financial situation with austerity politics, also designed to show to the Allies that Germany couldn’t pay its war debts. This massively increased the plight of many people. At the worst point of the crisis there were six million people unemployed, which is a number that only gives you a glimpse into the overall situation, because those six million often had several dependents and many more people were forced to work on short-term contracts, making their employment very precarious. That’s not always captured in statistics. A third of the German workforce was unemployed and Little Man, What Now? deals with the effects of that crisis. “When people write about the Weimar Republic, it’s very often about Berlin and other urban centres. But the vast majority of Germans at the time continued to live in smaller cities, villages and rural areas” It was first published in 1932 and it is set between 1930 and 1932, at the height of the Great Depression. The ‘little man’ in question is Johannes Pinneberg, a bookkeeper from northern Germany, and his girlfriend Emma, who is expecting their son. Just after they find out that she’s pregnant, he is fired from his job and must now find ways to make do in the middle of the world’s worst economic crisis. He tries to find a new job in Berlin and is hired as a salesman in one of the large Berlin department stores, where he and his colleagues have to meet extremely ambitious quotas to keep their jobs. Otherwise they get fired. The book really depicts how people became more and more dependent on occasional labour, how businesses became more and more exploitative because they knew that there was a large sea of unemployed people who could be forced to accept any work conditions. So, it’s very critical of these practices but, at the same time, it is also about how he and his small family make do under difficult circumstances. At some point Pinneberg is fired and they’re forced to leave the city because they can no longer afford accommodation in it. In the end, he returns to Berlin to collect his dole money, but is further humiliated when a policeman confuses him for a beggar and chases him away from the front of a fancy department store. This is a novel that deals with the harsh realities of ordinary people’s lives after 1929. At the same time, the novel also has some positive things to say about the Weimar Republic, in the sense that Pinneberg is surprisingly complimentary about the institutional social safety nets that exist in the Republic. At least for a while, he gets unemployment benefits, his wife’s medical bills are paid during the pregnancy and she gets paid maternity leave. There are lots of important themes that highlight both the plight of working class families during the Great Depression, but also some of the mitigating factors. Fallada has recently had a bit of a renaissance in the Anglophone world, with the publication of his book Alone in Berlin a few years ago. Yet his earlier works are also worth re-visiting. Apart from Little Man, What Now? I also like his important but perhaps underappreciated, A Small Circus , which deals with the often-overlooked rural population of Germany in the late Weimar period. When people write about the Weimar Republic, it’s very often about Berlin and other urban centres. But the vast majority of Germans at the time continued to live in smaller cities, villages and rural areas. A Small Circus is about how the economic crisis affected the rural population which, in turn, radicalised. There were arson attacks and bomb attacks on public institutions by members of the so-called Landvolk, a farmers’ self-help organisation, with mass demonstrations of tens of thousands of men. I think Fallada is an amazing chronicler of some of the most pressing social issues of the late 1920s and early 1930s. He chronicles the effects of the economic crisis. He doesn’t blame the Weimar Republic per se in the book, but is critical of capitalism and how businesses exploited people who are desperately looking for jobs. A Small Circus is about how the very real issues of the rural population have been neglected. It’s not so much a blame game against the Republic that he’s playing because, as I mentioned, the novel also highlights that the Republic has introduced certain measures that mitigate the suffering of people. I think he sees himself, in the same way as Döblin, as a chronicler of what happens to ordinary people. Döblin’s 1929 novel, Berlin Alexanderplatz , deals with somewhat related issues—the poorer neighbourhoods around Alexanderplatz, but it is set before the beginning of the Great Depression. The protagonist, Franz Bieberkopf, is recently released from prison and moves in—and drinks himself through—the world of prostitutes, pimps, and crime in 1920s Berlin. Döblin, in what is probably the most acclaimed Weimar Berlin novel, follows an approach that is similar to Joyce’s in Ulysses . By introducing these literary techniques, I would say he also contributes to the genre of the ‘big city novel’ more generally by making more prominent than had previously been the case the lives of ‘little people.’ That is, of course, something that can also be found elsewhere in Weimar literature. Bertolt Brecht wrote some of his most powerful plays during this period, too. So, I’ve picked one example of that genre and I think Fallada’s novels on Weimar are worth revisiting."

"These are the diaries of, I would argue, one of the most interesting characters in Weimar Germany. There are lots of interesting characters in the Weimar Republic, but he stands out, not just for biographical reasons, but because he is one of the main chroniclers of what is going on in those years. The diaries cover the years 1918 to 1937. Kessler himself was born in Paris in 1868. He was the son of a wealthy Hamburg banker and an Anglo-Irish noblewoman, who was famous at the time for being one of the most beautiful women of her era. She was pursued by many powerful men including, allegedly, Kaiser Wilhelm I himself. In any case, he grew up in an extremely privileged setting and enjoyed an elite education in various countries. He studied law and became a very multicultural, multilingual, cosmopolitan figure, who embarked, as a young man, on journeys around the world from Japan to China , India , Egypt and elsewhere. His father died in the mid-1890s, leaving Kessler an enormous amount of money, so he was in the fortunate position of never having to work too hard to finance his fairly extravagant lifestyle. He spent his days as a dandy figure and collector of art. He met many artists as well, from Rodin to Maillol. Edvard Munch painted his portrait in 1906. In the context of Weimar, from 1918, he chronicled not just political events, but also his meetings with lots of interesting characters. He became friends with people like Igor Stravinsky, George Grosz, John Heartfield, had Einstein over for supper and met up with leading politicians such as Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau. “He became friends with people like Igor Stravinsky, George Grosz, John Heartfield, had Einstein over for supper and met up with leading politicians such as Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau” He was an interesting intellectual. He had a very brief stint as a diplomat, as ambassador to Warsaw in the winter of 1918, and remained involved in liberal politics. He was also very involved in the arts both before the Great War and after. In 1902 he temporarily moved to Weimar which was, of course, the spiritual home of Goethe and Schiller, but also a symbolically important city after 1918 because the German National Assembly met there in the spring of 1919 to draft Germany’s new constitution. Subsequently, it also become very closely connected with the Bauhaus and also has an important fine arts museum, which Kessler helped to put on the international map through his vast connections to the art scene in Paris, and elsewhere. So he’s really interesting as a curator, as a patron of the arts, but also as a socialite and political observer who engages with lots of different figures. No, they did not. He travelled to Paris in March 1933 and never returned. Because of the speed of the Nazi takeover, he left quite a lot of his artwork and fortune behind, so he actually died with little money left. But it’s interesting that he captured the four years after the Nazi seizure of power as well, because he shared the fate of lots of Germans who were either forced to leave the country in 1933 or, like Kessler, left voluntarily. Having said that, the fate of these people differed quite profoundly. There were people like Albert Einstein, who immediately found employment in the United States because he was already a famous Nobel laureate. Thomas Mann also found it quite easy to transition to life in the United States because, in his case, he was already a celebrated author. But for others, who didn’t have the language skills, or were not quite as famous, which is the majority of people who went into exile, it was much harder to adjust to their new lives. Kessler briefly lived in Majorca because of his declining health, but left again in 1936 because of the start of the Spanish Civil War , and then moved to France. He died there, in Lyon, in 1937. He does a little bit, and had previously warned against the Nazis. But he is also unsure what the future holds for him personally and that dominates his immediate reaction. Up until March 1933, he was busy negotiating the advance for his memoirs, then he left Germany with an uncertain future. Shortly after the burning of the Reichstag building, he realises that this is the essence of Nazi rule. But, of course, he is unsure about what exactly the future is going to hold. On the night that Hitler seized power in Berlin and the torch-lit SA parades through the Brandenburg Gate are taking place, Kessler drowns his sorrows in a pub nearby with a friend and two blond prostitutes. In a way, I think it shows the defeatism of many republicans in 1933. There was a realisation that the situation in January 1933 was fundamentally different from that in 1920, when the Communists and the Social Democrats briefly joined hands in a general strike to frustrate the Kapp Putsch. But in the midst of an unprecedented economic crisis, it was quite unclear whether people would adhere to such a call, whether there wouldn’t be hundreds of thousands of strike breakers, much more concerned about their own livelihood than about working-class solidarity. But also there was, at this point, a very deep schism between the Social Democrats and the Communists. The Comintern, in Moscow, essentially dictated the policy line that the Social Democrats were just as bad as the Nazis and that the Communists should not collaborate with them. So there wasn’t an opportunity for a united front against the Nazis at this point, even though the majority of the electorate voted against Hitler in November 1932. He was leader of the largest political party in parliament but, nonetheless, not voted in by the overall majority of the population. Instead he was appointed as Chancellor by President Paul von Hindenburg."