Ron Peters's Reviews > Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider

The Weimar Republic was created on 9 Nov 1918 and, for all practical purposes, was kaput on 30 Jan 1933 when Hitler was made Chancellor.

Culturally, when we think of those times we think of things like The Threepenny Opera, The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari, Mann’s The Magic Mountain, Bauhaus, and if we're being honest, Marlene Dietrich’s legs and Bob Fosse’s Cabaret.

But when you really think about it, gosh, who wasn’t around in those days? Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Theodore Adorno, Walter Gropius, Martin Buber, Rosa Luxemburg, Oswald Spengler, Arthur Koestler, Kurt Weill, Alban Berg, Paul Hindemith, Hermann Hesse, Rainer Maria Rilke, Wassily Kandinsky, Bruno Walter, Paul Tillich, Erich Fromm, Hannah Arendt, and Martin Heidegger, to name a few.

This was a time when Germany was traumatized by the loss of World War I, punitive war reparations, foreign occupation, civil war, revolution, the end of empire, insane levels of inflation, and the general rootlessness of modernism. What we saw in this dazed and confused population should be familiar to us today: a whirlwind of conflicting values and tremendous levels of political polarization.

There were people with soul yearnings for a new democracy, idealism, romanticism, and freedom of expression (and Expressionism), with socialist leanings thrown in, who were living in fear of godless capitalist materialism and the evils of the machine. These ran up against the growing part of the nation that was ultra-nationalistic, hate-driven, xenophobic, on the hunt for scapegoats, militaristic, and yearning for surrender to a powerful leader.

Peter Gay does a good job of staking out and describing this territory as well as appending a useful potted history of the Republic and a nice bibliography for following up on that enticing list of names shown above.