Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider
Peter Gay
Language: English
Pages: 240
ISBN: 0393322394
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
A seminal work as melodious and haunting as the era it chronicles, now reissued with a new introduction.
First published in 1968, Weimar Culture is one of the masterworks of Peter Gay's distinguished career. A study of German culture between the two wars, the book brilliantly traces the rise of the artistic, literary, and musical culture that bloomed ever so briefly in the 1920s amid the chaos of Germany's tenuous post-World War I democracy, and crashed violently in the wake of Hitler's rise to power. Despite the ephemeral nature of the Weimar democracy, the influence of its culture was profound and far-reaching, ushering in a modern sensibility in the arts that dominated Western culture for most of the twentieth century. Vivid and eminently readable, Weimar Culture is the finest introduction for the casual reader and historian alike. "[A]n enormously rich, intriguing, and exciting essay.... A major contribution to the study..."―The New York Times 16 black and white illustrations
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Descriptions were analogies, but analogies that were more than verbal. They called attention to a widespread psychological situation in Germany between 1918 and 1933. The creation of modern states, whether the United States, a united Italy, or Bismarck’s empire—and the Weimar Republic—all followed upheavals that made their origins possible and difficult at the same time. But the other states I have listed were all fruits of victory; the Weimar Republic, for its part, was the offspring of, and had.
Idea of a revolution not from its usual point of departure, the left, but from the right. Perhaps most effective was the pairing offered in the title of a three-volume work by the anti-Semite Ludwig Klages, who had in early years belonged to the George circle: his Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele pitted mind against soul, and assailed the intellect in the name of irrationalism. These fabricators of titles thought themselves aristocrats, but they did not disdain, in fact enjoyed coining,.
Sinister, appears before him; Hans enters it, afraid. He is right to be: there he sees two hideous witches tearing a child into pieces and devouring it. Nauseated and in despair at his vision, Hans half-awakens to find himself exhausted and frozen in the snow. And he works it out: death is in life, but love—not reason—is stronger than death. “Man is master of contradictions, they exist through him, and so he is grander—vornehmer—than they. Grander than death, too grand for it—that is the freedom.
Promenaded along the Kurfüstendamm—and not professionals alone: every high school student wanted to make some money, and in the darkened bars one could see high public officials and high financiers courting drunken sailors without shame. Even the Rome of Suetonius had not known orgies like the Berlin transvestite balls, where hundreds of men in women’s clothes and women in men’s clothes danced under the benevolent eyes of the police. Amid the general collapse of values, a kind of insanity took.
“We are sinners.” But “the sins committed by the Allies since 1918 are almost without parallel.”23 It was this attitude much more than the provisions of the treaty—bad as they were—that saddled the Weimar Republic with one of its many damaging legends. Millions who had no stake in the lost colonies or the lost territories, who were untouched by the enforced disarmament, responded warmly to the demagogues who denounced Versailles as a typical French attack on the very soul of Germany and maligned.