Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider

Peter Gay's elegant tale takes up an old theme, the connection between culture and politics, that recalls ancient Greek debate about art and society. Artists and politicians, outsiders and insiders, have much in common. Weimar deserves a close look for two reasons. More than other times and places, it nourished great writers, musicians, architects, film-makers, and painters, whose work has continued to delight and inform. Also, it was a time of political upset, a Prussian-styled monarchy, deposed after the humiliation of World War I, gave way to a creative social-democratic government that wilted during the great depression, and foreshadowed the rise of fascism and World War II. Gay puts forward the idea that culture is " in continuous, tense interaction with society, and expression and criticism of political realities. This mixture of intimacy and hostility between art and life is characteristic of all modern society." Political extremism provokes crisis and a reaction, that in turn may be followed by extreme counter-reaction. Blood will have blood. Feeding on and fueling the political turmoil, culture flourishes. The idea of culture existing outside of politics is a delusion. Weimar showed that there were two connected Germanies: "the Germany of military swagger ... and the Germany of lyrical poetry." In a small way the book itself illustrates the point. It was first published in 1968, as the war in Vietnam boiled over, and the U.S. turned from an era of expanding democracy under Johnson to right-wing conservatism under Nixon. When it was republished in 2001, fortunes evaporated as the the dot-com stock-market imploded, terrorists rained down war on U.S. soil, and government again turned sharply from an expansive democracy under Clinton to reactionary conservatism under Bush. What could be more timely than a beautifully written book that links cultural flowering to poltical confusion? In six brief chapters Peter Gay uses Freudian images to trace the birth, growth, and death of the Weimar Republic. He describes the November 1918 revolution after Germany's defeat in World War I, and the establishment of the Republic at Weimar as a "revolt of the sons." Of course, Weimar's expressionist culture had roots that stretched before 1918. But it flourished abundantly during the Republic. Without a single message, Weimar had a unifying theme: the pursuit of a renewed, peaceful humanity, the "son's revolt against the father ... a bid for rational freedom against irrational authority." Weimar's artistic contempt for politics and longing for renewal ironically furthered the Nazi cause. Ironically, because the Nazis despised expressionist culture. Rainer Maria Rilke, in calling for a universe in which love and suffering, life and death, form a harmonious whole, "in calling for something higher than politics, helped to pave the way for something lower - barbarism." Martin Heidegger, a most subtle philosopher-poet and benighted Nazi sympathize

I found this, as with Gay's other books, to be an extremely useful analysis. We tend to think of Weimar as the "new Periclean age" of Germany between the wars--rich in culture and artistic expression and experimentation. Gay does a very solid job of covering a number of topics in 145 pages. Among other subjects, Gay discusses expressionism; architecture (including Gropius and Bauhaus); the Warburg and Frankfurt Institutes; poetry and the German imagination; the rejection of politics during this period; the new realism in art, such as that of George Grosz (but no discussion of da-da); the "new objectivity"; youth movements; the impact of modernism; Heidegger and other philosophers; and Spengler and history. Among the most interesting sections is one on the expressionist cinema. Gay concludes with a brief, yet suggestive, analysis of what went wrong with Weimar and why it came to be rejected by most Germans prior to WWII. Particularly important in this regard, was the legacy of Versailles which tarnished all that Weimar politically (and perhaps artistically) had been able to accomplish. First published in 1968, the book contains a valuable bibliography (up to that point) and an interesting appendix "A Short Political History of the Weimar Republic." Norton has produced a most pleasant paperback edition, with some very fine illustrations and graphics. Compact but abundant with insights for those interested in this period.