The cultural richness of the inter-war period – whether the focus is on Europe, Russia, Scandinavia, or America – simultaneously defies and incites linear history. It defies it because of the extent to which it is marked by diversity and contestation. The cultural high ground was so effectively fought over that narrative accounts are bound to be partial, marked by a bias that is itself a historical residue of the period. Linear history is nevertheless incited precisely by the generally assumed underlying directionality marshalling the complexities of cultural life in a Europe ‘between’ catastrophes. One inevitably turns to Weimar Germany to illustrate the point. Its European and even global importance was attested by the many musicians, artists, writers, and scientists who continued to flock there to study, listen, and observe. With hindsight, everything that happened during the Weimar period pointed with such macabre logic towards 1933 and the arrival of the National Socialists that the imposition of an alternative narrative seems almost a moral obligation. That alternative has familiarly construed modernism and the various avant-garde movements as representing a more sympathetic cultural trajectory – both critical and oppositional – above and around the accumulating evils of the period.