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Weimar Germany and its Histories

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 December 2010

Eric D. Weitz
Eric D. Weitz
Affiliation:
University of Minnesota
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Extract

Years later, after the catastrophes of the Third Reich and World War II, Arnold Zweig remembered how he had returned home from another disaster, World War I. “With what hopes had we come back from the war!” he wrote. Zweig recalled not just the catastrophe of total war, but also the élan of revolution. Like a demon, he threw himself into politics, then into his writing. “I have big works, wild works, great well-formed, monumental works in my head!,” he wrote to his friend Helene Weyl in April 1919. “I want to write! Everything that I have done up until now is just a preamble.” And it was not to be “normal” writing. The times were of galloping stallions and wide-open furrows, and talent was everywhere. War and revolution had drawn people out of the confining security of bourgeois life. “The times have once again placed adventure in the center of daily life, making possible once more the great novel and the great story.”

Type
Culture of Politics—Politics of Culture: New Perspectives on the Weimar Republic
Information
Central European History , Volume 43 , Issue 4 , December 2010 , pp. 581 - 591
Copyright
Copyright © Conference Group for Central European History of the American Historical Association 2010

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References

1 Zweig, Arnold, “Freundschaft mit Freud. Ein Bericht” (1947/48), in Arnold Zweig, 1887–1968. Werk und Leben in Dokumenten und Bildern, ed. Wenzel, Georg (Berlin: Aufbau, 1978), 103–04Google Scholar, quotation 103.

2 Arnold Zweig to Helene Weyl, April 4, 1919, in Zweig, Arnold, Zweig, Beatrice, and Weyl, Helene, Komm her, Wir lieben dich. Briefe einer ungewöhnlichen Freundschaft zu dritt, ed. Lange, Ilse (Berlin: Aufbau, 1996), 149–51Google Scholar, quotation 150.

3 Zweig, Arnold, “Theater, Drama, Politik” (January 10, 1921), in Arnold Zweig, ed. Wenzel, , 115-18Google Scholar, quotation 117.

4 Mendelsohn, Erich, “Die internationale Übereinstimmung des neuen Baugedankens oder Dynamik und Funktion” (1923), in Erich Mendelsohn. Gedankenwelten, ed. Ita Heinze-Greenberg and Regina Stephan (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2000), 48–53Google Scholar, quotation 48–49.

5 Mendelsohn, Erich, “Das neuzeitliche Geschäftshaus” (1929), in Erich Mendelsohn. Gedankenwelten, ed. Heinze-Greenberg and Stephan, 96-103Google Scholar, quotation 103.

6 Mendelsohn's firm employed more than forty people by the end of the 1920s. See Heinze-Greenberg, Ita and Stephan, Regina, eds., Luise und Erich Mendelsohn. Eine Partnerschaft für die Kunst (Ostfildern-Raut: Hatje Cantz, 2004), 109Google Scholar.

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8 For some of the early works that established the interpretive frame of doom and collapse, see Halperin, S. William, Germany Tried Democracy: A Political History of the Reich from 1918 to 1933 (1946; New York: Norton, 1965)Google Scholar; Bracher, Karl Dietrich, Die Auflösung der Weimarer Republik. Eine Studie zum Problem des Machtverfalls in der Demokratie, 5th ed. (1955; Droste: Düsseldorf, 1984)Google Scholar; Der Weg in die Diktatur (Munich: Piper, 1962), translated into English as The Path to Dictatorship, 1918–1933: Ten Essays by German Scholars, trans. John Conway (New York: Anchor, 1966); Broszat, Martin, Hitler and the Collapse of Weimar Germany, trans. Berghahn, V. R. (1984; Leamington Spa: Berg, 1987)Google Scholar, though the German original is different since the title uses Zerstörung or “Destruction”; Nichols, A. J., Weimar and the Rise of Hitler (1968; New York: St. Martin's, 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; de Jonge, Alex, The Weimar Chronicle: Prelude to Hitler (New York: New American Library, 1978)Google Scholar; and Dobkowski, Michael N. and Wallimann, Isidor, eds., Radical Perspectives on the Rise of Fascism in Germany, 1919–1945 (New York: Monthly Review, 1989)Google Scholar. Abraham, David, The Collapse of the Weimar Republic: Political Economy and Crisis, 2nd ed. (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1986)Google Scholar, also uses the “collapse” terminology, but the analysis is more about destruction led by the elites.

9 On Taut and Mendelsohn, see Weitz, Eric D., Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 169–206Google Scholar.

10 See Gilbert, Felix, A European Past: Memoirs, 1905–1945 (New York: Norton, 1988)Google Scholar.

11 Gay, Peter, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (New York: Harper and Row, 1968)Google Scholar.

12 In a slightly different version published in the same year, Gay wrote in a note at the very beginning, “In the course of writing this essay, I have talked to a number of students and survivors of Weimar, to whom I am grateful for their time and effort.” Gay, Peter, “Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider,” in The Intellectual Migration: Europe and America, 1930–1960, ed. Fleming, Donald and Bailyn, Bernard (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1968), 11–93Google Scholar, quote 11. In the book, that thought is removed to the preface and becomes “My writing of this book has been greatly facilitated by the generous cooperation of a number of survivors and students of Weimar.” Gay, Weimar Culture, xv.

13 Anton Saefkow, member of the KPD's “operative leadership” and leader of the Saefkow-Jacob-Bäustlein resistance group, in his political testament written shortly before his execution by the Nazis in 1944. Quoted in Suckut, Siegfried, Die Betriebsrätebewegung in der Sowjetisch Besetzten Zone Deutschlands (1945–1948) (Frankfurt am Main: Haag+Herchen, 1982), 172Google Scholar.

14 See Weitz, Eric D., Creating German Communism, 1890–1990: From Popular Protest to Socialist State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997)Google Scholar.

15 Peukert, Detlev J. K., The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity, trans. Deveson, Richard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992)Google Scholar.

16 Achilles, Manuela, “With a Passion for Reason: Celebrating the Constitution in Weimar Germany,” Central European History 43, no. 4 (2010): 668.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For a related argument, see Harsch, Donna, “The Iron Front: Weimar Social Democracy between Tradition and Modernity,” in Between Reform and Revolution: Studies in German Socialism and Communism from 1840 to 1990, ed. Barclay, David E. and Weitz, Eric D. (Providence, RI, and Oxford: Berghahn Publishers, 1998), 251–74.Google Scholar

17 Achilles, “With a Passion for Reason,” 689.

18 Bryden, Eric, “Heroes and Martyrs of the Republic: Reichsbanner Geschichtspolitik in Weimar Germany,” Central European History 43, no. 4 (2010): 640.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

19 Rossol, Nadine, “Performing the Nation: Sports, Spectacles, and Aesthetics in Germany, 1926–1936,” Central European History 43, no. 4 (2010): 631.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

20 Ibid., 638.

21 Ibid., 638.

22 Canning, Kathleen, “The Politics of Symbols, Semantics, and Sentiments in the Weimar Republic,” Central European History 43, no. 4 (2010): 572.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

23 Naimark, Norman, Stalin's Genocides (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010).Google Scholar

24 Stephen Kotkin with a contribution by Gross, Jan T., Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment (New York: Modern Library, 2009).Google Scholar

25 The starting point for what became an extensive scholarship is Oertzen, Peter von, Betriebsräte in der Novemberrevolution (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1963).Google Scholar