A History of Germany 1918 - 2020. Mary Fulbrook

or compensation. This foreign policy initiative, which aroused considerable resentment among Western powers (who were suspicious of a special relationship between Germany and Russia), had also included a secret military agreement allowing German remilitarization inside the territory of the USSR. In the Berlin Treaty of 1926 Russia and Germany reassured each other of their friendly relations, and committed themselves to remaining neutral in the event of the other country being at war with a third power or powers. This meant that if, for example, Poland and Russia were at war, France would not be able to come to Poland’s help via German territory. Stresemann was anxious to reassure his opponents at home that Germany was not exclusively Western-orientated in her foreign policy but rather could act as a peace-keeping bridge in the centre of Europe between West and East. It was nevertheless clear that Poland’s position was weak, and the issue of Germany’s eastern frontiers was left sufficiently open to give hope to revisionists in Germany that changes might yet be effected on that front.

      In January 1927 the allied military commission overseeing the post-Versailles disarmament of Germany was withdrawn. The reparations question was reopened, as the ‘normal’ years of full reparations payments, 1928–9, drew closer. In August 1929 the Young Plan revised the reparations schedule yet again, setting a new total figure and a reduced annual average of reparations payments. This was met with an intense campaign of domestic opposition – in which the Nazis gained some respectability and free publicity by associating themselves with conservative nationalists in the DNVP. But the referendum ‘against the enslavement of the German people’ failed to win the required 21 million votes (receiving the acclamation of ‘only’ 5.83 million). In the event, under the Young Plan, foreign controls were to be removed and the Rhineland evacuated by the Allied powers in June 1930, five years earlier than envisaged in the Versailles Treaty. To moderate observers, it might appear that under Stresemann’s guidance, a considerable amount had been achieved: reparations had been renegotiated to a more manageable level, Germany’s relations with her former enemies and neighbours had been regularized, the Ruhr and Rhineland had been evacuated, Germany had been accepted into the League of Nations – and at the same time there still appeared to be the possibility of reconsidering Germany’s eastern frontiers, thus pursuing revisionist aims in a peaceful manner. From a Polish perspective, developments were less acceptable, serving to marginalize its international position and heighten hostility between Germany and Poland.

Many observers in the Weimar Republic were far from moderate. Each of the measures negotiated under Stresemann was highly contentious. Moreover, under the facade of apparent stabilization there were many cracks, both political and economic. In the period of renewed crisis after 1929 these cracks were to turn into an earthquake, bringing the shaky edifice of Weimar democracy tumbling down in ruins. We shall consider the intrinsic domestic weaknesses of the Weimar Republic as they affected its eventual collapse in the next chapter. In the meantime, however, on another front ‘Weimar culture’ was beginning to achieve international renown.

      The Golden Twenties? Society and Culture in the Weimar Republic

      Many people who know little more about the politics of the Weimar Republic than that it ended with the rise of Hitler may know a great deal about ‘Weimar culture’. Many of the currents we associate with Weimar had their roots in the prewar period, with the shifting paradigms of the turn of the century, associated with thinkers such as Sigmund Freud. But the experience of mechanized mass slaughter and suffering during the war, the perception of living in a ‘machine age’ with all its human costs and the social upheavals and deep political rifts of the early postwar years precipitated a series of more radical engagements. Artists, writers, social theorists and activists challenged received ways of thinking, and explored new sorts of interpretation and modes of representation of a rapidly changing world. Technological advances also played a major role in the changing patterns of culture at this time. Virtually all the tendencies associated with Weimar were part of wider, international currents at the time; and the shattering of this ferment of creativity with the Nazi clampdown, and the enforced exile of so many talented individuals, ironically ensured that this cultural ferment in Germany was to be of lasting international significance.

The Weimar years, brief though this political epoch was, saw an explosion of creativity across a wide range of scientific and artistic fields. The German traditions of research in medicine and the natural sciences, particularly physics and chemistry, and more recent expertise in psychology and psychoanalysis, continued to develop apace. Despite the later distortions and deeply unethical uses to which such theories were put under the Nazis, fields such as eugenics were widely shared across Europe and North America at this time. In the social sciences, where thinkers such as Max Weber, Georg Simmel and others had already made extensive contributions, new twists were added by the ‘Frankfurt School’ of Critical Theory. Theorists such as Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin sought to use theory not simply as description and understanding of immutable laws in order to control the world, as in the tradition of the Enlightenment, but rather as a critique of contemporary conditions, an exploration of transformative potential and a challenge to contemporary mass culture, in service of what they saw as emancipation. This school of social theory, forced into exile in the Nazi period, was subsequently rediscovered in the 1960s by younger American and European social theorists, influenced particularly by the ageing Herbert Marcuse and by a second generation of critical theorists such as Jürgen Habermas. In the visual arts, tendencies existing before the First World War – particularly the schools known as ‘Die Brücke’ (based in Dresden) and ‘Der blaue Reiter’ (based in Munich) – continued to be creative in the early Weimar years. Expressionism – associated with names such as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Franz Marc – exploded and diversified into an array of experimental and avant-garde tendencies: cubism, futurism, Dada and other styles flourished. Architectural developments associated with names such as Bruno Taut and Erich Mendelsohn changed the environment of major cities including Berlin, complementing and displacing the heavily ornamental bourgeois style of the imperial period. The Bauhaus school of design, founded by Walter Gropius in 1919, was based initially in Weimar, moving to Dessau in 1925 and Berlin in 1930. Focusing on architecture, the fine arts, graphic design and crafts, even dance, and informed by a wider philosophy of life in which teachers and pupils lived and worked together, it combined concern with functionality and affordability with a new sense of aesthetics. It, too, fell victim to the Nazi takeover, being pressured to close the Berlin school in 1933, but again, the exile of many leading proponents – not only Gropius but also, for example, Mies van der Rohe and Marcel Breuer – in fact served to spread its message to large parts of North America and Europe. The work of the Bauhaus was of major influence in twentieth-century architecture, art and design, with an impact ranging from the design of housing estates for the masses to villas and cultural centres, from steel tube chairs to the humble kettle, from the art of individuals such as Wassily Kandinsky to the basic elements of graphic design. In literature, a great range of prose, poetry and drama was produced which has proved to be of lasting significance. Again, the modernist period was far broader both chronologically and geographically than the Weimar epoch, and many significant works were germinated and published well outside this compass. Yet major works – Thomas Mann’s masterpiece The Magic Mountain, for example – were published during this period. Names such as Heinrich and Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, Rainer Maria Rilke, Bertolt Brecht and his musical associate Kurt Weill have achieved enduring international standing. In music, too, the experimental work and twelve-tone method of the Austrian composer Arnold Schönberg was influential, if controversial, informing the work of contemporaries and pupils including Alban Berg and Hanns Eisler, another associate of Bertolt Brecht.

The Weimar period also saw an explosion in new media of communication. The cinema began to replace the theatre, as films – first silent, then from 1929 with sound – became an increasingly popular form of mass entertainment. Weimar films participated in international developments, but with uniquely German overtones in the ways in which they explored the lives of ordinary people in the machine age, and the possibilities as well as the tragedies of individual fates in modern mass society, as well as intimating the role of the unconscious. Iconic masterpieces of Weimar film include the 1920 horror classic of the expressionist period, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari; Georg Wilhelm Pabst’s 1929 film about the tragic fate of a young