A History of Germany 1918 - 2020. Mary Fulbrook

1927 Berlin: Symphony of a Big City, recording in all its ambivalence, excitement, haste and contradictions a day in the life of a big city, as the wheels of technological progress affect the lives of hundreds of thousands of individuals who, in their working hours, become mere cogs in the machine; Fritz Lang’s 1927 Metropolis, in rather different manner also exploring the more threatening sides of big city life in a dystopian future; and Lang’s extraordinary 1930 murder thriller, M., demonstrating both a curious and prescient understanding of perpetrator mentality and critique of mass responses to the perpetrator figure.

      Radio, too, was a new medium of communication which became ever more significant. Radio ownership spread rapidly among German households and contributed to the formation of a new national public. The commercialization of leisure may have started to break down divisions between class-based subcultures and began to erode the hold of the SPD over the outlook and organizations of large parts of the working class.⁸ Regional isolation was also diminished, in a less than democratic manner, with increased concentration in the newspaper industry: press barons such as Hugenberg not only directly owned and influenced their own newspapers but also indirectly affected the contents and political bias of ‘independent’ local papers through their press agency services and the provision of news snippets and commentaries.

      New media of communication had a variety of consequences and could be used to a wide variety of ends. In film, radio and newsprint, as in other areas of Weimar culture, developments were ambiguous. While certain renowned films, such as Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (Im Westen nichts Neues), took a firm stand against war, they remained the exception: there were many more, generally ephemeral and of low artistic quality, which glorified nationalism, war and the fatherland. In the sphere of radio, pro-Republican forces failed to gain political control or make serious use of a medium which was for most of the Weimar period intended to be politically neutral. It was only in 1932 that Franz von Papen (then Chancellor) asserted political control of the radio, leaving a welcome gift for the Nazis to exploit in their propaganda efforts after January 1933.

The German culture of the interwar period, and much of what we associate with Weimar culture, was then neither restricted to this period nor limited by German national borders. Given such an extraordinary diversity of talent and creative production, it is difficult to form valid brief generalizations. Yet there are specificities in the ways the cultural creativity of this time was related to the distinctive political and social conditions in which it was produced and received. After the near-apocalyptic exuberance of the early years – in both the political and artistic realms – as well as the continuing emotional pain occasioned by physical and psychological legacies of the Great War, during the middle years of the Weimar period a new empha- sis was given to a cool, detached combination of utilitarian and aesthetic qualities. Eberhard Kolb and others have pointed out that the tendency known as ‘new objectivity’ (Neue Sachlichkeit), with which the Bauhaus, for example, was associated, coincided with the period of relative stabilization from 1924 to 1929.⁹ The final years of the Weimar Republic witnessed not only a radical political polarization but also a heightened politicization and polarization in art, particularly in such fields as theatre. And novels such as Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz bore witness to the disturbing social conditions and radical political violence of the closing years of the Republic, with the onset of economic depression.

But there are perhaps more important ways than simple periodization in which Weimar culture reflected, refracted and contributed to the complexities of Weimar politics. For Weimar culture, far from being a homogeneous entity, was a deeply divided phenomenon: indeed, perhaps it would be more apposite to speak of Weimar cultures in the plural, or of diverse broader, international currents in which developments in Germany played a leading role. The one element that united the widely differing aspects of this culture within Germany, on both the Right and the Left, was the problematic relationship with ‘modernity’ in general as well as the Weimar Republic in particular. Use was made of modern means of communication, modern machinery and media to criticize the age of the machine and modern society. On the Left, artists such as Georg Grosz, Otto Dix, Käthe Kollwitz and Heinrich Zille criticized the bourgeois society in which the bourgeois, conservative and nationalist ‘pillars of society’ (to borrow the title of one of Grosz’s most scathing and biting pictures) grew fat at the expense of the masses, who were driven into conditions of abject poverty. This poverty was captured with humour in Zille’s drawings of the life of the Berlin working classes in the early twentieth century and with pathos in Käthe Kollwitz’s representations of misery and suffering, most poignantly in the figure of a mother mourning a son lost at war. While left-wing political cabaret and theatre attacked the pomposity and injustice of bourgeois capitalist society, right-wingers attacked parliamentary democracy, the political form of the Weimar Republic. The influx of new forms, such as American jazz music – held by right-wingers to be the ultimate in decadence – and the perceived ‘laxity in morals’, particularly in metropolitan centres such as 1920s Berlin, were held to be evidence of cultural decay. Viewed from other perspectives, however, this era heralded new freedoms and new tolerance. Expressions of homosexual love and attraction, for example, were far more openly accepted in Berlin bars and cafes, flourishing in the Nollendorf Platz area made famous in the Berlin novels of Christopher Isherwood. Along with other prominent figures, Magnus Hirschfeld, a physician and founder of the Institute for Sexual Research in Berlin, continued the campaign against Paragraph 175 of the German criminal code which criminalized homosexual acts between men; the difficulties faced by gay men in face of the prejudices of the time were poignantly captured in the 1919 film, in which Hirschfeld played himself, Anders als die Andern (‘Different from the Others’). But in the view of conservatives, the Weimar Republic itself was held responsible for decadence, and for the penetration of Western forms of shallow, superficial ‘civilization’ into the purer German ‘culture’, defiling it in the process. And while the Left attacked capitalism, the Right attacked democracy: with the exception of a few individuals, most notably (and belatedly) Thomas Mann, few spoke out to sustain the Weimar Republic in principle.

      Nor was ‘culture’ in the wider sense to sustain the new Republic. The social institutions which had the most influence on popular attitudes were still the churches and the schools: and both religious and educational institutions by and large tended to undermine Weimar democracy. Both the Catholic and the Protestant churches propagated essentially conservative, monarchist and anti-democratic sympathies; they were moreover highly critical of the moral decadence, as they saw it, of a society in which birth control was for the first time becoming widespread. The education system was also, in general, conservative and anti-democratic in outlook. Many schoolteachers were traditional conservative nationalists. Student fraternities and university teachers were similarly preponderantly right-wing and anti-democratic in sympathy: the Left was only to dominate German student politics for the first time in the West Germany of the late 1960s. However, in the sphere of education, as in virtually every other aspect of Weimar life, quite different tendencies coexisted. Alongside the highly conservative educational establishment ran currents of reform and progressive schools. After the Second World War largely unsuccessful attempts were made to resurrect some of the more progressive elements in Weimar education.

If one turns from culture, at both elite and mass levels, to society more generally in the Weimar period, then a similar range of complexities, ambiguities and conflicts appear. Women were formally ‘emancipated’ in what was essentially a highly progressive welfare state. But this was an ‘emancipation from above’: despite the existence of minority feminist movements, both bourgeois and socialist, the majority of women continued to have rather traditional conceptions of their role. Being a wife and mother was held to be the essential fulfilment of womanhood: paid employment outside the home was preferably to be undertaken only before marriage, or only if economically absolutely essential. Weimar ‘emancipation’ was more theoretical than real: while women gained the vote (of which they made slowly increasing use), they remained in predominantly low-paid and low-status occupations. While women had always formed a considerable proportion of the agricultural labour force – peasant farms, for example, being family concerns where women brought in the hay, fed the chickens and milked the cows as a matter of course – women in the Weimar Republic were increasingly employed in white-collar occupations