Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy (review)

With this exciting new book, Eric D. Weitz offers a timely addition to the growing array of historical surveys of the Weimar Republic. His competition includes, to name only the best-known titles, Hans Mommsen's The Rise and Fall of Weimar Democracy (1996), Detlev Peukert's The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity (1989), and, of course, Peter Gay's magisterial Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (1968). While Weitz devotes chapters to both the political and economic history of the Republic, his clear focus is on cultural matters, and as such Gay is his most immediate rival. The two works even display a similar structure, bookending synchronic analyses of Weimar culture with chapters on the Republic's birth and demise.

To take on one of the seminal works of twentieth-century historiography in such direct fashion may seem a Quixotic task, but Weitz acquits himself well. Rereading Gay, I was struck above all by two things. First, the fact that Weimar Culture now stands closer to the time that it surveys than to our own ("The Weimar Republic died only thirty-five years ago, in 1933, yet it is already a legend," reads its opening sentence).¹ Second, the extent to which Gay is wedded to his psychoanalytically articulated belief that the death of the Republic was an inevitable response to the transgressions of its founders. Weitz's work, by contrast, is not only thoroughly up-to-date in its scholarship (a useful bibliographic essay is included), but also clearly written with the present moment in mind. Summarizing his central contentions, Weitz writes in the final paragraph: "The threats to democracy are not always from enemies abroad. They can come from those within who espouse the language of democracy and use the liberties afforded them by democratic institutions to undermine the substance of democracy" (367–68).

Weitz, however, attempts far more than merely to produce a new history of Weimar suitable for the age of the "War on Terror." His aim is to transform the way that we approach the 1920s in Germany. As he argues, interpretations that would view the Republic as doomed from the beginning are mistaken. Instead, promise and tragedy hung in the balance for most of Weimar's lifetime, and history could have read very differently had it not been for a series of short-sighted blunders on the part of people who should have known better.

In order to make this last point, Weitz skillfully refocuses our gaze on some of the period's central cultural manifestations, moving what was previously in the foreground to the background and highlighting materials that might otherwise have been mentioned only in passing. His section on film, for instance, dutifully begins with a summary of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), the expressionist motion picture that scores of cultural historians, including Gay, have read as an allegory of repressed Weimar autocracy. But Weitz's real interests clearly lie elsewhere, and he quickly moves into analyses of Walter Ruttmann's Berlin, Symphony of the Big City (1927) and Billy Wilder's People on Sunday (1930), two films that celebrate the modern condition with unabashed excitement. He also reminds us that cinema during the 1920s was a truly international affair. Weimar audiences not only consumed the products of their own culture industry, but also cheered on the revolutionary crowds in Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin and suffered alongside Charlie Chaplin in The Gold Rush (both released in Germany in 1926).

Similarly, when Weitz turns to the visual arts, he focuses his attention not on the verist paintings of Neue Sachlichkeit or on dadaist collages, but rather on the photographs of László Moholy-Nagy, who froze fleeting impressions of modern street life into hauntingly abstract compositions (Hannah Höch does receive separate treatment in a later chapter). While the canvases of Otto Dix, George Grosz, and others have always seemed to provide visual confirmation of the moral corruption that bubbled under the surface of Weimar society (most...