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 girl falling into the wrong hands, Pandora’s Box; Walter Ruttmann’s 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
