Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider
by Peter Gay
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Book Summary Information
Author: Peter GayEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2001-12
ISBN: 0393322394
Number of pages: 224
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Book Reviews of Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider
Book Review: A Grave Phenomenon
Summary: 5 Stars
Peter Gay's elegant tale takes up an old theme, the connection between culture and politics, that recalls ancient Greek debate about art and society. Artists and politicians, outsiders and insiders, have much in common. Weimar deserves a close look for two reasons. More than other times and places, it nourished great writers, musicians, architects, film-makers, and painters, whose work has continued to delight and inform. Also, it was a time of political upset, a Prussian-styled monarchy, deposed after the humiliation of World War I, gave way to a creative social-democratic government that wilted during the great depression, and foreshadowed the rise of fascism and World War II.
Gay puts forward the idea that culture is " in continuous, tense interaction with society, and expression and criticism of political realities. This mixture of intimacy and hostility between art and life is characteristic of all modern society." Political extremism provokes crisis and a reaction, that in turn may be followed by extreme counter-reaction. Blood will have blood. Feeding on and fueling the political turmoil, culture flourishes. The idea of culture existing outside of politics is a delusion. Weimar showed that there were two connected Germanies: "the Germany of military swagger ... and the Germany of lyrical poetry."
In a small way the book itself illustrates the point. It was first published in 1968, as the war in Vietnam boiled over, and the U.S. turned from an era of expanding democracy under Johnson to right-wing conservatism under Nixon. When it was republished in 2001, fortunes evaporated as the the dot-com stock-market imploded, terrorists rained down war on U.S. soil, and government again turned sharply from an expansive democracy under Clinton to reactionary conservatism under Bush. What could be more timely than a beautifully written book that links cultural flowering to poltical confusion?
In six brief chapters Peter Gay uses Freudian images to trace the birth, growth, and death of the Weimar Republic. He describes the November 1918 revolution after Germany's defeat in World War I, and the establishment of the Republic at Weimar as a "revolt of the sons." Of course, Weimar's expressionist culture had roots that stretched before 1918. But it flourished abundantly during the Republic. Without a single message, Weimar had a unifying theme: the pursuit of a renewed, peaceful humanity, the "son's revolt against the father ... a bid for rational freedom against irrational authority."
Weimar's artistic contempt for politics and longing for renewal ironically furthered the Nazi cause. Ironically, because the Nazis despised expressionist culture. Rainer Maria Rilke, in calling for a universe in which love and suffering, life and death, form a harmonious whole, "in calling for something higher than politics, helped to pave the way for something lower - barbarism." Martin Heidegger, a most subtle philosopher-poet and benighted Nazi sympathizer, found reason and intellect to be inadequate guides to the secret of being. Thomas Mann proudly proclaimed himself to be unpolitical. Gay calls these feelings a "hunger for wholeness," defined by the pursuit of culture for its own sake, a strong need for community, the dismissal of reason, the yearning for heroes, and unquestioning submission to authority.
Counter-revolution follows revolution and in Gay's Freudian model the "revenge of the father" comes after the "revolt of the sons." Following the social-democratic revolution in 1918, art and politics were in a time of innovation. Between 1924 and 1929 there was prosperity and stability. The arts displayed a new, matter-of-fact, objectivity. In 1924 a wiser Thomas Mann, now seeing connections between politics and life, published "The Magic Mountain."
Berlin became a cultural center with a lively theater scene (Brecht), film (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari), music (Furtwangler, Walter), architecture (Gropius' Bauhaus school of architecture), and journalism. The excitement, celebration, sexual freedom, and hustle of Berlin led some to describe it as dancing at the edge of a volcano. If there was hedonism, there was much else of enduring value.
After 1929 unemployment rose, the economy sank, the newspapers overflowed with right-wing propaganda, and "the country was inundated by the rising tide of Kitsch, much of it politically inspired." Nazis led riots against Remarque's film, "All Quiet on the Western Front." Brecht's "Threepenny Opera" taunted the choice of the middle class for a full belly over morality. In a fit of black humor Gay notes, "There was a whole genre of novels dealing with the suicides of young high school students ... and its popularity reflected widespread interest in a grave phenomenon." By 1933 the expressionist artists dispersed and the Nazis began to labor in earnest.
"Weimar Culture" provides a useful introduction to German Kultur und Politik between 1918 and 1933. More important, the book persuasively illustrates a model for understanding how they interact. Political tides influence art, and art colors politics.
Summary of Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider
A seminal work as melodious and haunting as the era it chronicles, now reissued with a new introduction.
First published in 1968, Weimar Culture is one of the masterworks of Peter Gay's distinguished career. A study of German culture between the two wars, the book brilliantly traces the rise of the artistic, literary, and musical culture that bloomed ever so briefly in the 1920s amid the chaos of Germany's tenuous post-World War I democracy, and crashed violently in the wake of Hitler's rise to power. Despite the ephemeral nature of the Weimar democracy, the influence of its culture was profound and far-reaching, ushering in a modern sensibility in the arts that dominated Western culture for most of the twentieth century. Vivid and eminently readable, Weimar Culture is the finest introduction for the casual reader and historian alike. "[A]n enormously rich, intriguing, and exciting essay.... A major contribution to the study..."?The New York Times 16 black and white illustrationsGermany Books
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