WEIMAR GERMANY
Promise and Tragedy
Eric D Weitz
Princeton; 408 pages; $26.95
In conventional histories, the Weimar Republic (1919 to 1933) is written off as a forgettable prelude to Nazi Germany, an inept transition from monarchy to democracy that somehow made the rise of right-wing national socialism inevitable. But the subtitle to this book, "Promise and Tragedy", expresses more accurately the legacy of what was actually a significant 14-year period in modern European history and culture. This is the burden of Eric D Weitz's impassioned, detailed and deeply absorbing account.
Far from being a barren interlude marked by hyperinflation, misery and turmoil, Mr Weitz chronicles a vibrant and widely influential turning point in cultural and political history. "… [I]t is a travesty to see Weimar only as a prelude to the Third Reich," Mr Weitz writes. "Weimar Germany was a rich, exciting moment and many of the artistic works, philosophical considerations, and political imaginings created in its midst offered bright visions of a better world. Those visions continue to have meaning for us today."
This was, after all, an era of wrenching social change that was creating a society that spoke of women's rights and saw the growth of a consumer culture centred on factory and city. Presented in their totality, as Mr Weitz has done here, the cultural achievements of this brief republic were nothing short of remarkable, much of it clearly anticipating the 1960s' counterculture.
The influence of the Bauhaus school of architecture, established by German architect Walter Gropius, with its revolutionary use of glass, light and functional dynamism, can be seen in every modern city today (not always with the happiest aesthetic results). The progressive, avant-garde Dada movement in art, spawned as a reaction to the war and Swiss in origin, found its fullest expression in Weimar Germany under photographers like Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and the raw expressionism of artists like Hannah Hoch and Paul Klee.
In music, Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's stunning Threepenny Opera revolutionised the music hall with its jazz overtones and blunt portrayal of the seamier side of urban life. In America, Mack the Knife became a beloved jazz standard (made famous by Bobby Darin, Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong), and Alabama Song later became a Doors hit.
This was the age that saw Thomas Mann, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929 and a staunch supporter of the Republic, write his magnum opus, The Magic Mountain, a classic of 20th-century literature. It was at the height of Weimar that the philosopher Martin Heidegger wrote Being and Time, a spirited, complex challenge to western philosophy since Socrates and one of the world's most significant philosophical works (Heidegger later became a Nazi, but early on he accepted Jewish students of whom the political theorist Hannah Arendt was one). Hans J Morgenthau, of the famous Institute of Social Science at Frankfurt University (better known as the Frankfurt School), "virtually invented the political science field of international relations" - a famous follower of his "realist" approach being Henry Kissinger.
It is appropriate that this book, which brilliantly locates these achievements within their socio-political context, has been republished ahead of the centenary of World War I next year, the pointless five-year conflagration that ended in the dissolution of monarchies throughout east-central Europe. This considerably expanded version of Weimar Germany is particularly thought-provoking at a time when global politics is tilting to the right under the pressure of a prolonged economic slowdown when messianic yearnings for "strong" governments gather traction.
The history of the violent death of democracy in Germany less than two decades after its birth is familiar to the average student: the draconian terms of the post-war Treaty of Versailles that imposed impossible reparations on Germany, the national shame of defeat, ineffectual, vacillating government and, of course, the Great Depression that destroyed a fragile economic revival.
But the trajectory from democracy to right-wing totalitarianism was by no means inevitable. Mr Weitz focuses on an angle that, though not novel, is relevant for India as it heads for one of its most polarised general elections. The "trend of the Weimar years were also the result of policy choices that gave major industrial and financial interest preponderant influence over the economy," he writes. "In the revolutionary moment of 1918-1919 more forceful and imaginative policies … could have reined in big business which, after all, was … largely anti-democratic."
Business, unions and the state supported inflation until it "went sour in hyperinflation". In the crisis that followed, business was able to reassert its powers and roll back many of the social achievements of the revolution (shorter working hours and better working conditions). In the Depression, a right-authoritarian government pursued the deflationary strategies that business also supported.
In sum, writes Mr Weitz, though many blamed the socialists and Jews for their predicament, the real problem was the "German Right, in which heavy industry and major financial interests exercised preponderant influence and which promoted policies … that worsened the real-life circumstances of so many Germans".
As he warns, the threats to democracy "can come from those within who … use the liberties afforded them by democratic institutions to undermine the substance of democracy. Weimar cautions us to be wary of those people as well. What comes next can be very bad, even worse than imaginable".
