Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider
Peter Gay
Language: English
Pages: 240
ISBN: 0393322394
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
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 illustrations
time, and with a congenial atmosphere inviting free debate, these tensions relaxed, and the Bauhaus even profited from that rather premature exhibition of 1923 on which the government had insisted against the better judgment of Gropius and others. The true enemy, in any event, was not internal dissension, but outside hostility—the political and aesthetic aversion of right-wing, tradition-bound craftsmen to the revolutionary implications of the Bauhaus’ experiments and to the Bohemian conduct of
newly founded Democratic Party, rich in distinguished bourgeois intellectuals and progressive industrialists, did extraordinarily well, totaling about 5½ million votes and 75 seats—it was this party, abundant in talent, decent in campaign methods, rational in its program, that turned out to be “the only party that lost in each election”;2 the National People’s Party, the Conservatives of the Empire, unchanged in all but name, got 3 million votes and 42 seats; the Independent Socialists
gegenwärtige Lage der Sozialphilosophie und die Aufgaben eines Instituts für Sozialforschung, Frankfurter Universitätsreden, XXXVII (1931). Important but already somewhat Aesopian. (See also above under Grünberg.) ——, ed., Studien über Autorität und Familie (1936). A famous collective volume done by the members of the Institut für Sozialforschung in French exile, with articles by Horkheimer, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, and others. Hühnerfeld, Paul, In Sachen Heidegger (1961). Lucid,
commentary on Marx’s call to the workers of the world to unite. III Historians have made much of the failures of the politicians who governed the young Republic. Had they failed utterly, it would have been understandable; Ebert and his associates faced difficulties that would have daunted the coolest and most experienced statesman. There was endemic disorder, there was desperate hunger, there was demoralization among intellectuals, there was an army to be brought home and demobilized, there
Difficult study of an affinity. Barlach, Ernst, Das dichterische Werk, 3 vols., ed. Klaus Lazarowicz and Friedrich Dross (1956–1959). Benjamin, Walter, Schriften, 2 vols., ed. Theodor W. Adorno, Gretel Adorno, and Friedrich Podszus (1955). Collected writings by the brilliant social and literary critic who committed suicide in September 1940 on the Spanish frontier, on the verge of safety, hounded to death by Spanish officials. (There is a useful one-volume collection of his selected writings,