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Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy | 
 enlarge | Author: Eric D. Weitz
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Category: Book
List Price: $29.95
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Rating:  9 reviews
Sales Rank: 63859
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 448
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.8
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 5.9 x 1.5
ISBN: 069101695X
Dewey Decimal Number: 943.085
EAN: 9780691016955
ASIN: 069101695X
Publication Date: September 4, 2007
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Product Description
Weimar Germany still fascinates us, and now this complex and remarkably creative period and place has the history it deserves. Eric Weitz's Weimar Germany reveals the Weimar era as a time of strikingly progressive achievements--and even greater promise. With a rich thematic narrative and detailed portraits of some of Weimar's greatest figures, this comprehensive history recaptures the excitement and drama as it unfolded, viewing Weimar in its own right--and not as a mere prelude to the Nazi era. Weimar Germany tells how Germans rose from the defeat of World War I and the turbulence of revolution to forge democratic institutions and make Berlin a world capital of avant-garde art. Setting the stage for this story, Weitz takes the reader on a walking tour of Berlin to see and feel what life was like there in the 1920s, when modernity and the modern city--with its bright lights, cinemas, "new women," cabarets, and sleek department stores--were new. We learn how Germans enjoyed better working conditions and new social benefits and listened to the utopian prophets of everything from radical socialism to communal housing to nudism. Weimar Germany also explores the period's revolutionary cultural creativity, from the new architecture of Erich Mendelsohn, Bruno Taut, and Walter Gropius to Hannah Hoech's photomontages and Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's theater. Other chapters assess the period's turbulent politics and economy, and the recipes for fulfilling sex lives propounded by new "sexologists." Yet Weimar Germany also shows how entrenched elites continually challenged Weimar's achievements and ultimately joined with a new radical Right led by the Nazis to form a coalition that destroyed the republic. Thoroughly up-to-date, skillfully written, and strikingly illustrated, Weimar Germany brings to life as never before an era of creativity unmatched in the twentieth century-one whose influence and inspiration we still feel today.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 4 more reviews...
 The Golden Age of Weimar Germany October 22, 2007
Ronald H. Clark (WASHINGTON, DC USA)
35 out of 36 found this review helpful
Weimar Germany (i.e., the period between the two wars) is usually primarily seen merely as a precursor to the Nazi era which was to follow. This is a shame because Weimar itself is an extremely interesting period well meriting extensive study on its own. This excellent study, by a professor of history at the University of Minnesota, demonstrates the virtue of taking a close look at this fascinating period.
Most books on Weimar tend to focus on the political developments that led to Hitler's rise; while that is covered in this book as well (the initial chapters focus upon the aborted German revolution and the "political worlds"), it is clearly secondary to other concerns of the author. He sees Weimar as fundamentally being about trying to cope with "modernism" and all of the technological changes that swept life in the 1920's and 1930's. So there is sustained discussion of the mass printed media, radio, theater and film, architecture, photography (Sander and Moholy-Nagy), music and expressionist art as well as political developments and the impact of economic crises on German life. Culture and the "mass society" is a constant focus here, including some interesting capsule discussions of individuals such as Thomas Mann, Bertold Brecht, Kurt Weill, Martin Heidegger, and an absolutely fascinating figure of whom I had not previously been aware, the artist Hannah Hoch. "Bodies and Sex" is another interesting topic which I have not encountered in other studies of Weimar.
All of this is discussed against the political background which is so critical to understanding the period. As such, the book is a richer study with wider sweep than Peter Gay's stupendous "Weimar Culture," which it complements nicely. The book contains extremely helpful notes, a useful bibliographic essay, and a number of incisive illustrations, many in full color. The author begins his book stating: "Weimar Germany still speaks to us." This fine study validates that perspective.
An Incomplete Political Analysis February 26, 2008
Michael Jay Friedman (Virginia, United States)
11 out of 12 found this review helpful
The rise of the hyper-specialized academic, overbred for success (read tenure) in a clubby, overpoliticized hothouse (read department of history), deprives educated general readers of first class yet accessible works of the caliber their parents or grandparents enjoyed. The days when Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. (Harvard) or Richard Hofstadter (Columbia) commanded substantial readerships are long gone. There are exceptions, of course, and a number of fine writers outside the academy have stepped forward partially to bridge that gap. Occasionally an academic publisher seeks consciously to marry cutting-edge scholarship to engaging, accessible prose. Princeton University Press aims high with its lavishly illustrated presentation (including one of the most beautiful covers ever to adorn a historical monograph) of Eric D. Weitz's Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy. Unfortunately, the text itself is something of a mixed bag.
At least one of the other reviews here suggests that Weitz offers little that one could not find elsewhere, including the first volume of Richard Evans's Third Reich trilogy. This is correct, at least with regard to Weimar politics, but not in my view necessarily objectionable. Plainly Weitz aims here at an introduction for readers new to the subject. And Weitz covers far more than Weimar politics. The problems here, and the book's real strengths partially offset them, pertain to Weitz's pedestrian and at times repetitive prose, and to his selective assignment of blame for the Weimar Republic's political demise. One is sorely tempted to trace both deficiencies back to Weitz's abode in the academic hothouse.
First, though, the book does a number of things well enough. Chapter length summaries introduce us to significant developments in architecture and housing design; in literature and theater; to conflicts over new, modern ideals regarding bodies, sex, and women's role in society. For many readers, the concise precis of Bruno Taut's housing projects (a boon to German workers who now would enjoy modern utilities plus windows open to the sun and greenery--but in other aspects designed "the way people should live, whether they liked it or not"), or Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, or Billy Wilder's Menschen am Sonntag (People on Sunday) will amply justify their investment of time and energy in this book.
But modernism, Weimar Germany's oversized contributions notwithstanding, was not a uniquely German phenomenon. Those who seek in these pages an explanation of what made Weimar unique may not leave fully satisfied. Weitz asserts that during the 1920s and early 1930s, Weimar was the situs of an especially vibrant kinetic energy, one that pulsed more intensely because Germany had lost the First World War. Having experienced a greater sense of postwar disillusion, Weitz writes, Germans experienced a more acute effort by "artists, writers, and political organizers... to unravel the meaning of modernity." This may very well be correct, but Weitz does not really prove it. Possibly doing so would require a different book, one that embraced a more comparative approach.
Weitz's inclusion of "political organizers" among the great modernists brings us to the nub of his analysis. As Weitz shows, the harsh traditionalist reaction to modernist cultural advance was only one front of a broader indictment of perceived "un-Germanic" elements in the extant culture, government, and populace. Words like nomadic, uprooted, and Bolshevist were flung with equal fervor at the Bauhaus, the republic and the Jew. Well before Hitler assumed the Chancellorship, Weitz writes, "the attack on the modernists became entwined with ever-growing race thinking."
But Weitz attributes Weimar's demise exclusively (or nearly so; he can be a bit clever on this point) to a determined political effort by the nationalist political Right, which ever considered the republic an alien imposition upon the German Reich. The problem here is that the German Communist party also denied Weimar's legitimacy, also sought violently to overthrow it, and also contributed significantly to its demise.
Weitz's response, enunciated briefly at several points in his text, is that the Communists were never strong enough to overturn Weimar democracy while right-wing nationalist parties culminating in the Nazi movement were. This is true of course, but the better question is whether Weimar might have survived had its Communist foes instead lent their support to German democracy. Flanked on either end of the political spectrum by revolutionary, anti-democratic parties, the democrats never quite commanded majority support, and they proved that much weaker when the final showdown came. In that sense, extreme nationalists and communists alike were responsible for Weimar's demise.
Among the Weimar Republic's real and ultimately fatal weaknesses was that its army, civil service, and judiciary all substantially accepted the right-wing nationalist charge of republican illegitimacy. Weitz repeatedly blames the democrats for failing fully to reform them, or, as he puts it, to "clear away the old order" during the rush of the 1918 revolution. Well, yes. But at the time (1918-21), the Social Democrats and their allies instead were expending their limited political capital coming to terms with those institutions -- a move necessitated by Communist efforts violently to overthrow the fledgling democracy. If there was a way to purge the army -- at that moment or later--Weitz doesn't reveal it.
So in the end, says Weitz, Weimar failed for its unwillingness to clear away the old order. That's always a popular prescription on campus, but not always feasible in the real world.
These caveats aside, this is not a bad choice for the reader who plans on reading only one book on Weimar. If, however, one's interest runs more toward arts, letters, and culture, one might look instead I suppose to Peter Gay. For political analysis, Richard Evans' The Coming of the Third Reich remains a superior choice.
 Portrait of a fractured society January 30, 2008
Ralph Blumenau (London United Kingdom)
8 out of 8 found this review helpful
The theme of this book is that the shattering of the structure of Imperial Germany led to an explosion of innovation and creativity, an optimism that it was possible to create a better and freer world; but that the unbroken old elites in business, the churches, the judiciary and the army hated all these changes, blamed them on the Republic and consistently undermined it where they could. The rhetoric of the conservative Right was widespread long before the Nazis became significant, that indeed `the Nazis invented nothing ideologically or rhetorically'. The crisis of the Depression and the inability of the Reichstag to deal with it brought the conservative and the radical Right together. And although Weitz says a few times at the end that there was nothing inevitable about Hitler coming to power, that it was `the result of a small group of powerful men around the president who schemed to place Adolf Hitler in power', the impression left by the book as a whole is that the tensions inside the Weimar Republic between progress and reaction, tradition and modernity, was so intense that the Republic was doomed almost from the start. One baleful symptom was the militarization of the parties on the left and the right, always ready to march in demonstrations.
The two outside chapters are political. The opening chapter is good on analysis but amazingly sketchy in parts of the narrative: the Spartacist Revolt of 1919 receives the briefest of mentions; the upheavals in Bavaria (1918/1919) none at all; the Beer Hall Putsch and the Communist rebellions in Saxony and Thuringia (1923) are dismissed in two sentences (p.102): `Communists attempted a revolution; the Nazis attempted a march on Berlin to seize power. Both were fiascos.' The concluding chapter is a better narrative account of the death-throes of the Weimar Republic, although I think that Weitz is unduly harsh on Chancellor Bruening, who, he says, `happily deployed' Article 84 of the Constitution which enabled him to govern by emergency decree, because he `wanted to use his office to overthrow the Republic and create some kind of authoritarian political system.' With the Reichstag unable to agree on any measures to deal with the economic crisis, what else could he have done? Of course Bruening wanted a reform of the Constitution, but that is not the same as wanting to overthrow the Republic, and he was after all overthrown because he banned the SA and the SS when Schleicher and Papen wanted to negotiate with the Nazis.
The seven chapters in the middle deal with the social and cultural history of the period. The social history is well done. The role of women - the hardships they suffered during the three great crises (post-war hunger, inflation, and depression) but also their liberation is frequently underlined. The impact of radio, cinema, the gramophone and photography are described in great detail (though those chapters would have applied to most countries in Western Europe and the Soviet Union. The popularity of the Tiller Girls in Germany disturbed the journalist Siegfried Kracauer: `they joined together his two nightmare visions: Prussian militarism and the American factory'. No mention that the Tiller Girls originated in England.) The sexual liberation, though also not confined to Germany, was perhaps greater in Germany - or rather, in Berlin - than it was in other countries, and the cult of nudity and the Body Beautiful was also more pronounced in Germany than elsewhere. The conservative forces, especially the churches, hated all that and blamed the Republic.
The chapters devoted to the arts consist of sometimes rather long essays devoted to a handful of individuals whom Weitz considers representative of the wish to break completely with the traditions of the past. In architecture they are Walter Gropius and the Bauhaus, Erich Mendelsohn, and Bruno Taut; in the theatre Berthold Brecht, also breaking with the traditional forms of theatre and opera. In painting there is Hannah Hoech's Dadaism: her collages represent `the cacophony of modern life' and her provocatively trans-gender and trans-racial images predictably caused outrage among conservatives; but there is very little on German expressionist artists apart from the comment that they expressed both the jagged anxiety of the period and also its frenetic joy. There are no examples given of the Neue Sachlichkeit, though the school is referred to. Only in literature is more attention given to conservatives: Thomas Mann is shown as nostalgic about the culture which existed before the age of the masses; Martin Heidegger as expressing his distaste for modernism, technology, the mass culture that stifled authenticity, and the frantic life of the cities by isolating himself in his hut in the forest. Oswald Spengler and Ernst Juenger are shown as using a vocabulary which the Nazis picked up.
I think the book is excessively repetitive, but it does bring out well that life in the Weimar Republic was more fractured and more damaged by the three monumental crises in its short life than were other societies in the West. But I think that, like so many other historians of the Weimar period, Weitz is in danger of reading history backwards from the Nazi period. Perhaps the judgment in 1926 of an outsider, a Harvard specialist on Germany called Kuno Francke, was superficial: `Germany is running with a smoothness as if it has been used to republican government for generations'. Not much awareness of a fractured society there!
Their country right or righter October 28, 2007
Harry Eagar (Maui)
6 out of 37 found this review helpful
It's a question ripped from today's headline. Can a society whose history is monarchical, aristocratic and military, with a puritan religion and ethnic and linguistic splits, defeated and impoverished, bitter and occupied, be made into a democracy?
Not Iraq today but Germany in 1919. The answer for Germany was no.
Eric Weitz paints Weimar -- actually Berlin, nothing much ever happened in Weimar -- as a split personality. Vibrant and creative, on the verge of modernity; and sullen, backward-looking and afraid. Tense is the word he uses.
As a leftist, even, apparently, an admirer of postmodernism, Weitz finds much to admire in Weimar Germany: a concern for workers' housing, sexual openness, artistic experimentation, a free approach to life and Martin Heidegger.
My view, colored by an introduction through Georg Grosz, is less sunny, but unquestionably Weimar had a potential to go in more than one direction. It is not so obvious, now, that the road not taken would have been appealing, although it could not have been worse than the one that was taken.
Politically, Weitz dismisses the chance that Germany could have gone Communist. "Germans are not Russians," he says. Perhaps. There was more than one brand of Red revolution on the menu in the '20s.
He regards it as inevitable that Germany would eventually go Right, but he does not regard it as inevitable that it would go Nazi.
This gives too much credit to the old Right, which proved stronger than the new Left but was too feckless to have withstood Nazism, or something like it..
The Left revolution of 1918 was never completed, and the personnel and institutions of the old regime were left intact, except the monarchy. The army, universities, churches, state bureaucracy, nobles and industrialists were not stripped of either assets or position.
The hyperinflation of 1923 (engineered by socialists but reading from a capitalist script) ruined the middling classes, the resentment about reparations to the World War I allies embittered everyone and the Depression finally finished off a republic that hardly anyone admired and no one liked.
So, in the end, it was economics, not morality or society, that brought down democracy. How very Marxian.
However, not so fast. Weitz's chapters on reparations and economics are the weakest part of this otherwise interesting reconstruction. Germany never paid any reparations (we Americans foolishly rebated everything to them, the stupidest of Coolidge democracy's many stupidities), so the resentment was wholly artificial. The economic analysis is merely weak. There are hardly any statistics offered.
Weitz's most loving chapters are about culture: architecture, theater, painting, photography, surprisingly little about music. He thinks Weimar culture still speaks to us through its "sparkling creativity."
Much of it seems empty to me. Dada was even expressly so.
The admiration for "sparkling creativity" leads, though, via a very short step to appeasement of bestial behavior on the grounds that a people who could compose such lovely music could not be really evil.
We ought to know better by now, but Weitz seems to have missed that lesson..
Astonishingly, the one part of Weimar intellectual life that really does still speak to us -- theoretical physics -- does not get a single word. Neither David Hilbert nor Werner Heisenburg appears.
Weitz's "Weimar Germany" is written from the perspective of the cafes. In fact, it begins at a cafe on the Potsdamer Platz.
And for all its goals of painting the big picture, it never gets very far from there.
Well, anyhow, there are not any better summaries of Weimar in English though there are some about as good.
I think "Weimar Germany" teaches a lesson that few wish to learn. Despite what George Bush imagines, it is not true that all peoples thirst for liberty. Germans didn't.
Weitz's best insight is that it was the Nazis who paved the way for a modern, democratic Germany by turning on their conservative sponsors and ruining them, in a why the socialists were afraid to do in 1919-23.
In the last few paragraphs, he ruminates -- without naming names -- on the dangers to democracy. They are internal, he thinks. "A democratic political system cannot long endure a situation in which virtually every issue becomes magnified to an ideological contest over ultimate meanings. But it especially cannot endure when its elites seek to undermine the democracy from within, when they whine incessantly about a system in which they still exercise privileges and still dispose of immense resources."
Dick Cheney, I'm thinking, he's lookin' at you.
Such thoughts are common coin around Bloomington, where Weitz teaches.
I think there is a different lesson to be drawn for the 21st century from Weimar Germany. The threat to liberty is external, it resides in violent fanatics who despise western values and care nothing for how much they destroy as long as they destroy us.
Look, if you care to, at who represents Professor Weitz in the Congress (5th District of Minnesota).
Interwar Germany - Promise and Tragedy November 4, 2007
David Lisbona (Haifa, Israel)
4 out of 7 found this review helpful
The subtitle for this book is most apt, for the period in question, between the end of the first World War until the Nazi rise to power, was indeed a period of great promise and ultimately great tragedy (the rise of the Nazis). World War 1 had been devastating for the Germans both in their defeat and the horrific numbers of dead and wounded and for the humiliation the Germans felt as a result of the Versailles Treaty.
Yet the German Empire was over and there was a spirit that the days of the staid aristocratic elites was past. It was a period of incredible ups and downs with rapid economic recovery tempered by severe economic crashes. There was a whiff of revolution in the air - politically, socially, sexually and in the arts and architecture. It was an exciting and tumultuous period.
Weitz takes us on a walk through Weimar Berlin , Weimar politics , working life, art, entertainment and body culture. Very readable and informative.
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