Weimar culture

In the days of the Weimar Republic (1919-1933), Germany was rendered unable to project itself economically and politically on the world stage by the harsh terms and reparations placed upon the country enumerated in the Treaty of Versailles (1918) that ended World War I. During this interbellum period, Germany became a center of culture, marking the years after the pains of war and the subsequent worldwide economic depression, with the rapid development and fervent creation of literature, art, music, dance, drama, and the new medium of the motion picture. Preeminent political theorist, Ernst Bloch would later describe the Weimar Republic's cultural explosion as a Periclean Age, comparing it to the culturally vibrant period of Athens in ancient Greece during the government of Pericles in the Fifth Century BCE.

Germany became a thriving center of many new cultural movements, including the stark social satires of Dadaism and the vibrant depictions of expressionism, expressed exquisitely in the paintings of Otto Dix, George Grosz, and John Heartfield and in architecture with the Bauhaus school. Writers like Alfred Döblin, Erich Maria Remarque and the brothers Heinrich and Thomas Mann presented a sobering look at the world and the failure of politics and society through literature. The theatres of Berlin and Frankfurt am Main exploded with new, experimental dramas by Bertolt Brecht, cabaret, and revolutionary stage direction by Max Reinhardt and Erwin Piscator. Concert halls and conservatories were ablaze with the atonal and modern music of Alban Berg, Arnold Schoenberg, and Kurt Weill. Lastly, Germany excelled in the development of cinema— the most notable example being the 1927 film Metropolis, directed by Fritz Lang—and dominated the motion picture industry with talented actors and actresses (Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, Brigitte Helm), in the era of silent film and the early days of "talkies."

Finally, during the era of the Weimar Republic, Germany became a center of intellectual thought at its medieval universities, and most notably social and political theory (especially Marxism) was combined with Freudian psychoanalysis to form the highly influential discipline of Critical Theory—with its development at the Institute for Social Research (also known as the Frankfurt School) founded at the University of Frankfurt am Main.

Historical Origins of Weimar

A Cultural Explosion

Art

Expressionism

DADA

The ART of Social Criticism

The Bauhaus

Cinema

Drama

Literature

Music

Political Theory

Science

Flight of German Intellectuals

With the rise of Nazism and the ascension of Adolf Hitler to power in 1933, many German intellectuals and cultural figures fled Germany for the United States, the United Kingdom, and other parts of the world. Those who remained behind were often arrested, sent to early concentration camps to either be killed or die from maltreatment or disease.

The intellectuals associated with the Institute for Social Research (also known as the Frankfurt School) fled to the United States and reestablished the Institute at Columbia University in New York City.

Criticism of Weimar Culture

Notable Cultural Figures of the Weimar Era

Artists

• Ernst Barlach – sculptor
• Max Beckmann – printmaker
• Otto Dix – painter
• Max Ernst – painter
• George Grosz – painter
• John Heartfield – photomontage artist
• Erich Heckel – painter
• Kaethe Kollwitz – printmaker, sculptor, artist
• Wassily Kandinsky – painter
• Ernst Ludwig Kirchner – painter
• Paul Klee – painter
• Gerhard Marcks – sculptor, woodcuts, lithographer, ceramics
• Otto Mueller – painter
• Gabriele Munter – painter
• Emil Nolde – painter
• Max Pechstein – painter
• Karl Schmidt-Rottluff – painter
• Kurt Schwitters – painter

Literature

• Bertolt Brecht – playwright (The Threepenny Opera)
• Alfred Döblin ‐ novelist (Berlin Alexanderplatz)
• Hermann Hesse – novelist (Siddartha)
• Christopher Isherwood – novelist
• Ernst Jünger
• Heinrich Mann – novelist (Der Untertan)
• Klaus Mann
• Thomas Mann – novelist (Death in Venice, Buddenbrooks, The Magic Mountain)
• Erich Mühsam – poet, playwright, anarchist
• Erich Maria Remarque – novelist (All Quiet on the Western Front)
• Anna Seghers – novelist
• Kurt Tucholsky – satirist

Music

• Alban Berg – composer (Wozzeck)
• Paul Hindemith – composer, violist (Mathis der Maler)
• Otto Klemperer – conductor and composer
• Arnold Schoenberg – composer (Transfigured Night)
• Anton Webern – composer
• Kurt Weill – composer (The Threepenny Opera)

Theater and Film

• Marlene Dietrich – actress
• Greta Garbo – actress
• Brigitte Helm – actress
• Erika Mann – theatre producer, playwright, journalist, cabaret and film actress.
• Max Reinhardt – theatre producer
• Fritz Lang – filmmaker Metropolis (1927)
• Erwin Piscator – theatre and film producer
• Hans Richter – filmmaker, actor, writer
• Leontine Sagan – actress and filmmaker Mädchen in Uniform (1931)
• Josef von Sternberg – filmmaker The Salvation Hunters (1925), The Blue Angel (1930)

Intellectuals

• Theodor W. Adorno
• Walter Benjamin – critical theorist
• Albert Einstein – physicist
• Erich Fromm – psychologist and philosopher
• Sigmund Freud – psychoanalyst
• Max Horkheimer – critical theorist
• Carl Jung – psychoanalyst
• Siegfried Kracauer
• Franz Oppenheimer – sociologist and political economist
• Max Weber – political theorist

See also

• Aftermath of World War I
• Bauhaus
• Cabaret
• Cinema of Germany
• Critical Theory
• Culture of Germany
• Dadaism
• Degenerate art
• Expressionism
• Frankfurt School
• Futurism
• Germany
• German Expressionism
• Gleichschaltung
• Glossary of the Weimar Republic
• History of Germany
• Kultur
• Literature of World War I
• Lost Generation
• Modernism
• Nazi Germany
• New Objectivity
• Post-WWI recession
• Post-expressionism
• Surrealism
• Weimar Republic
• Weimar Timeline
• World War I

References

Footnotes

Background Resources

External Links