Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy (Hardcover)

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Key Phrases: sex reformers, sexual misery, World War, Potsdamer Platz, United States (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. University of Minnesota history professor Weitz takes readers on a walk through Weimar Republic–era Berlin in the footsteps of a 1920s flâneur, an urban ambler. Wandering among cafes and department stores, Weitz notices the New Women, the jazz bands, the prostitutes, the beggars, the war wounded. He considers how radio and motion pictures changed public gatherings, internationalizing mass entertainment. Separate chapters, with a wealth of well-chosen illustrations, explore Weimar's new theories of architecture, graphic arts, photography, theater, philosophy and sexuality. Weitz selects key exemplars of each discipline—Brecht, Weill, Mann, Bruno Taut, Erich Mendelsohn, August Sander, László Moholy-Nagy, Hannah Höch, Siegfried Kracauer, etc.—for in-depth focus before turning to the backlash that their radicalism aroused. In his closing discussion of the collapse of the republic, Weitz elaborates on the right's resistance to modernization, as well as the overall fragility of the democratic spirit. A lively style and excellent illustrations make this intellectually challenging volume accessible to both academics and armchair scholars. 8 color (not seen by PW) and 52 b&w photos. (Oct.)
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Review

"... perhaps the best single-volume history available in English." -- John Kappes, The Cleveland Plain Dealer

"...Weitz takes the reader on a pleasant walk through the city, observing its sights." -- Roger K. Miller, The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

"His most innovative chapter is an imaginary walk through Berlin, observing the daily lives of the city's different classes." -- Brian Ladd, The New York Times Book Review

"To read about Weimar is to be reminded of the stupendous number of gifted people it produced." -- Roger K. Miller, Philadelphia Inquirer

"Weimar Germany" serves as a perfect introduction to its subject." -- Adam Kirsch, The New York Sun

"Weimar embodied - a cultural explosion he chronicles with a passionate, persuasive voice." -- Michael Levitin, Financial Times

"Whatever the flaws, this remains an often gripping (and splendidly illustrated) work." -- The Economist

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 448 pages
• Publisher: Princeton University Press; illustrated edition edition (September 4, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 069101695X
• ISBN-13: 978-0691016955
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 5.9 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #464,369 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

39 of 40 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Golden Age of Weimar Germany, October 22, 2007

By	Ronald H. Clark (WASHINGTON, DC USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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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.

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Portrait of a fractured society, January 30, 2008

By	Ralph Blumenau (London United Kingdom) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

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 Brüning, 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 Brüning 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 Höch'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 Jünger 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!

20 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars An Incomplete Political Analysis, February 26, 2008

By	Michael Jay Friedman (Virginia, United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.