Читать книгу A History of Germany 1918 - 2020 - Mary Fulbrook - Страница 18

Many people who know little more about the politics of the Weimar Republic than that it ended with the rise of Hitler may know a great deal about ‘Weimar culture’. Many of the currents we associate with Weimar had their roots in the prewar period, with the shifting paradigms of the turn of the century, associated with thinkers such as Sigmund Freud. But the experience of mechanized mass slaughter and suffering during the war, the perception of living in a ‘machine age’ with all its human costs and the social upheavals and deep political rifts of the early postwar years precipitated a series of more radical engagements. Artists, writers, social theorists and activists challenged received ways of thinking, and explored new sorts of interpretation and modes of representation of a rapidly changing world. Technological advances also played a major role in the changing patterns of culture at this time. Virtually all the tendencies associated with Weimar were part of wider, international currents at the time; and the shattering of this ferment of creativity with the Nazi clampdown, and the enforced exile of so many talented individuals, ironically ensured that this cultural ferment in Germany was to be of lasting international significance.

The Weimar years, brief though this political epoch was, saw an explosion of creativity across a wide range of scientific and artistic fields. The German traditions of research in medicine and the natural sciences, particularly physics and chemistry, and more recent expertise in psychology and psychoanalysis, continued to develop apace. Despite the later distortions and deeply unethical uses to which such theories were put under the Nazis, fields such as eugenics were widely shared across Europe and North America at this time. In the social sciences, where thinkers such as Max Weber, Georg Simmel and others had already made extensive contributions, new twists were added by the ‘Frankfurt School’ of Critical Theory. Theorists such as Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin sought to use theory not simply as description and understanding of immutable laws in order to control the world, as in the tradition of the Enlightenment, but rather as a critique of contemporary conditions, an exploration of transformative potential and a challenge to contemporary mass culture, in service of what they saw as emancipation. This school of social theory, forced into exile in the Nazi period, was subsequently rediscovered in the 1960s by younger American and European social theorists, influenced particularly by the ageing Herbert Marcuse and by a second generation of critical theorists such as Jürgen Habermas. In the visual arts, tendencies existing before the First World War – particularly the schools known as ‘Die Brücke’ (based in Dresden) and ‘Der blaue Reiter’ (based in Munich) – continued to be creative in the early Weimar years. Expressionism – associated with names such as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Franz Marc – exploded and diversified into an array of experimental and avant-garde tendencies: cubism, futurism, Dada and other styles flourished. Architectural developments associated with names such as Bruno Taut and Erich Mendelsohn changed the environment of major cities including Berlin, complementing and displacing the heavily ornamental bourgeois style of the imperial period. The Bauhaus school of design, founded by Walter Gropius in 1919, was based initially in Weimar, moving to Dessau in 1925 and Berlin in 1930. Focusing on architecture, the fine arts, graphic design and crafts, even dance, and informed by a wider philosophy of life in which teachers and pupils lived and worked together, it combined concern with functionality and affordability with a new sense of aesthetics. It, too, fell victim to the Nazi takeover, being pressured to close the Berlin school in 1933, but again, the exile of many leading proponents – not only Gropius but also, for example, Mies van der Rohe and Marcel Breuer – in fact served to spread its message to large parts of North America and Europe. The work of the Bauhaus was of major influence in twentieth-century architecture, art and design, with an impact ranging from the design of housing estates for the masses to villas and cultural centres, from steel tube chairs to the humble kettle, from the art of individuals such as Wassily Kandinsky to the basic elements of graphic design. In literature, a great range of prose, poetry and drama was produced which has proved to be of lasting significance. Again, the modernist period was far broader both chronologically and geographically than the Weimar epoch, and many significant works were germinated and published well outside this compass. Yet major works – Thomas Mann’s masterpiece The Magic Mountain, for example – were published during this period. Names such as Heinrich and Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, Rainer Maria Rilke, Bertolt Brecht and his musical associate Kurt Weill have achieved enduring international standing. In music, too, the experimental work and twelve-tone method of the Austrian composer Arnold Schönberg was influential, if controversial, informing the work of contemporaries and pupils including Alban Berg and Hanns Eisler, another associate of Bertolt Brecht.

The Weimar period also saw an explosion in new media of communication. The cinema began to replace the theatre, as films – first silent, then from 1929 with sound – became an increasingly popular form of mass entertainment. Weimar films participated in international developments, but with uniquely German overtones in the ways in which they explored the lives of ordinary people in the machine age, and the possibilities as well as the tragedies of individual fates in modern mass society, as well as intimating the role of the unconscious. Iconic masterpieces of Weimar film include the 1920 horror classic of the expressionist period, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari; Georg Wilhelm Pabst’s 1929 film about the tragic fate of a young girl falling into the wrong hands, Pandora’s Box; Walter Ruttmann’s 1927 Berlin: Symphony of a Big City, recording in all its ambivalence, excitement, haste and contradictions a day in the life of a big city, as the wheels of technological progress affect the lives of hundreds of thousands of individuals who, in their working hours, become mere cogs in the machine; Fritz Lang’s 1927 Metropolis, in rather different manner also exploring the more threatening sides of big city life in a dystopian future; and Lang’s extraordinary 1930 murder thriller, M., demonstrating both a curious and prescient understanding of perpetrator mentality and critique of mass responses to the perpetrator figure.

Radio, too, was a new medium of communication which became ever more significant. Radio ownership spread rapidly among German households and contributed to the formation of a new national public. The commercialization of leisure may have started to break down divisions between class-based subcultures and began to erode the hold of the SPD over the outlook and organizations of large parts of the working class.⁸ Regional isolation was also diminished, in a less than democratic manner, with increased concentration in the newspaper industry: press barons such as Hugenberg not only directly owned and influenced their own newspapers but also indirectly affected the contents and political bias of ‘independent’ local papers through their press agency services and the provision of news snippets and commentaries.

New media of communication had a variety of consequences and could be used to a wide variety of ends. In film, radio and newsprint, as in other areas of Weimar culture, developments were ambiguous. While certain renowned films, such as Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (Im Westen nichts Neues), took a firm stand against war, they remained the exception: there were many more, generally ephemeral and of low artistic quality, which glorified nationalism, war and the fatherland. In the sphere of radio, pro-Republican forces failed to gain political control or make serious use of a medium which was for most of the Weimar period intended to be politically neutral. It was only in 1932 that Franz von Papen (then Chancellor) asserted political control of the radio, leaving a welcome gift for the Nazis to exploit in their propaganda efforts after January 1933.

The German culture of the interwar period, and much of what we associate with Weimar culture, was then neither restricted to this period nor limited by German national borders. Given such an extraordinary diversity of talent and creative production, it is difficult to form valid brief generalizations. Yet there are specificities in the ways the cultural creativity of this time was related to the distinctive political and social conditions in which it was produced and received. After the near-apocalyptic exuberance of the early years – in both the political and artistic realms – as well as the continuing emotional pain occasioned by physical and psychological legacies of the Great War, during the middle years of the Weimar period a new empha- sis was given to a cool, detached combination of utilitarian and aesthetic qualities. Eberhard Kolb and others have pointed out that the tendency known as ‘new objectivity’ (Neue Sachlichkeit), with which the Bauhaus, for example, was associated, coincided with the period of relative stabilization from 1924 to 1929.⁹ The final years of the Weimar Republic witnessed not only a radical political polarization but also a heightened politicization and polarization in art, particularly in such fields as theatre. And novels such as Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz bore witness to the disturbing social conditions and radical political violence of the closing years of the Republic, with the onset of economic depression.

But there are perhaps more important ways than simple periodization in which Weimar culture reflected, refracted and contributed to the complexities of Weimar politics. For Weimar culture, far from being a homogeneous entity, was a deeply divided phenomenon: indeed, perhaps it would be more apposite to speak of Weimar cultures in the plural, or of diverse broader, international currents in which developments in Germany played a leading role. The one element that united the widely differing aspects of this culture within Germany, on both the Right and the Left, was the problematic relationship with ‘modernity’ in general as well as the Weimar Republic in particular. Use was made of modern means of communication, modern machinery and media to criticize the age of the machine and modern society. On the Left, artists such as Georg Grosz, Otto Dix, Käthe Kollwitz and Heinrich Zille criticized the bourgeois society in which the bourgeois, conservative and nationalist ‘pillars of society’ (to borrow the title of one of Grosz’s most scathing and biting pictures) grew fat at the expense of the masses, who were driven into conditions of abject poverty. This poverty was captured with humour in Zille’s drawings of the life of the Berlin working classes in the early twentieth century and with pathos in Käthe Kollwitz’s representations of misery and suffering, most poignantly in the figure of a mother mourning a son lost at war. While left-wing political cabaret and theatre attacked the pomposity and injustice of bourgeois capitalist society, right-wingers attacked parliamentary democracy, the political form of the Weimar Republic. The influx of new forms, such as American jazz music – held by right-wingers to be the ultimate in decadence – and the perceived ‘laxity in morals’, particularly in metropolitan centres such as 1920s Berlin, were held to be evidence of cultural decay. Viewed from other perspectives, however, this era heralded new freedoms and new tolerance. Expressions of homosexual love and attraction, for example, were far more openly accepted in Berlin bars and cafes, flourishing in the Nollendorf Platz area made famous in the Berlin novels of Christopher Isherwood. Along with other prominent figures, Magnus Hirschfeld, a physician and founder of the Institute for Sexual Research in Berlin, continued the campaign against Paragraph 175 of the German criminal code which criminalized homosexual acts between men; the difficulties faced by gay men in face of the prejudices of the time were poignantly captured in the 1919 film, in which Hirschfeld played himself, Anders als die Andern (‘Different from the Others’). But in the view of conservatives, the Weimar Republic itself was held responsible for decadence, and for the penetration of Western forms of shallow, superficial ‘civilization’ into the purer German ‘culture’, defiling it in the process. And while the Left attacked capitalism, the Right attacked democracy: with the exception of a few individuals, most notably (and belatedly) Thomas Mann, few spoke out to sustain the Weimar Republic in principle.

Nor was ‘culture’ in the wider sense to sustain the new Republic. The social institutions which had the most influence on popular attitudes were still the churches and the schools: and both religious and educational institutions by and large tended to undermine Weimar democracy. Both the Catholic and the Protestant churches propagated essentially conservative, monarchist and anti-democratic sympathies; they were moreover highly critical of the moral decadence, as they saw it, of a society in which birth control was for the first time becoming widespread. The education system was also, in general, conservative and anti-democratic in outlook. Many schoolteachers were traditional conservative nationalists. Student fraternities and university teachers were similarly preponderantly right-wing and anti-democratic in sympathy: the Left was only to dominate German student politics for the first time in the West Germany of the late 1960s. However, in the sphere of education, as in virtually every other aspect of Weimar life, quite different tendencies coexisted. Alongside the highly conservative educational establishment ran currents of reform and progressive schools. After the Second World War largely unsuccessful attempts were made to resurrect some of the more progressive elements in Weimar education.

If one turns from culture, at both elite and mass levels, to society more generally in the Weimar period, then a similar range of complexities, ambiguities and conflicts appear. Women were formally ‘emancipated’ in what was essentially a highly progressive welfare state. But this was an ‘emancipation from above’: despite the existence of minority feminist movements, both bourgeois and socialist, the majority of women continued to have rather traditional conceptions of their role. Being a wife and mother was held to be the essential fulfilment of womanhood: paid employment outside the home was preferably to be undertaken only before marriage, or only if economically absolutely essential. Weimar ‘emancipation’ was more theoretical than real: while women gained the vote (of which they made slowly increasing use), they remained in predominantly low-paid and low-status occupations. While women had always formed a considerable proportion of the agricultural labour force – peasant farms, for example, being family concerns where women brought in the hay, fed the chickens and milked the cows as a matter of course – women in the Weimar Republic were increasingly employed in white-collar occupations in the new middle class, a trend evident since the beginning of the century. A minority of women did achieve a certain status, if not actual power: the first Parliament of the Weimar Republic, for example, had a distinguished group of women members. But by and large, despite the spread of birth control and the progressive framework of the constitution, attitudes both of and towards women remained highly traditional. In the Depression, with rising unemployment after 1929, there was criticism of ‘double earners’ (Doppelverdiener), as people complained of the unfairness of some families having two incomes while others had no income at all. And when women voted they tended to vote disproportionately for parties which did not hold progressive attitudes on women’s questions, such as the conservative and Christian parties. The two parties with the most progressive views on women’s issues, the SPD and the KPD, failed to attract a proportional share of the votes of women.¹⁰ Formal appearances notwithstanding, most women neither were nor seemed to want to be ‘emancipated’. The minority who adopted what they held to be an emancipated style – smoking cigarettes in long holders, cutting their hair in short fashions, driving cars and indulging in an apparently glittering nightlife – attracted criticism from many of the more staid and stolid Hausfrauen of Weimar Germany.

There was nevertheless widespread experimentation in lifestyles among some groups, with ‘reform’ movements in the areas of food and health, for example. There was an emphasis on nature, with members of youth movements indulging in long hiking trips through the German pine forests, swimming in lakes and rivers, camping and youth hostelling at every opportunity. There had been a tradition of such youth movements in Imperial Germany, such as the largely middle-class Wandervogel movement, and the comparable SPD youth organizations. Their activities continued to flourish in the Weimar Republic. Perhaps partly in reaction against the constraints and repressions, the restrictions and gloom of life in large cities, emphasis was given to escape into the countryside. But appeals to youth were similarly riven with political divides; both the far Right and the Left sought to mobilize youth for their diverse purposes. The right-wing mobilization of paramilitary groups that sought to forge a glorious future and make up for the humiliation of national defeat and the ‘shame’ of Versailles was to prove the most threatening in assisting Hitler’s rise to power, while the reformist and often pacifist youth cultures of the Left were ultimately defeated by the superior military might of the Right.

In every possible way, the nature and possibilities of modernity were contested, challenged, reshaped. For a few brief years, manifold possibilities for creating a different future fought to achieve dominance. Conflicting visions of the future and critiques of the present battled alongside and against each other, in an effort to create not only a new society, but also to reshape the very nature of what it meant to be human. Yet this battle was fought in highly unstable political and economic conditions. The fragility of the social compromise that marked the beginning of Weimar democracy became all too evident when it was rocked by the shocks of world depression. Whatever the ambiguities of Weimar society and culture, perhaps the deepest and most fatal splits were embedded in the Weimar social compromise and in the institutional framework of relations between the classes. It was these which contributed mightily to the breakdown of the Weimar political system, creating the opportunities which the Nazis were to seize. We must turn now to the complex and contentious task of explaining the ultimate collapse of the short-lived Weimar Republic.