Germany’s Weimar Republic continues to fascinate us. From popular culture — see the recent popularity of the Netflix crime series Berlin Babylon — to the challenge of authoritarian populists and the threat of inflation, Germany’s first democracy still resonates a hundred years after the dramatic events that shaped it. Given this enduring interest, Harald Jähner’s kaleidoscopic new cultural and emotional history, Vertigo: The Rise and Fall of Weimar Germany 1918–1933, seems likely to enjoy similar success to Aftermath, his acclaimed book on the lives of Germans in the years immediately after the second world war.
Within a roughly chronological structure, Jähner takes the reader on a thematic tour of Weimar German culture and experience. After chapters on the revolution that transformed military defeat into the country’s first democracy following the first world war, and after the obligatory chapter on German hyperinflation in the early 1920s, he introduces us to topics including the Bauhaus and its innovations in building and design; the social and cultural phenomenon of the female office worker; the expansion of automobile ownership; the Charleston and Berlin’s dance halls; Weimar culture’s veritable cult of the human body; and new gender norms. Chronology sets in again with the advent of the Great Depression, mass unemployment and the fall of democracy.
Jähner is a particularly well-read tour guide, and he has an eye for the telling illustration (figuratively as well as literally — the book is illustrated with a wealth of photographs, many of them relatively unfamiliar). Even readers well-versed in the history of the period will discover striking new examples of the culture of the time. I had not previously seen the photograph of female dancers in a stage revue arranged behind discs representing the keys of a typewriter — an example of the eroticisation of the secretary in the 1920s. And we learn that Germany’s confrontation with American culture in this period included not only Mickey Mouse, a creature abhorred by German cultural conservatives, but a now-forgotten yo-yo craze that provided transient distraction during the Depression.
Jähner also displays an intimate knowledge of Weimar literature, including once-popular novels that have fallen into obscurity, and he has delved deeply into the periodical literature of the period, from highbrow journals to the popular illustrated magazines that celebrated a new consumer culture even when most Germans had precious little cash to spend on it.
It is interesting to compare Jähner’s book with older portrayals such as Peter Gay’s highly influential Weimar Culture. First published in 1968, Gay’s book was closer in time to the period it described than it is to our own era. (Gay himself was born in Weimar Berlin.) Its portraits of heroic modernists and their enemies, and its depiction of contests between the “insiders” and “outsiders” who changed places after the democratic revolution of 1918–19, can seem overly schematic now.
Vertigo incorporates a broader spectrum of cultural history than Gay’s focus on high culture, and Jähner has more room for the contradictions and messiness of the cultural and emotional life of the period. (The comparison is a little unfair: Gay’s book was essentially a long essay, while Jähner has some 400 pages to spread out in.) Jähner introduces his readers to right-wing modernists like the decorated war veteran Ernst Jünger, who celebrated the destructive power of modern military technology and idealised the warrior elite who could master it, although another right-wing modernist author, the medical doctor and poet Gottfried Benn, is left out of his account. It is hard, of course, to give a comprehensive account of Weimar culture without either omitting some names or reading like a library catalogue.
Jähner’s book is particularly rich in its coverage of the shifting gender landscape of interwar Germany. From the new genre of novels about the modern secretary to women’s efforts to carve out new professional roles as well as make their own mark in cultural life, he is particularly attentive to questions of gender. He provides a lengthy discussion of celebrity female motorists, for example, who included Erika Mann, daughter of the Nobel Prize–winning novelist Thomas Mann, and Clärenore Stinnes, daughter of the industrialist (and inflation-profiteer) Hugo Stinnes. In fact, Clärenore gets as much space as her more notorious father. Her feats as a driver — including a journey around the world in a fifty horse-power car accompanied by a male Swedish photographer — were certainly remarkable.
While these women may seem to have represented a democratisation of motoring and touring, the possession of a car remained a mark of the social elite. With car ownership featuring on a “prosperity index” used to help determine Germany’s capacity to meet its reparation payments to the Allied powers, German governments used high taxes to discourage purchasers.
Jähner pays more attention than some earlier works to women authors of the Weimar period, including Irmgard Keun, whose novels have recently undergone a revival in English translation. Keun’s portrayal of a young secretary in The Artificial Silk Girl became an emblematic representation of the Weimar “New Woman.”
Given Jähner’s attention to questions of gender, sexuality and the body, it is slightly surprising that he doesn’t mention the campaign to reform Germany’s abortion law, which gained considerable support from feminists and the German left. One by-product of the campaign was the communist playwright Friedrich Wolf’s play Cyankali (Cyanide). Popular mass-market writer Vicki Baum’s novel, Stud. Chem. Helene Willfüer (Student of Chemistry Helene Willfüer), also dealt with abortion, in this case through the story of a pregnant university student. The novel’s subject matter was considered so scandalous that Baum’s publisher sat on the manuscript for some time, though it eventually became a bestseller and was even turned into a film in 1930.
Jähner shines in his interpretations of other cultural artefacts of the Weimar years, although his is a slightly selective account. We learn more about Bertolt Brecht’s enthusiasm for boxing and fast cars, for example, than we do about his plays, and his remarkable 1932 film about communist youth in Depression-stricken Berlin, Kuhle Wampe, made in collaboration with director Slatan Dudow, goes unmentioned.
Jähner also says surprisingly little about the cultural life of the Weimar left. The experimental theatre of the leftist director Erwin Piscator is only barely touched on. Older works on Weimar by the late Brecht scholar John Willett, for example, are more informative about this dimension of Weimar culture. Willett demonstrates the influence of early Soviet avant-garde culture, a dimension absent in this book.
A reader wanting to use Vertigo to understand the rise and fall of Germany’s first democracy will find significant lacunae in its treatment of the history of Weimar politics. We learn little about one of the crucial trends in German politics after the hyperinflation and currency revaluation of the early 1920s: the phenomenon characterised by Larry E. Jones as the “shrinking middle,” an apparently inexorable decline in voter support for the mainstream middle-class liberal parties. (The Protestant middle classes would largely swing behind the Nazi Party during the Depression.)
The intervention by national government troops to depose the left-wing coalition government of Saxony in 1923 gets just one sentence. Jähner rightly points out that the communist candidate Ernst Thälmann split the working-class vote in the 1925 presidential election, helping to elect the anti-republican field marshal Paul von Hindenburg, but fails to mention that the right-wing Bavarian People’s Party also split the Catholic vote, favouring Hindenburg over the Catholic candidate Wilhelm Marx.
Nor does Jähner discuss the Stalinisation of the German Communist Party during the 1920s. On the right of politics, he says little about the radicalisation of the mainstream conservative-nationalist party, the DNVP, which came under the control of the media magnate Alfred Hugenberg in 1928. Hugenberg’s media empire included tabloid newspapers and the Ufa film conglomerate; his tactical alliances with Hitler helped to make the Nazi leader acceptable to the conservative right.
Fritz Thyssen, the Ruhr steel magnate who was one of the Nazi Party’s early backers in big business circles, goes unmentioned, as does the sponsorship of anti-democratic intellectuals and publications by other industrialists. The chemical combine IG Farben’s vast headquarters in Frankfurt is described, but its buyout of the Frankfurter Zeitung, which signalled the end of that paper’s decades-long existence as the voice of democratic liberalism, is not. The abolition of the eight-hour day at the end of 1923 and the massive lockouts in the metal-working industry of 1928 — when heavy industry sought to break with the social compromise on which the republic had been based in 1918–19 — are also missing from this account.
In another, perhaps more surprising, omission, Jähner jumps from the Reichstag fire and the elections on 5 March 1933 to the Enabling Act that bestowed dictatorial power on Hitler without mentioning the stage-managed inauguration of the new Nazi government. That ceremony in Potsdam symbolically celebrated the alliance between the new nationalist forces of the Nazi movement and the conservative Prussian-German elites.
In short, anyone who wishes to learn about the vital socioeconomic conflicts and political dynamics that determined the political fate of the Weimar Republic will need to turn to other histories of the period.
An edited collection of academic essays on the Weimar Republic from 2012 was titled Beyond Glitter and Doom, and “Glitter and Doom” was also used as the title of an exhibition of German portraits from the 1920s at the New York Metropolitan Art Museum in 2006. Subsequent major exhibitions of Weimar art (including in Australia) have played variations on that theme.
The “glitter and doom” paradigm — the dancing on the edge of the volcano, the intellectuals debating high theory in the “Grand Hotel Abyss” — has become a cliché. Jähner brings to light many lesser-known aspects of Weimar culture, and seems aware of the dangerously seductive pull of its popular image, but he is unable to resist it entirely. He also knows that there is more to the history of the Weimar Republic than the urban culture of Berlin, but Vertigo’s perspective remains very Berlin-centric. Perhaps the magnetic pull of 1920s Berlin is indeed irresistible.
In the historical drama of the death of the Weimar Republic, the zeitgeist, that slippery and always elusive abstraction, figures in Jähner’s book as victim and culprit alike. He is an always readable and entertaining analyst of the cultural manifestations of that zeitgeist. But when historians arrive at the crime scene to try to discover who killed Weimar democracy, they will be looking for more tangible evidence than this book ultimately offers. •
Vertigo: The Rise and Fall of Weimar Germany 1918–1933
By Harald Jähner | Translated by Shaun Whiteside | W.H. Allen | $36.99 | 480 pages
