Reinterpreting the Weimar Republic

Reinterpreting the Weimar Republic

 

 

 

By Colin Storer

 

 

 

History Today Volume 65 Issue 7 July 2015

 

 

 

The archetypal image of the Weimar Republic is one of political instability, economic crisis and debauched hedonism. Colin Storer challenges the clichéd view of the Republic as a tragic failed state.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Unicyclists on Pariser Platz in front of the Brandenburg Gate, Berlin, c.1920.

 

 

 

The Universal Pictures film adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque's anti-war novel All Quiet on the Western Front had its German premiere at the Mozart Hall in Berlin on December 5th, 1930. Hailed as a masterpiece in Britain and America, 'the most impressive talking picture yet seen', the film had a very different reception in Germany. Barely ten minutes after it had begun, the performance was interrupted when the National Socialist propaganda chief Josef Goebbels walked noisily out of the theatre. This was the signal for Nazi activists in the audience to release white mice, stink bombs and itching powder into the crowded auditorium. Fights broke out between the demonstrators and other cinema-goers and eventually the police, who were there in force, intervened and 'cleared the theatre with their truncheons'. There followed four days of demonstrations and rioting until, on December 11th, the Supreme Film Censorship Board, in an act condemned abroad as 'the worst kind of censorship … an artistic lynching', bowed to pressure and revoked its decision to pass the film for distribution on the grounds that it was 'detrimental to German prestige'.

 

 

 

The one-dimensional view

 

 

 

This incident in some ways encapsulates the archetypal image of the Weimar Republic in the English-speaking world; a society that, following its establishment on August 11th, 1919, existed in the shadow of the Great War, caught between cosmopolitan cultural experimentation and violent political and economic upheaval. For many, the very words 'Weimar Republic' conjure up images of avant-garde art, risqué cabaret shows, wheelbarrows full of worthless paper money and violent political confrontation on the streets, of the sort depicted in Bob Fosse's 1972 film Cabaret.

 

 

 

Incidents such as the one recounted above seem vividly to illustrate the violent clash between the forces of innovation and reaction that characterised the life of the Republic. In the decision to ban All Quiet on the Western Front we see concern over 'Americanisation' and the perceived threat it posed to German culture and values. Here, too, is the highly charged atmosphere in which almost every question and action, no matter how seemingly mundane and innocuous, became politicised. Most of all we see the shadow of Hitler hanging over the Republic, the violent attacks of the Nazis and the apparent impotence of the German establishment in the face of such tactics.

 

 

 

Yet, as enduring as this interpretation of Weimar has been, it seriously misrepresents the period and those who lived through it. As a growing body of research is making apparent, the older, overly pessimistic and one-dimensional view of the Republic does not stand up to close scrutiny. This was a complex and fascinating period in German history that witnessed violent political unrest, economic crisis and cultural ferment, but was not defined by any of these. It is, therefore, high time for a reinterpretation of the Republic that takes into account its complexities and achievements as well as its failures.

 

 

 

One could be forgiven for thinking that in 1933 the Republic was snuffed out, leaving nothing behind it other than a few striking modernist pictures, songs, films and theories. on the contrary, the Republic left a much more positive legacy. Alongside its failures there were also real and lasting achievements that, although submerged during the Nazi era, resurfaced in the 1950s and 1960s. Weimar Germany had one of the most open and progressive societies in Europe. The Republic led the world in social legislation, cultural experimentation and sexual tolerance and blazed a trail that many societies would follow.

 

 

 

 

 

Women at work

 

 

 

Equal voting rights were extended to all men and women over the age of 20 on November 12th, 1918 and the Weimar period saw women increasingly move out of their traditional roles to become workers and consumers as well as daughters, sisters, wives and mothers. By 1927 there were 35 female parliamentarians in the Reichstag and 40 in the Prussian Diet, compared with only four female MPs elected to the British House of Commons in 1924. Elsewhere, despite initial attempts to force women out of the workplace to make way for men returning from the war, women were employed in large numbers as secretaries, shop-girls and in the new rationalised industries.

 

 

 

This gave young women in particular incomes of their own, freeing them from dependence on their parents or husbands. As businesses woke up to this fact, they increasingly targeted the advertising of household goods and fashion items at women, who became a powerful consumer market under the Republic. Their new status was reflected by efforts to display their individuality and forge a distinct identity for themselves through their dress and behaviour.

 

 

 

 

 

A militant democracy

 

 

 

The gender imbalance caused by the deaths of young men in the First World War forced all those women to abandon hope of ever taking on the traditional roles of wife and mother and instead to focus their energies on their careers, but it also meant that the rules of the dating game changed. With so many more women than men, competition for partners was fierce and women became more assertive and adopted more liberal attitudes towards sex and sexuality.

 

 

 

This reflected a wider trend in the Republic, which saw a much more open approach towards sex. Middle-class sex reformers argued that the key to a happier and healthier society was a fulfilling sex life, while parliament considered a range of surprisingly liberal reforms, including the legalisation of prostitution and homosexuality. Although Paragraph 175 of the German legal code stated that 'An unnatural sex act committed between persons of male sex … is punishable by imprisonment', the authorities displayed a fairly tolerant attitude towards homosexuality, with the result that Berlin became home to a thriving gay and lesbian subculture.

 

 

 

There were, in Berlin alone, 26 magazines aimed at a gay or lesbian audience during the 1920s and it has been estimated that by 1929 there were between 65 and 80 bars (or Dielen) catering for an exclusively homosexual clientele, as well as 50 clubs catering for lesbians. Such broadmindedness was quickly brought to an end after the Nazis came to power, but in the case of both women's rights and sexual liberation, the Weimar Republic provided a model of tolerance and progressive social intervention for later postwar societies throughout the West.

 

 

 

Nor was the republican state as weak and ineffectual as historians have sometimes suggested. Rather than a failed state, the Weimar Republic was in many ways a 'militant democracy', which not only possessed the means to robustly defend itself from its opponents, but also made full use of them. The 1922 Law for the Protection of the Republic (Republikschutzgesetz) prefigured postwar anti-extremist and anti-terrorist legislation in not only providing the authorities with powers to prohibit anti-republican organisations but also in criminalising the language and imagery of extremism.

 

 

 

From the beginning, the new democracy was able to mobilise mass support and continued to do so until at least 1929. Political participation remained high throughout the 15-year lifespan of the Republic, with electoral turnouts consistently reaching levels that many of today's liberal democracies can only dream of. There was also a much higher degree of consensus among Weimar's political class than previously appreciated and, despite the high turnover of different governments, the personalities often remained the same.

 

 

 

The willingness of Weimar's political elite to compromise, at least during the relative stability of the Republic's middle period, is illustrated by the fact that even the anti-republican right-wing German National People's Party (DNVP) was persuaded to enter government twice, in 1925 and in 1927-8. It was ultimately only the extremist parties of the Left and Right that refused to participate fully in the system and, although proportional representation did make it comparatively easy for these parties to gain seats in parliament, they were unable even after the onset of the Great Depression to secure the backing of the majority of German voters.

 

 

 

Even in the March 1933 elections, which were carried out in an atmosphere of violence and intimidation, the Nazis could not muster an overall majority, securing only 43.9 per cent of the vote. The truth is that the democratic parties could still have formed a parliamentary majority, if they had been willing to work together to form a common front against fascism.

 

 

 

 

 

On the edge of a volcano

 

 

 

Perhaps the one area where the Weimar Republic has traditionally been singled out for praise is the cultural sphere. Historians have always been keen to point out that, to a large extent, the political and economic failures of the Weimar Republic were offset by an extraordinarily rich cultural scene. In visual art, architecture, literature, music, cinema and theatre the Weimar period saw an outpouring of avant-garde creativity which was matched by the achievements of German academics and scientists.

 

 

 

The Weimar era has become famous – even notorious – for its hedonistic nightlife, avant-garde art and saucy cabarets. Yet even this perception of Weimar as a liberated land of artistic experimentation is not without its darker side. There is a sense that all of this decadence merely masked the hollow and rotten heart of the Republic and was as much a symptom of Weimar's instability and emptiness as worthless paper money or political violence. Even the most sympathetic accounts of Weimar's culture and nightlife cannot help but give the feeling that those participating in it were 'dancing on the edge of a volcano'. And there is a fatalism in such accounts perhaps best summed up by Peter Cook's claim to have modelled London's Soho Establishment Club in 1961 on 'those wonderful Berlin cabarets which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent the outbreak of the Second World War'.

 

 

 

 

 

A tragedy for Europe

 

 

 

But there was more to 'Weimar culture' than Thomas Mann on one hand and Sally Bowles on the other. If we move away from the established 'canon' of Weimar culture to consider the arts under the Weimar Republic in a broader sense, we get a very different picture. Poster for Fritz Lang's Metropolis, 1927. Alongside the metropolitan avant-garde were more conservative and traditionalist tastes, often (perhaps paradoxically) expressed in the new media that made up 'mass' or 'popular' culture. For every experimental ｅxpressionist masterpiece like Robert Wiene's Das Cabinett des Dr Caligari (1919) or Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927), there were scores of screwball comedies, horror films or historical epics. Glossy fashion magazines and hard-boiled detective stories had a larger readership than the novels of Alfred Döblin or Heinrich Mann and the extent to which most ordinary people were even aware of the paintings of George Grosz and Otto Dix or the theories of Einstein and Heisenberg is debateable.

 

 

 

When looked at in this way, Weimar culture may seem less startlingly original or excitingly advanced than in most accounts, but it also seems richer, more multi-faceted and more reflective of the lives of ordinary Germans and, as a result, more useful in helping us to understand what it was like to live in this period. Above all, its very openness is stressed and calls into question the deterministic and pessimistic interpretation of the Republic through an examination of the public debates surrounding politics, morality, society and the arts.

 

 

 

Considering what came after it, the fact that Weimar democracy ultimately failed to survive the domestic and international pressures placed on it after 1929 was a tragedy not just for Germany but for Europe as a whole. Yet this should not detract from the myriad achievements of the Republic's 15 years of existence. In trying to understand how and why the Weimar Republic collapsed, as so much of the historical literature has done over the last 80 years, we should not lose sight of the positive features of its history.

 

 

 

The story of the Republic is one of creation as well as destruction and it deserves to be remembered as such. It was a remarkable period in German history that demonstrates both the best and worst features of democratic politics and what can happen to modern industrial societies when they face extreme conditions. Indeed, given the pressures placed upon it and the consistent opposition it faced from large sections of German society, that Weimar democracy endured as long as it did is a remarkable achievement in itself.

 

 

 

Colin Storer teaches at the University of Nottingham and is the author of A Short History of the Weimar Republic(I.B. Tauris, 2013).

 

 

 

 댓글

 

관조자/觀照者

좋은 글 소개하셨습니다. 와이마-ㄹ 공화국에 관해서 잘 배웠습니다. 감사합니다. 2015/06/21 20:45:30