Weimar culture was a flourishing of the arts and sciences that happened during the Weimar Republic (between Germany's defeat at the end of World War I in 1918, and Hitler's rise to power in 1933).[1] This period is frequently cited as one of those with the highest level of intellectual production in human history; Germany was the country with the most advanced science, technology, literature, philosophy and art.[2][3] 1920s Berlin was at the hectic center of the Weimar culture.[1] Although not part of the Weimar Republic, some authors also include the German speaking Austria, and particularly Vienna, as part of Weimar culture.[4]
In Science, Heisenberg formulated the famous Uncertainty principle, and, with Max Born and Pascual Jordan, made foundational contributions to quantum mechanics;[5] Paul Klee revolutionized painting and his lectures on modern art at the Bauhaus have been compared for importance to Leonardo's Treatise on Painting and Newton's Principia Mathematica, constituting the Principia Aesthetica of a new era of art;[6][7] the Bauhaus school by Walter Gropius founded modern architecture;[8] in philosophy, Husserl and Heidegger revolutionised our way of thinking with their method of phenomenology and the publication of Heidegger's own Being and Time, the neo-Marxist sociology developed by Theodor Adorno and the Frankfurt School dominated the field in much of Europe; the avant-garde theater of Bertolt Brecht and Max Reinhardt in Berlin was the most advanced in Europe, being rivaled only by that of Paris.[8] While Rudolf von Laban and Mary Wigman laid the foundations for the development of Contemporary dance.
If we also include the German speaking Vienna, during the Weimar years Mathematician Kurt Gödel published his groundbreaking Incompleteness Theorem; and cultural critic Karl Kraus, with his brilliantly controversial magazine Die Fackel, advanced the field of satirical journalism, becoming the literary and political conscience of this era.[9]
With the rise of Nazism and the ascent to power of Adolf Hitler in 1933, many German intellectuals and cultural figures fled Germany for United States, the United Kingdom, and other parts of the world. Those who remained behind were often arrested, or detained in concentration camps. 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 the New School for Social Research in New York City.
In the words of Marcus Bullock, Emeritus Professor of English at University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, "Remarkable for the way it emerged from a catastrophe, more remarkable for the way it vanished into a still greater catastrophe, the world of Weimar represents modernism in its most vivid manifestation." The culture of the Weimar year was later reprised by the left-wing intellectuals of the 1960s,[10] especially in France. Deleuze, Guattari and Foucault reprised Wilhelm Reich; Derrida reprised Husserl and Heidegger; Guy Debord and the Situationist International reprised the subversive-revolutionary culture.
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By 1919, an "influx" of labor had migrated to Berlin turning it into one of the most fertile grounds for the modern arts and sciences in history. The population of the German Reich rose from 900,000 to 2.7 million between the years of 1875 and 1900. This caused "a boom in trade, communications and construction." The advancement was so tremendous that it significantly turned over the ways of the royalty. In response to the shortage of pre-war accommodation and housing, tenements were constructed not very far from the Kaiser's Stadtschloss and all the other majestic structures that were erected in honor of former royalties. People used their backyards and basements to run small shops, restaurants, workshops and haulage carts. This led to the establishment of bigger and better commerce in Berlin, including its first department stores, prior to World War I. An "urban petty bourgeoisie" along with the middle class colonized and flourished the wholesale commerce, retail trade, factories and crafts. [11]
The Wilheminian values were further discredited as consequence of World War I and the subsequent inflation, since the new youth generation saw no point in saving for marriage in such conditions, and preferred instead to spend and enjoy.[12] According to cultural historian Bruce Thompson, Fritz Lang movie Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (1922) captures Berlin's postwar mood:[12]
| “ | The film moves from the world of the slums to the world of the stock exchange and then to the cabarets and nightclubs–and everywhere chaos reigns, authority is discredited, power is mad and uncontrollable, wealth inseparable from crime. | ” |
Politically and economically, the nation was struggling with the terms and reparations imposed by the Treaty of Versailles (1918) that ended World War I and endured punishing levels of inflation.
During the era of the Weimar Republic, Germany became a center of intellectual thought at its 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.
The most prominent philosophers with which the so-called 'Frankfurt School' is associated were Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Jürgen Habermas and Max Horkheimer.[13] Among the prominent philosophers not associated with the Frankfurt School were Martin Heidegger and Max Weber.
Many foundational contributions to quantum mechanics were made in Weimar Germany or by German scientists during the Weimar period. While temporarily at the University of Copenhagen, German physicist Werner Heisenberg formulated his famous Uncertainty principle, and, with Max Born and Pascual Jordan, accomplished the first complete and correct definition of quantum mechanics, through the invention of Matrix mechanics.
The fourteen years of the Weimar era were also marked by explosive intellectual productivity. German artists made significant cultural contributions in the fields of literature, art, architecture, music, dance, drama, and the new medium of the motion picture. Political theorist Ernst Bloch described Weimar culture as a Periclean Age.
Kirkus reviews remarked upon how much Weimar art was political:[8]
| “ | fiercely experimental, iconoclastic and left-leaning, spiritually hostile to big business and bourgeois society and at daggers drawn with Prussian militarism and authoritarianism. Not surprisingly, the old autocratic German establishment saw it as 'decadent art', a view shared by Adolf Hitler who became Chancellor of Germany in January 1933. The public burning of 'unGerman books' by Nazi students on Unter den Linden on 10th May 1933 was but a symbolic confirmation of the catastrophe which befell not only Weimar art under Hitler but the whole tradition of enlightenment liberalism in Germany, a tradition whose origins went back to the 18th century city of Weimar, home to both Goethe and Schiller. | ” |
Weimar culture encompassed the political caricature of Otto Dix and John Heartfield and George Grosz, the futuristic skyscraper dystopia of Fritz Lang's 1927 film Metropolis and other products of the UFA studio, the beginnings of a new architectural style at the Bauhaus and the mass housing projects of Ernst May and Bruno Taut, and the decadent cabaret culture of Berlin documented by Christopher Isherwood. Isherwood's novel Goodbye to Berlin has been later transposed to the musical movie Cabaret.[12]
Writers such as Alfred Döblin, Erich Maria Remarque and the brothers Heinrich and Thomas Mann presented a bleak look at the world and the failure of politics and society through literature. The theatres of Berlin and Frankfurt am Main were graced with drama by Bertolt Brecht, cabaret, and stage direction by Max Reinhardt and Erwin Piscator. Concert halls and conservatories exhibited the atonal and modern music of Alban Berg, Arnold Schoenberg, and Kurt Weill.