From the collection of the author
| MAX BECKMANN: TWO AUTO OFFICERS | DRYPOINT, 1915 |
Beckmann, who was in the war, knew that the face of the enemy did not need caricature; realism was quite enough, as long as the realist had Beckmann’s graphic talent. In 1919 this drypoint was published in a portfolio of nineteen etchings under the title of Gesichter.
Courtesy of the Busch-Resinger Museum, Harvard University Art Museums, Gift of Erich Cohn. Photographic services © President and Fellows of Harvard College
| GEORGE GROSZ: H. M. (PRESIDENT FRIEDRICH EBERT) | INK DRAWING, 1934 |
Friedrich Ebert, first President of the Weimar Republic, 1919 to 1925, wickedly caricatured from the left: the trade unionist as parvenu.
Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Archive
TWO SCENES FROM The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)
The Expressionist horror film that made history, with sets by three Expressionist artists: Hermann Warm, Walter Röhrig, and Walter Reimann. Werner Krauss is the insane Dr. Caligari, Conrad Veidt the somnambulist Cesare whom Caligari incites to murder.
Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Archive
AP/Wide World
WALTHER RATHENAU AT CANNES IN EARLY 1922
German foreign minister and martyr to right-wing assassins in 1922, Rathenau, aesthete, millionaire, statesman, Utopian, and Jew, reveals something of his problomatic personality in this photograph.
New York Public Library Picture Collection
TROOPS RESTORING ORDER IN THE CITY OF DRESDEN IN 1923
Between 1918 and 1923, and 1932, there were many such scenes, in many cities.
AP/Wide World
A BAKER RECEIVING HIS PAY DURING THE PERIOD OF HIGH INFLATION
These scenes, which reached a ludicrous crescendo in the summer and fall of 1923, are comical only in retrospect.
© 2001 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP Paris
| WASSILY KANDINSKY: ABSTRACTION | LITHOGRAPH, ca. 1925 |
Kandinsky, the most influential among the abstract artists, worked in the Bauhaus from 1922 to its closing in 1933; there he did some of his most effective geometric abstractions—testimony to the modernity of the Weimar spirit
Museum of Modern Art, New York
ERICH MENDELSOHN: EINSTEIN TOWER, POTSDAM, 1919
One of Mendelsohn’s best-known Expressionist buildings. When Albert Einstein was taken through this observatory, he said one word—the right one: “Organic.”
Museum of Modern Art, New York
WALTER GROPIUS: BAUHAUS BUILDING IN DESSAU, COMPLETED IN1926
Perhaps the most celebrated structure built during the Weimar Republic, a striking contrast, with its clear angularity, to Mendelsohn’s swooping curves.
Gift of Herbert Bayer © 2001 Museum of Modern Art, New York
MARCEL BREUER: FIRST TUBULAR CHAIR, 1925
A splendid design, characteristic of the Bauhaus, as influential as the Gropius building in which it was produced.
Courtesy of the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University Art Museums, Gray Collection of Engravings Fund. Photographic services © President and Fellows of Harvard College
HINDENBURG
Paul Ludwig Hans Anton von Hindenburg und Beneckendorff, second and last President of the Weimar Republic, 1925 to 1933; chaste and dignified—the general as civilian.
Courtesy of the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University
| OSKAR KOKOSCHKA: WALTER HASENCLEVER | LITHOGRAPH, 1917 |
The two Expressionists, the painter and the playwright, became friends late during World War I. Both incurable lovers of humanity, only Kokoschka managed to survive the Nazis—abroad. Hasenclever killed himself in June 1940 in Southern France, hounded to death by Spanish frontier guards.
New York Public Library Picture Collection
THOMAS MANN IN 1930
A belated convert to the Weimar Republic, a year after winning the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Archive
A SCENE FROM The Blue Angel (1930)
Marlene Dietrich as the cabaret singer Lola Lola, Emil Jannings as the high school teacher, Professor Unrat, who slavishly loves her. The Heinrich Mann novel of 1904, on which the film is based, is a hilarious satire on German bourgeois life; the film, adapted by Carl Zuckmayer with Mann’s full consent, has satiric touches but emphasizes pathos—a remarkable and ominous change.
Courtesy of Felix Gilbert
FRIEDRICH MEINECKE, ERICH MARCKS, AND HERMANN ONCKEN IN 1929
A trio of distinguished historians. Oncken and Marcks were specialists in nineteenth-century history; Meinecke, one of the most famous of Vernunftrepublikaner, was internationally known for his studies of the national spirit in Germany, the demonic force of raison d’état and the rise of historicism.
From the collection of the author
| MAX LIEBERMANN: ALBERT EINSTEIN | LITHOGRAPH, mid-1920’s |
In his long lifetime (1847-1935), Max Liebermann was the most famous painter in Germany; unlike his present subject, Einstein, he is now rather forgotten. A Jew and a true Berliner, Liebermann greeted the advent of the Nazis with an untranslatable remark: “Man kann nicht soviel fressen, wie man kotzen möchte!”—roughly, “You can’t eat as much as you want to throw up.” A fitting comment, not on the life, but on the death of the Weimar Republic.