The Weimar Republic died only thirty-five years ago, in 1933, yet it is already a legend. Its tormented brief life with its memorable artifacts, and its tragic death—part murder, part wasting sickness, part suicide—have left their imprint on men’s minds, often vague perhaps, but always splendid. When we think of Weimar, we think of modernity in art, literature, and thought; we think of the rebellion of sons against fathers, Dadaists against art, Berliners against beefy philistinism, libertines against old-fashioned moralists; we think of The Threepenny Opera, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The Magic Mountain, the Bauhaus, Marlene Dietrich. And we think, above all, of the exiles who exported Weimar Culture all over the world.
The exile holds an honored place in the history of Western civilization. Dante and Grotius and Bayle, Rousseau and Heine and Marx, did their greatest work in enforced residence on alien soil, looking back with loathing and longing to the country, their own, that had rejected them. The Greek scholars from Byzantium who flooded the Italian city-states early in the fifteenth century and the Huguenot bourgeois who streamed out of France across Western Europe late in the seventeenth century brought with them energy, learning, and scarce, welcome skills; New England was founded by refugees who transformed wilderness into civilization. But these migrations, impressive as they are, cannot compare with the exodus set in motion early in 1933, when the Nazis seized control of Germany; the exiles Hitler made were the greatest collection of transplanted intellect, talent, and scholarship the world has ever seen.
The dazzling array of these exiles—Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann, Erwin Panofsky, Bertolt Brecht, Walter Gropius, George Grosz, Wassily Kandinsky, Max Reinhardt, Bruno Walter, Max Beckmann, Werner Jaeger, Wolfgang Köhler, Paul Tillich, Ernst Cassirer—tempts us to idealize Weimar as unique, a culture without strains and without debts, a true golden age. The legend of Weimar begins with the legend of “the golden twenties.”1 But to construct this flawless ideal is to trivialize the achievements of the Weimar Renaissance, and to slight the price it had to pay for them. The excitement that characterized Weimar Culture stemmed in part from exuberant creativity and experimentation; but much of it was anxiety, fear, a rising sense of doom. With some justice, Karl Mannheim, one of its survivors, boasted not long before its demise that future years would look back on Weimar as a new Periclean age.2 But it was a precarious glory, a dance on the edge of a volcano. Weimar Culture was the creation of outsiders, propelled by history into the inside, for a short, dizzying, fragile moment.
In this essay I have tried to portray Weimar Culture as a whole, without sentimentalizing or sensationalizing it. I know that this is an essay; I have said less than could be said about the sequence of political events and economic developments, about popular culture, about institutions like the churches, the family, the universities, the press, and about the structure of German society. I have said nothing about science. In other words, I have not written the complete history of the Weimar Renaissance, though one day I plan to write it. What I have done here is to bring together themes that dominated the hectic life of the Republic, and to juxtapose them in ways that will, I trust, permit us to define the Weimar spirit more clearly and more comprehensively than it has been done before.
For those who are unfamiliar with modern German history, I have appended a short political history of the Weimar Republic which obviously makes no claim to originality. My bibliography lists all the titles I cite in the footnotes, and other titles I consulted, with short comments; I trust that it will give an accurate picture of my intellectual debts. Among the historians I have read I should like to single out Karl Dietrich Bracher, whose interpretation of Weimar I found most congenial and most instructive.
My writing of this book has been greatly facilitated by the generous cooperation of a number of survivors and students of Weimar. I appreciate their readiness to talk to me and their permission to print their comments and reminiscences, especially since I know that we do not always agree on our interpretation of events. My greatest debt is to Felix Gilbert, whose influence on this essay is pervasive, and to whom I dedicate this book in gratitude. I was privileged to have a brief conversation with the late Erwin Panofsky. I want also to thank Hannah Arendt, Kurt R. Eissler, James Marston Fitch, George F. Kennan, Walter Gropius, Heinz Hartmann, Hajo Holborn, Paul Lazarsfeld, Rudolph M. Loewenstein, Adolf Placzek, Rudolf Wittkower, for their helpful comments. Joseph P. Bauke, Istvan Deak, and Theodore Reff gave me valuable information. David Segal, John A. Garraty, and above all my wife Ruth stood by in some difficult moments; as always, and to my lasting profit, she read every version of this manuscript with sympathetic care. The book originated in a welcome invitation by Bernard Bailyn and Donald Fleming, gratefully accepted, to preface Volume II of their Perspectives in American History, published at Harvard University by the Charles Warren Center for American History, with an article on Weimar Culture. I thank George L. Mosse for encouraging me to turn the article into a book.
I delivered a much shorter version of this book as four lectures to the Institute of Philosophy and Politics of Education, Teachers College, Columbia University. I am deeply grateful to its director, my friend Lawrence A. Cremin, for providing me with such a stimulating occasion for testing my ideas.
1 Among many others, Theodor Heuss would later deplore the rise of the legend “von den ‘goldenen zwanziger Jahren.’” Erinnerungen, 1905–1933 (1963), 348.
2 In conversation with Hannah Arendt, reported to the author by Hannah Arendt. Bruno Walter attributes the same term to the powerful Berlin drama critic Alfred Kerr. Walter, Theme and Variations: An Autobiography (tr. James A. Galston, 1946), 268. From here on, quotations in the text not specifically identified in the footnotes are from conversations with, or letters to, the author.