Weimar culture: Difference between revisions

In the days of the Weimar Republic (1919-1933), Germany was rendered unable to project itself economically and politically on the world stage by the harsh terms and reparations placed upon the country enumerated in the Treaty of Versailles (1918) that ended World War I. During this interbellum period, Germany became a center of culture, marking the years after the pains of war and the subsequent worldwide economic depression, with the rapid development and fervent creation of literature, art, music, dance, drama, and the new medium of the motion picture. Preeminent political theorist, Ernst Bloch would later describe the Weimar Republic's cultural explosion as a Periclean Age, comparing it to the culturally vibrant period of Athens in ancient Greece during the government of Pericles in the Fourth Century BCE.

Germany became a thriving center of many new cultural movements, including the stark social satires of Dadaism and the vibrant depictions of expressionism, expressed exquisitely in the paintings of Otto Dix, George Grosz, and John Heartfield and in architecture with the Bauhaus school. Writers like Alfred Döblin, Erich Maria Remarque and the brothers Heinrich and Thomas Mann presented a sobering look at the world and the failure of politics and society through literature. The theatres of Berlin and Frankfurt am Main exploded with new, experimental dramas by Bertolt Brecht, cabaret, and revolutionary stage direction by Max Reinhardt and Erwin Piscator. Concert halls and conservatories were ablaze with the atonal and modern music of Alban Berg, Arnold Schoenberg, and Kurt Weill. Lastly, Germany excelled in the development of cinema— the most notable example being the 1927 film Metropolis, directed by Fritz Lang—and dominated the motion picture industry with talented actors and actresses (Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, Brigitte Helm), in the days of silent films and "talkies."

Finally, during the era of the Weimar Republic, Germany became a center of intellectual thought at its medieval 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.

Notable Cultural Figures of the Weimar Era

Artists

• Max Beckmann – printmaker
• Otto Dix – painter
• Max Ernst – painter
• George Grosz – painter
• John Heartfield – painter
• Erich Heckel – painter
• Kaethe Kollwitz – printmaker, sculptor, artist
• Wassily Kandinsky – painter
• Ernst Ludwig Kirchner – painter
• Paul Klee – painter
• Otto Mueller – painter
• Gabriele Munter – painter
• Emil Nolde – painter
• Max Pechstein – painter
• Karl Schmidt-Rottluff – painter

Literature

• Bertolt Brecht – playwright (The Threepenny Opera)
• Alfred Döblin ‐ novelist (Berlin Alexanderplatz)
• Christopher Isherwood – novelist
• Ernst Jünger
• Heinrich Mann – novelist (Der Untertan)
• Thomas Mann – novelist (Death in Venice, Buddenbrooks, The Magic Mountain)
• Erich Mühsam – poet, playwright, anarchist
• Erich Maria Remarque – novelist (All Quiet on the Western Front)
• Kurt Tucholsky – satirist

Music

• Alban Berg – composer
• Arnold Schoenberg – composer
• Anton Webern – composer
• Kurt Weill – composer

Theater and Film

• Marlene Dietrich – actress
• Greta Garbo – actress
• Brigitte Helm – actress
• Erika Mann – theatre producer, playwright, journalist, cabaret and film actress.
• Max Reinhardt – theatre producer
• Fritz Lang – filmmaker Metropolis (1927)
• Leontine Sagan – actress and filmmaker Mädchen in Uniform (1931)
• Josef von Sternberg – filmmaker The Salvation Hunters (1925), The Blue Angel (1930)

Intellectuals

• Theodor W. Adorno
• Walter Benjamin – critical theorist
• Albert Einstein – physicist
• Erich Fromm – psychologist and philosopher
• Sigmund Freud – psychoanalyst
• Max Horkeimer – critical theorist
• Carl Jung – psychoanalyst
• Siegfried Kracauer
• Franz Oppenheimer – sociologist and political economist
• Max Weber – political theorist

See also

• Aftermath of World War I
• Bauhaus
• Cabaret
• Cinema of Germany
• Critical Theory
• Culture of Germany
• Dadaism
• Degenerate art
• Expressionism
• Frankfurt School
• Futurism
• Germany
• Kultur
• Literature of World War I
• Lost Generation
• Modernism
• Post-WWI recession
• Surrealism
• Weimar Republic
• World War I