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East Germany Weimar Culture
The Weimar Republic was the first attempt to establish
constitutional liberal democratic government in Germany. The
republic's name symbolically evoked memories of the German writer
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who had spent a number of years at
the court of Weimar, and of the nation's humanistic cultural
traditions. Goethe's Weimar was contrasted with the Prussian
Germany of authoritarianism, military swagger, and imperialism.
Many Germans, however, remained attached to the old order and
lacked a genuine commitment to republican ideals. Both the Social
Democrats and those who harkened back to the Prussian past were
opposed by the radical opposition, whose program included
revolutionary tactics. German culture under the republic
reflected the ideological diversity of a politically fragmented
society.
The Warburg Library, the Psychoanalytic Institute, the German
Academy for Politics, and the Marxist Institute for Social
Research, founded soon after World War I, were dedicated to the
critical analysis of political and social values. These
institutions reflected the desire of Weimar intellectuals to
reconsider the German past. Eckart Kehr's Schlachtflottenbau
und Parteipolitik (Battleship Construction and Party
Politics), published in 1930, pursued the same critical
objective, revealing the domestic socioeconomic basis for
Imperial Germany's naval policy.
The cult of the hero survived in the poet Stefan George's
literary society, known as the George Circle, which, in addition
to publishing "elevated" poetry and translating the classics,
displayed its aristocratic mentality in biographies about great
historical figures. Ernst Kantorowicz's Emperor Frederick
II, a biography of the thirteenth- century Hohenstaufen
ruler, received widespread public acclaim. Kantorowicz, a former
Prussian army officer, describes the Weimar Republic as the
triumph of mediocrity, and in his preface he speaks of Germany's
secret longing for its emperors and heroes. In his biography, he
mythically portrays Frederick II as a superman who defies all
authority and is voraciously eager to taste all of life.
Many German artists during this period were part of the
expressionist movement. Both literary and visual expressionism
were primarily concerned with representing the immediate present.
In contrast to the strict form in the writings of the George
Circle, literary expressionism consciously simplified,
abbreviated, and distorted sentence structures to give expression
to passionate inner feeling. A reaction to inhuman social
conditions and the horrors of World War I, expressionist writing
called for a new man and a new world that would be united in
brotherly love. The outsider, as a victim of society, became the
hero. Writers whose works represent this kind of reaction include
Georg Heym and Fritz von Unruh. Although some writers, for
example, Kurt Hiller and Heinrich Mann, became politically active
extremists, expressionists were, for the most part, solely
literary revolutionaries. Inner experience is also emphasized in
the bold and symbolic colors and distorted forms found in the
drawings and paintings of expressionist artists such as Franz
Marc and Emil Nolde. In his grotesque figures and suggestive
juxtapositions, the postwar artist George Grosz satirized the
materialistic pseudoculture of the bourgeoisie.
The dilemma of the Weimar intellectual, who had to choose
between the conservative past and the liberal present, can be
approached through the novelist Thomas Mann. A monarchist before
World War I, a commonsense republican after the war, Mann finally
made a genuine commitment to the republic in the mid-1920s. In
1924 he published Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain), a
novel that describes Hans Castorp's education through life. While
visiting a tubercular cousin in a Swiss sanatorium, the
protagonist contracts the disease himself and stays for seven
years. The sanatorium is a cross section of European civilization
in which Castorp is exposed to a variety of political ideologies,
including enlightened liberalism. Significantly Castorp (and the
conservative Mann) cannot choose liberalism. Love, not reason,
the novel concludes, will provide the basis for social
reconciliation.
After 1929 national socialism offered a different social and
political solution. The Nazi party took full advantage of
political instability and economic depression, launched a largescale propaganda campaign, and won a mass following. Nazi
ideology, authoritarian but promising social revolution, appealed
particularly to German youth, who longed for the restoration of
order.
Data as of July 1987
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