Summer reading I: Weimar

Weitz, Eric D. Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007.

Having thoroughly enjoyed my undergraduate encounter with a course entitled “Central Europe Since 1815, “ I entertained the possibility of moving on to this professor’s other excellent course, “The Culture of Europe between the Two World Wars. “ I read a good deal of the literature from the period out of interest and upon the recommendations of students who did take the course. This kind of cultural history, exploring all aspects of a period (however brief, in this case) in politics, arts, and technological innovation invites a real participation in its spirit and sometimes real concern that certain attitudes and dangerous tendencies may be surfacing in one’s own contemporary situation. Reading Weitz’s very readable and compelling history of what has long been regarded as a pivotal moment, one that could have been a golden moment in German history after a devastating war, does rekindle in one’s mind all the debates about the Allies’ treatment of Germany and of course, whether Nazism and the rise of Hitler could have been avoided.

Weitz covers the political situation in detail, and this was useful to me because this was my area of least knowledge; I know more about literary developments and about the art history of the period. He also emphasizes architecture and again, speaking selfishly, this helped me fill in some gaps about early modernism, one of my strong interests.

The subtitle “promise and tragedy” certainly employs the right key words to bring up the relevant ethos of the time. Glimmers of our current financial dilemma and our silence as an American people in the face of a war that went forward in violation of international law flash across the scene and make me feel uncomfortable. While the equation of Jews with internationalism etc. is born of an anti-Semitism that we left behind, one hopes, with Richard Nixon (who appropriated internationalism to himself, nonetheless, with better than expected results) , other aspects of nationalism, “nativism” and such ghosts of the Twenties of the Twentieth Century have ghostly cousins at present in the form of Sarah Palin’s McCarthyism of lies and distortions regarding modest attempts to reform and humanize our health care market. There is anger, and it is dangerous.

Where is the serious art to hold its image up to our collective face that we might see it for what it is? (see review of The Rest Is Noise for more reflection on this question).