NOSTALGIA AND REVISION: THE VOGUE OF WEIMAR CULTURE

...There was only to be Kultur...

...For most of its 14 years, this was not quite correct, and even if all the parties using antiestablishment rhetoric—Separatists, Communists, Nazis, and Nationalists—together might have received a majority of the vote, they could never have formed a coalition...

...The famous radical authors of the left-wing weekly, the Weltbuehne (comparable to the Nation), are quoted as being admirers of Mussolini and of the Camelots du Roi...

...On his pragmatic level, he can state that the Republic fell because it was pursued by bad luck and because some people made the wrong decisions...

...Laqueur is entirely on the side of the squares, not for any deep philosophical reasons, but, as befits such a position, entirely on pragmatic grounds...

...However, the peasant who brought his eggs to Florence did not look at Michelangelo's David either but went to pray before a crudely painted Saint, and if Cesare Borgia could live in the same City with Raphael, why not Paul von Hindenburg, the Kaiser's field marshal and later president of the Republic, with Josephine Baker, the nude dancer who was both black and Jewish...

...A third way was that of Thomas Mann, pleading with the Republic to develop "a politics of Novalis...

...Mabuse, and of the populist, anticapitalist Metropolis, was about to become a maker of cultural policy in the Third Reich— when it was discovered that he had a Jewish grandmother...

...For Laqueur both high-brow and lowbrow culture contain elements of reflection and elements of protest, elements of deflection and elements of the creative, as well as destructive adaptations to reality...

...In his book on Weimar, Walter Laqueur leaves no doubt that the low-brow culture of the 1920s—six-day bicycle races, jazz and youth cult, faddism and cocaine, paramilitary parades and beerhall brawls, schmaltzy hit songs, Sad Sack and Student Prince movies— was more characteristic of the Weimar Republic than all its Einsteins and Plancks, Manns and Brechts...

...The Republic of the Squares—despised by both the Jacobins of the left and of the right—committed itself to avoid civil war, and so it disappointed the expectation of both the Communists and the militarists who envisaged a war of revenge against the Versailles powers, sidebyside with the Soviet Army...

...The intelligentsia often seemed to live in a different world...

...for Heinrich Mann had been a satirist, the sharpest critic of Teutonic authoritarianism, and a butt of patriotic recrimination...

...Weimar culture did not grow out of the social and political structure of the Republic but largely in protest against it...

...e.g., Emil Ludwig, otherwise a pet target of fascist insults...

...They go to the theater and applaud parricide...

...Strangely, the original contributions that the 1920s made to sociology and political theory are not given credit, and in general the relationship between the socialeconomic background and the prevailing ideologies remains unexplored...

...there was not even the faint smell of sansculottism then still lingering in that republican sanctum, St...

...It should be clear, however, that, to the chagrin of both Tucholsky and Heidegger, Weimar was a pluralistic state whose policies were determined by logrolling and compromise...

...Goebbels's Ministry of Culture...

...Not so...

...It was an age that may best be characterized by one of its favorite words: interesting, but considerably short of great...

...Nor did the left have a monopoly on creativity and quality...

...Paradoxes abound...

...It is true that no significant works appeared under the Thousand Year Reich, whereas Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Brecht, Feuchtwanger, and many others continued to be productive...

...To the rightists it was the "Jew Republic," to the leftists it was the bourgeois, merely formal republic, to the Bavarians it was the "Prussian" republic...

...as surely as they hoped to become Beamte (civil servants) one day, their mentality was far from the cliche of the obedient, subservient German Untertan (subject) depicted by Heinrich Mann and George Gross...

...Most emphatically, he denies any parallel between the Weimar of the 1920s and today's America...

...His film The Blue Angel was to launch Marlene Dietrich on her career as the sex symbol of her age, and as Siegfried Kracauer has pointed out, the film owed its success not so much to Marlene's incomparable legs (which were matched by the Tiller Girls and Ziegfeld's "revues," that new art form of the '20s) as to her raucous voice, her lack of talent, and the vulgar cruelty of the character she was portraying...

...On the other hand, the exciting films that gave the Weimar scene an avant-garde air were distributed by UFA, the reactionary concern belonging to the monarchist Nazi sponsor 279 Alfred Hugenberg, and some of their great directors later tried to collaborate with Dr...

...the name of Goethe was to reassure everybody, especially the middle class and the Western powers, that this was a revolution without Jacobins...

...But Laqueur does not let us off so easily with a neat partition into "two cultures," be they low-brow and high-brow, conservative and decadent, or right and left...

...its leaders were party and trade union bosses...

...their contemporaries counted these and other patriotic writers among their intellectual elite just as they considered critics of the Republic from the left, such as Brecht, as part of the ensemble that we now call "Weimar culture," which seemed to embrace the sublime and the ludicrous, the honest and the mean, from Marlene to Heidegger, from Schoenberg to Spengler...

...It was definitely no dumb mass that was craving to be subjected, but the intellectuals...

...Laqueur's analysis yields striking insights that contradict Herbert Marcuse's simplistic scheme in which high-brow culture appears as merely a sublimated reflection of the capitalist reality, and low-brow culture as a mere escape from it...

...Like the French Republic after 1871, the German Republic after 1918, born of defeat and accepted as an interim solution, was not loved by anyone...

...It will therefore not do to attribute the gulf between the intellectuals and the Republic to the Jewishness of either the intellectuals or the Republic...

...His judgment is so balanced that he even concedes that the social democrats might be charged with lack of resolution...

...But Furtwaengler, the great conductor, became one of Hitler's state councillors and did not emulate Toscanini and choose exile...

...The poet laureate of the Republic, Gerhart Hauptmann, who cultivated a superficial resemblance to Goethe, ended by composing a Prologue for one of Hitler's festivals...

...The legend that the Jewish spirit is "negativistic" or especially incompatible with German aspirations is just untenable (it may also be "sour grapes" considering the eagerness with which Jewish emigres assert that they were "Weimar culture...

...A truly "modern" author, Ernst Juenger, consciously prepared the totalitarian ideology and cultivated the militaristic spirit, whereas ErichMaria Remarque, who still passes for a man of the left, was honestly surprised when the Nazis found All Quiet on the Western Front offensive...

...The press and the movies may have employed liberals but were dominated by reactionary owners (except in Berlin and Frankfurt, where a few good papers were owned by liberal Jews...

...When intellectuals projected their alienation on the political screen, they might develop either what Laqueur calls "the Tucholsky syndrome" (blaming the Republic for not being Jacobin) or the Stefan George syndrome (looking down on its lack of nobility and structure...

...q THE VOGUE OF WEIMAR CULTURE 283...

...among these were owners of significant publishing houses, art galleries, and magazines, they were prominent in the theater and in the movies, in the press, and above all in criticism...

...More than one historian has called the 1920s "the age of Marlene," but, more appropriately, it should be called the age of ambiguity...

...The older generation, with its bad conscience, never punished them...

...to the young it was the republic of their parents...

...From this source, the complaint sounds surprising...

...The generation of Young Werther could not be assorted more thoughtlessly than with the generation that made Berlin the vice capital of Europe...

...it enumerates and records, but does not advocate...

...to the intellectuals it was the middle-class republic...

...It is somewhat paradoxical that the so-called Weimar Intellectuals should have claimed the Republic's heritage...

...Walter Benjamin, now a New Left saint, was able to travel through Italy without noticing that the country was ruled by fascist goons and the laborers were poor...

...in Italy, where there were no Jews to speak of, the fascists had to invent a conspiracy of freemasons for similar purposes...

...Goethe had nothing to say to the 1920s, and after Nietzsche, Kultur was precisely what the Youth Movement was trying to get rid of—we called bathing suits "culture rags...

...certainly not seminal since most of the ideas with which it throbbed—Bauhaus, relativity, psychoanalysis, expressionism, the liberation of youth and women—had originated in the previous epoch...

...however, it certainly made the diffusion of these ideas a thrilling experience...

...Its ruling elites, the professors, the lawyers, the doctors, the higher civil servants, the churches cultivated the memory of the imperial structure and mostly leaned to the right...

...Intellectuals, becoming more and more journalistic and sensationalist, wanted to see drama, excitement...

...Rejecting the political fantasies of the ideologists, he simply tells the story of blundering politicians who were too harassed to understand the lost possibilities later historians now hold against them...

...It is true, as Laqueur writes, that without some of the Jewish names the intellectual life of Weimar Germany was almost unthinkable...

...The appeal of Goethe's Weimar found no response among the creators of the big fair that today is called "Weimar Culture...

...Vice versa, those Nazi students who marched with the SS in military formation were the same nihilistic, antiauthoritarian youths about whom the radical novelist complained: they were subversive and, following Hitler, even antipatriotic...

...This impression has been created by the self-serving memoirs of some refugee intellectuals who, on arriving in Hollywood, declared that German culture had emigrated...

...To the younger generation, however, Goethe was the hated subject of high school essaya, while everything that was new, dynamic, fresh, or simply intelligent in German letters was either romantic or expressionistic or sick...

...Some Jews also traveled in Italy and wrote admiringly about Mussolini as long as the latter was not anti-Semitic...

...Were there no ideological forces that might have averted THE VOGUE OF WEIMAR CULTURE 281 the decomposition of the body politic...

...But in another sense the contention has meaning...

...Even in deeply republican Prussia, the state government did not dare to purge the civil service of monarchists...

...This sense of alienation became a trait so essential that Adorno later made negativity a duty of the clerk...

...But all these men (with the exception of Einstein and Hermann Cohen who were active Zionists, and of Martin Buber, Rosenstock, and Brunner who cultivated Jewish mysticism) were thinkers not qua Jews...

...hence their interest in psychology and literature and art criticism...

...Or, with respect to the Tucholsky syndrome, why did people whose very existence depended on the Republic nevertheless exert themselves to hasten its fall...

...The revolution produced neither a Robespierre nor a Cromwell, but it killed Rosa Luxemburg, and instead of to Napoleon it succumbed to a Hitler...

...For all practical purposes they were as German and patriotic as Proust and Bergson were French and French patriots...

...that age, which in another context I have called Periclean, was one of anguish and strife...

...Sillier still is the charge that the Jewish spirit "undermined" German Kultur...

...All of this, and worse, did not kill France's Troisieme Republique, which simply had better luck but also had more republican traditions to build on...

...This mistaking of "modern" for "left" was almost universal, Fritz Lang, the director of M, and Dr...

...Walter Laqueur, in his informative and well-balanced Weimar: A Cultural History, 1918-1933 (New York: Putnam, 1974) The year was 1922 and the speaker was not a New York hardhat but Heinrich Mann (brother of the Thomas who was to become the oracle of Weimar Culture...

...we have had enough of these...

...I have named here some of the most significant minds of the Weimar scene who were Nazis...

...Laqueur shows that much of the ebullient creativity and intellectual effervescence now known as ``Weimar Culture" developed in opposition to, or maybe outside, the social and political foundations on which it 280 HENRY PACHTER rested...

...Its intellectuals were as much "outsiders" as those of Weimar, and I see no need to emphasize the fact that in Germany so many of them were Jews...

...The gap was in the relationship of republican institutions with the intellectual heritage of Germany, in the bewilderment of modernization, in the narrow-minded, even hateful contempt of the elites for the society that fed them...

...For as long as that Republic existed, they had protested their alienation from it through all the media...

...Bucking the trend of interpretation, he restores history to its rightful place...

...Spengler had called for a Caesar, Max Weber for a "charismatic leader," Count Kessler would have accepted "anyone" provided he would fire the youth with enthusiasm...

...Tucholsky, the darling of the Weimar left, found the Republic much too philistine and plebeian...

...The Republic may not have been without republicans but it certainly was lacking intellectual leaders who cared for it...

...He shows that the good and the bad, the grave and the sophisticated, the noble and the ridiculous were intimately connected...

...Yet, after all this has been said, the curious still might ask why the Republic had so little appeal for the intellectuals, why it was so repugnant to the middle-class youth...

...The choice of Weimar—a small provincial town where Goethe had once founded an intellectual center and the national theater—as host for the Constituent Assembly, meant to indicate that the German revolution was to be the most polite and genteel affair in history...

...Contrary to Laqueur's assertion, they were prominent in the arts (Liebermann, the foremost German impressionist), in sociology (Simmel, Oppenheimer, Kelsen, Albert and Gottfried Salomon, Gruenberg, not counting the ex-Hungarians, Lukacs and Mannheim who wrote in German), and even (despite considerable resistance from the faculties) among philosophers (Hermann Cohen, Jonas Cohn, Cassirer, Joel, Dessoir, Husserl, Liebert...

...Laqueur does not pursue these relationships between ideology and reality, for in fact he does not devote a full chapter to the social conditions at all, and he does not show how the coexistence of ideologies interacted with the coexistence of interest groups...

...its institutions were neither inspiring nor dynamic...

...This was one subject on which the Jacobins of the left and of the right could agree...

...Contemplating the lack of a unifying philosophy, Laqueur makes the shrewd remark that instead of one Weimar Culture, there were many—with each cult, party, circle or coterie having its own press, priests, coffee houses and even resort places—and that they could all have coexisted for a long time but for the Great Depression, which forced the power brokers to act out their ideologies, for it politicized and radicalized the various group identifications...

...The Nazis did not attack the Republic because it was "Jewish" or "Judaized," but they found the Jews a convenient target as symbols of rationalism, liberalism, and republicanism...

...His lesson seems simple: other Western democracies do not have to succumb to the onslaught of totalitarianism and defeatism...

...It has been said that the Weimar Republic was a republic without republicans...

...It is entirely mistaken to believe that Weimar culture consisted of the Weltbuehne, the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research and a few Jewish intellectuals, surrounded by a mass of Yahoos...

...And on Constitution Day, the high school principals would rather show no flag than the republican colors...

...282 HENRY PACHTER middle-class, traditionally devoted to learning, hence it is natural to find them represented heavily among the free professions...

...Moreover, as a minority, they may have tended to be more sensitive, just like Protestants in France or Southerners and Negroes in the U.S...

...A pity, because even if the state was republican only in form, or perhaps because of that condition, its culture was a true republic of letters...

...The sansculottes in revolutionary Berlin would not invade sessions, as their Paris forebears had done in 1792...

...According to them, the Republic was nothing but imperial Germany minus the Kaiser...

...Jews in business were even more patriotic: Rathenau had organized the German war economy and had published ideas his Nazi murderers, had they been literate, would have approved of, and Albert Ballin, the shipowner, was to my knowledge the Kaiser's only friend who shot himself when he heard of Wilhelm's ignominious flight...

...Both Laqueur and Gay make much of the theory that assimilation was rather superficial and therefore, true Germans (or true Frenchmen, for that matter, like Barres) felt unable to accept the preponderance of Jews among the literati.* I wonder why one hears so often Jews accepting this Nazi argument: Jews were urban, *Peter Gay, in "The Jewish Intellectuals in the Wilhelminian Empire," Menorah, January 1975...

...In fact, even before the Republic had adopted a constitution, its "social partners," the industrialist Hugo Stinnes and the trade union leader Carl Legien, had concluded an "Agreement to Cooperate" (Arbeitsgemeinschaft...

...A few examples must suffice...

...Refreshingly, he also refuses to mention the sociological and metaphysical reasons why the Weimar experiment had to fail...

...This sober view, this absence of illusions and regrets, should be held against the more ideological and nostalgic books on the Weimar period, and I don't hesitate to proclaim, without intended malice, that Walter Laqueur's greatest merit is what previous reviewers have blamed him for: his book seems deliberately uninspiring, to the point of boredom...

...Rejecting glory and idealism, the Republic opted for peace and bread...

...Bu.t that grandiose failure, The Magic Mountain—revealing so much less about the Weimar Republic than, for instance, Roger Martin du Gard reveals about the Troisieme Republique or H. G. Wells about post-Victorian England—mirrors quite faithfully the incomprehension and impotence of the German intellectuals confronted with a new social reality, just as the vogue of Heidegger's philosophy exhibited almost brutally their inability to make contact with their society...

...Jews were swarming around Richard Wagner (as critics and conductors, despite Hitler's devotion to the composer), Richard Strauss (his librettist was Hugo von Hoffmannsthal, half Jewish), and Stefan George...

...His Olympian brother had called him a Zivilisationsliterat (phony intellectual...

...Paul's church at Frankfurt, where Germany's first Parliament had met in 1848...

...Emil Nolde, the expressionist painter, and Gottfried Benn, the expressionist poet, and, of course, Martin Heidegger, the existentialist philosopher, hailed Hitler as the God-sent instrument that was to realize their ideas—though to their chagrin their idol rebuffed them as "culture bolshevists...

...All protests, threats and actions of the young are directed against the over-30 and their ways of life...