Paradoxes of Weimar

...It seems to me that Benjamin frequently goes over the edge, leaving the reader baffled and bewildered on the brink...

...and "(to be discussed presently)" and "What I mean to say is . . ." Sometimes the style does take the breath away...

...When I hear the word 'culture,' I take the safety catch off my automatic") It was one of the many paradoxes of Weimar that while Dr...

...He committed suicide in the fall of 1940 when his attempt to cross from occupied France into Spain, on his way to the United States, was frustrated...

...Johst, Vesper and Kolbenheyer, on the other hand, though they belonged to the underworld of letters, did have a demonstrable effect on their readers and hence cannot reasonably be omitted from any meaningful treatment of Weimar culture: Their rabidly nationalistic articles, essays, plays, poems and books helped create the state of mind that made Nazism possible...

...It is one of those assertions which depends on the passage of time and thus can be made with the happy assurance that no one is going to be able to refute it...

...I can only say that I find his style far from breathtaking in translation, and that his manner seems heavy, didactic and often murky...

...One of the first necessities for the success of National Socialism," Hitler wrote to Alfred Rosenberg shortly after he came to power, "was the intellectual destruction of the complex of ideas [Gedanken-welt] hostile to our movement in the world around us...

...The age demanded that we flow And hammered in the bung...

...If anything," Gay astutely writes, "Weimar enjoyed too many ideas...

...The Republic was a permissive society, too, with sexual freedom veering into degeneracy, an open narcotics traffic (heroin was hawked on street corners in Berlin), and a general restlessness, aimless-ness and despair that engulfed much of the nation's youth...

...And in the end the age was handed The sort of shit that it demanded...

...And we think, above all, of the exiles who exported Weimar culture all over the world...

...But, curiously, we learn very little about the cultural factors that combined to make exiles of so many of Weimar's artists and intellectuals...

...It was written by an unknown American named Ernest Hemingway ("It's damn funny that Germany is the only place I can sell anything"), and Querschnitt printed it in English: The age demanded that we sing And cut away our tongue...

...When we think of Weimar," he writes, "we think of modernity in art, literature, and thought...

...She compares him to Kafka in this respect: "To put it bluntly, it would be as misleading today to recommend Walter Benjamin as a literary critic as it would have been misleading to recommend Kafka in 1924 as a short-story writer and novelist...

...Over and over, observers noted this psychotic strain in the new Republic...

...The poor stumbling, bungling Republic—flailed by the Right, despised by the Left, shattered by inflation, paralyzed by depression—¦ had no friends anywhere...

...Cali-gari, which appeared early in 1920, before anyone had ever heard of Adolf Hitler...

...And, looking back, George Grosz wrote: "Those were fantastic times...

...When some of us think of Weimar we are less inclined to think of The Threepenny Opera and Marlene Dietrich than of Mein Kampf and Adolf Hitler, both more potent and enduring manifestations of the culture of the time...

...It was a dazzling show as long as it lasted, but most of the names that fall strictly within the Weimar days —Jessner, Toller, Bronnen, Hasenclever—left virtually nothing that endured...

...The change duly came, and patrons of the Romanisches began packing their bags and fleeing Germany by night, those who were lucky enough to get away...

...From this viewpoint, the Johsts, the Vespers, and the Kolbenheyers were writers to be reckoned with...

...only an absurd academic snobbery would ignore them and run on fruitlessly about Holderlin, Kleist and Stefan George...

...The age demanded that we dance And jammed us into iron pants...

...Miss Arendt argues that Benjamin's work was so distinctly sui generis as to be unclassifiable: He was one of those "whose work neither fits the existing order nor introduces a new genre that lends itself to future classification...

...There is nothing sane to report...

...Historical parallels are notoriously tricky, yet some phases of the Weimar experience seem disturbingly close to what is now being lived through in this country and elsewhere...

...Perhaps Gay, in his expanded work, will tell us a little more about how all this came about...

...At any rate, Weimar is a continuing story, and another of its current reverberations is the publication of Illuminations, the essays of Walter Benjamin selected and edited by Hannah Arendt...

...A verse in the magazine Quer-schnitt expressed something of the prevalent disillusion and cynicism among the literate but frustrated young...

...Miss Arendt's introduction, which first appeared in the New Yorker and then was thriftily used again in her book Men in Dark Times, is not much help, being itself heavy, didactic and often murky...

...The intellectuals" (and how familiar this sounds...

...Although the book is slim and the subject vast, page after page is devoted to evaluations of Friedrich Holderlin, Heinrich von Kleist, and Stefan George, while we hear nothing at all of Harms Johst, Will Vesper, or Erwin Guido Kolbenheyer...

...Weimar was, in fact, the most free and enlightened government Germany had ever known, but the intellectuals sat around the Romanisches Cafe eating stale cake, drinking bad coffee, telling each other that the Republic was a hopeless mess, and that any change would be an improvement...

...Ben Hecht, then a foreign correspondent, observed the birth trauma of the Republic and cabled his managing editor: "Germany is having a nervous breakdown...

...Brecht called Benjamin's death "the first real loss that Hitler inflicted on German literature," and his work is now attracting more attention and causing more discussion in Germany than it did while he was alive...

...The implication seems to be that Kafka's day came, and so will Walter Benjamin's...

...This kind of Tal-mudic nit-picking rapidly grows tiresome, especially when it is offered, as it usually is, with such backing and filling as "Therefore, if one says —as I have just said...

...other qualified persons express the warmest admiration for his style ("it takes the reader's breath away"), the profundity of his insights, and the originality of his thought...

...Gay rightly stresses that the alienation of son from father?the enmity between generations?was a deeply troubling factor in Weimar...

...Even Jakob Wasserman, who sympathized with the "hopelessness of student youth," was impelled to point out: "Not every 40-year-old is a criminal and an idiot for the simple reason that he is 20 years older than you are . . . not every father is a fool and not every son a hero and a martyr...

...It was Johst, by the way, who coined the unforgettable slogan: "Wenn ich das Wort Kultur hore, entsichere ich meinen Browning...

...Caligari's indefinable "something frightful" gradually took specific shape, infecting the whole society from the dregs to the top, the arts flourished as never before—they flourished feverishly and hectically, showing the streaks of instability and freakishness that were harbingers of horrors to come...

...Those that do survive?Mann, Kandinsky, Klee, Feininger, Grosz—had established themselves prior to the Republic, and continued to function after its demise...

...And perhaps Gay will find space for another notable literary work of the period that is not so much as mentioned in Weimar Culture—the book called Mein Kampf...

...The Wandervogel were a pre-hippy manifestation of the young in rebellion against a society where there seemed "not a trace of honesty and rationality...

...The daffi-ness of Dada, which Jung called "too idiotic for any decent insanity," set the tone for the times, and a certain wildness often tainted even the more solid achievements in theater, art and literature...

...I report all this to convey the esteem with which Benjamin's work is regarded in certain quarters...

...The present volume is merely the published version of four lectures delivered at Columbia University...

...of the rebellion of sons against fathers . . . Dadaists against art . . . The Threepenny Opera . . . the Bauhaus, Marlene Dietrich...

...The period seems a strange dream...

...Benjamin is briefly referred to by Gay as a member of the "group of powerful intellects" who were associated with the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt...

...Reviewed by RICHARD HANSER Author of documentary films, "Germany Today" and "Berlin Powderkeg" There was something terribly wrong with Weimar right from the start...

...A professor discussing the culture of a given period will, by inclination and training, tend to stress the significance of the most gifted, most estimable writers...

...None of these quotations, and almost nothing of the atmosphere they suggest, appears in Peter Gay's Weimar Culture...

...This may account for Gay's bland, academic approach, which so seldom gets to the heart of the matter...

...There is an undefinable point where profundity, in literary criticism as in philosophy, shades into absurdity, and then the absurdity overrides the profundity and smothers it...

...He promises to take care of all that in a future book...

...There Is Something Frightful In Our Midst," read a key subtitle in The Cabinet of Dr...

...I have tried to portray Weimar culture as a whole," a sweeping commitment he immediately cancels in the same paragraph by conceding that he has said "less than could be said" about political events and economic developments, popular culture, the church, the family, the press, science, and the structure of German society—a rather broad spectrum to be scanted or omitted in portraying a culture as a whole...

...A highly cultivated man himself, Gay naturally finds Holderlin, Kleist and George congenial to analyze and comment upon...

...Perhaps only Brecht and Gropius can be considered pure products of the period, in the sense that they arrived as artists and reached their peaks under Weimar...

...Leo Lania, another eyewitness chronicler of the period, wrote: "Days of madness had come to Germany...

...But Querschnitt gets only a glancing mention in Weimar Culture, and is not quoted...

...Gay says...

...But even granting that there may be those who can follow him, what is the value, in 1969, of reproducing Walter Benjamin's bickering with Max Brod over obscure aspects of Franz Kafka's writing...

...The ferment of freedom and experimentation, the explosion of talent, make the period endlessly fascinating...

...In her introduction Hannah Arendt, who was his good friend, speaks highly and at length of his qualities as essayist, social commentator and literary critic...

...almost without exception opposed the government...

...But, after laboriously adumbrating their significance, he admits it is impossible to demonstrate that they had any appreciable effect on the behavior of men or the course of events...

...It had turned out, to their shocked surprise, that there were worse governments than Weimar...

...His present book, a thoroughly civilized and highly polished effort, is pitched on too lofty a level to come to grips with what the Berlin critic Herbert Ihering was talking about when he reviewed Drums in the Night in 1922?the horror of this age . . . the chaos and putrid decay of the times," as reflected in the early Brecht...