Looking the Wrong Way

...Writers, artists, journalists, teachers, publicists-the leaders of thought and idea-operated unhampered at the top of their bent and to the limits of their talent...

...In the areas that are essentially Weimar, however, the book is unfailingly sound and enlightening...

...Yes," said Sam, "but what good does it do...

...There are pages here sprinkled with as many as a score of loosely connected names, some of which would have prompted Harold Ross of the New Yorker to scribble his famous query in the margin: "Who he...

...In many ways, the culture of Weimar was indeed unforgettable and sui generis...

...Still, it was a time of matchless intellectual glitter and flash...

...Yet, almost to a man, they misjudged their times, misunderstood the social and political currents that were sweeping them to disaster, and accomplished next to nothing that can be called salutary and saving for the society they lived in...

...He makes clear, for instance, that many of the great names commonly associated with the Republic were not, strictly speaking, Weimar characters...

...What Paul Klee said about the painters of the time applied to the intellectuals as a whole: "Uns tragt kein Volk"-the people don't support us...

...When the last Bauhaus building has crumbled to dust, and the last box office has given up on Brecht, and even the glory of Marlene's legs has dimmed, the volumes that tell, and retell, the curious story of the curious Republic that flickered so fitfully between two world catastrophes will still be piled high...

...It is an invaluable gift in an undertaking like this one, where a total pattern is to be woven from the literature, politics, music, film, and philosophy of a turbulent period...

...they never knew what hit them...

...The Republic, as such, produced few giants...

...The great virtue of his book is that it deals so evenly and knowledgeably with the absurd and the enduring elements of Weimar, making an engrossing chronicle of both...

...After the Nazis took power, members of the intelligentsia continued to confidently assure each other that Hitler could not last six months...

...on Laqueur's own showing, there was no special Weimar coloration to these disciplines...

...The Weimar writers," he says, "did not know their own country well, and their world was a very small one, poles apart from the rest of the people...

...Laqueur conveys all this vividly, without ever going overboard...

...But in the light of what happened in Germany, what good did it do...

...For at least this reader, though, the net effect of the book is deeply disturbing...

...The greatest of them had established themselves well before it emerged and continued to function as artists well after it collapsed...

...Kurt Tucholsky, who was probably as brilliant as a journalist ever gets, ludicrously misread Hitler's appeal, and he was typical...

...Reviewed by Richard Hanser Author, "Putsch: How Hitler Made Revolution" The most lasting contribution to posterity of the Weimar Republic and its culture may well turn out to be the books about them...

...He was over 80 when a friend accosted him at a party and warmly complimented him on how well he looked...

...The celebrated personalities who were exclusively of the period achieved, for the most part, little of lasting significance...

...They didn't see him coming...

...the common man has no respect for us...

...The highly intelligent, superbly literate Count Harry Kessler was thunderstruck when Hitler became chancellor, although to the miner in the Ruhr and the washerwoman in Wuppertal this was no surprise...

...As a demonstration of the value of an intelligentsia to a society under stress, Weimar's culture was a dismaying bust...

...If one brushes aside the flash and the glitter, what one sees-as so often in a laboratory-is appalling...

...This is not the main theme of Walter Laqueur's valuable and absorbing study, but it is one of them...

...On the only issue that really mattered, on the subject that made the dramas and books and films seem like largely playtime twaddle-on Hitler and the rise of Nazism-the brightest and best minds of Weimar were fatally deficient...

...Barriers were breached, and experiments ventured, in every direction-from the floor of the cabaret to the stage of the legitimate theater, from the note pads of the journalists to the easels of the artists...

...Laqueur can have few equals at clarifying and evaluating ideas, trends, movements, and attitudes, while keeping them ail in balance and perspective...

...The Weimar age," says Walter Laqueur, "is of enduring interest because, with all its fads and follies, it witnessed the emergence of the first truly modern culture...

...At the risk of seeming to trivialize the subject, one thinks of a saying of Samuel Goldwyn, that ever-flowing font of instructive anecdotes...

...Moreover, it turned out that the common man was right...

...Whether his heading is "The Left-Wing Intellectuals," or "Thunder from the Right," or "The Rise and Decline of the Avant-Garde," the author has something unexpected and stimulating to tell the reader...

...The passages on science and religion remind one of the college cram-course, too, and might better have been omitted...

...He has, besides, a cool intelligence that keeps him from lapsing into the overstatement and exaggeration so tempting to less disciplined writers...

...Within the limits of a book of moderate bulk a certain amount of roll-calling and base-touching is inevitable...

...They drew erroneous conclusions from the past and shockingly misinterpreted the future...

...they didn't know what he was when he got there...

...Weimar is also a culture in the laboratory sense: Time allows us, so to speak, to put it on a slide and under the microscope...