Berlin – Weimar Studies Network

Moderate Modernity: The Newspaper Tempo and the Transformation of Weimar Democracy

Focusing on the fate of a Berlin-based newspaper during the 1920s and 1930s, Moderate Modernity: The Newspaper Tempo and the Transformation of Weimar Democracy chronicles the transformation of a vibrant and liberal society into an oppressive and authoritarian dictatorship. Tempo proclaimed itself as “Germany’s most modern newspaper” and attempted to capture the spirit of Weimar Berlin, giving a voice to a forward-looking generation that had grown up under the Weimar Republic’s new democratic order. The newspaper celebrated modern technology, spectator sports, and American consumer products, constructing an optimistic vision of Germany’s future as a liberal consumer society anchored in Western values.

Weimar at German Historical Museum

The Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin has opened the flagship exhibition of this year’s Weimar centenary celebrations.

WEIMAR: THE ESSENCE AND VALUE OF DEMOCRACY runs until September and highlights the central challenges in politics and society faced by contemporaries of the Weimar Republic. The exhibition is expressly addressed at “current debates about the crisis of liberal democracy” and features a Democracy Lab, aiming “to build awareness for the fact that this form of government lives on the participation and engagement of all citizens, is marked by the continuous negotiating of different opinions and positions, and in this way is constantly able to further develop itself.”

Exhibition: Magic Realism, 1919-33

If you find yourself in London over the next few months, make sure to visit the free exhibition MAGIC REALISM: ART IN WEIMAR GERMANY 1919-33 at the Tate Modern. The exhibition draws on paintings from The George Economou Collection and many of the artworks not ordinarily on public display. The Guardian calls it “a truly revelatory voyage through art and history”.

Daily Life in Berlin, 1925

Two years before Walther Ruttmann’s Berlin. The Symphony of the City (1927), Ufa published The City of the Millions. A Life Picture of Berlin by Adolf Trotz. The film documents life in Berlin in the mid-1920s, taking the viewer on a tour of the city, from fashionable shopping streets such as the Friedrichstrasse and the Kurfürstendamm to the film studios in Tempelhof and Babelsberg and petit-bourgeois quarters of the city. Continue reading “Daily Life in Berlin, 1925”

Moka Efti returns

With the recent success of the TV series Babylon Berlin, the famous Moka Efti café has been in the news again, nearly 90 years after its opening in 1929. The Guardian recently reported on the real-life inspiration for the “sinful superclub” of the same name that plays a central role in Babylon Berlin: “The decor inside the original venue, however, was even wilder than the imagination of the TV producers has allowed. An elevator took visitors from street level to the first floor – a technical invention so new and laden with the promise of social mobility at the time that many Berliners visited Moka Efti merely for the ride” – which echoes Siegfried Kracauer’s (overly cynical) report on the opening of the café: Continue reading “Moka Efti returns”

Weimar Cinema at Berlinale 2018

Weimar film fans have something to celebrate in 2018: the Berlin Film Festival Berlinale has just announced a whole section devoted to Weimar cinema next year, from Georg Lamprecht’s gritty proletarian drama Die Unehelichen (1926) to Friedrich Dalsheim and Gulla Pfeffer’s ethnographic documentary Menschen im Busch (1931):”The Retrospective of the 68th Berlin International Film Festival will focus on the great variety of cinema in the Weimar era. Some one hundred years ago, at the end of World War I and the dawn of the Weimar Republic, one of the most productive and influential phases in German filmmaking began unfolding, a creative era that went on to shape international perception of the country’s film culture, even to the present day. For “Weimar Cinema Revisited”, the festival will present a total of 28 programmes of narrative, documentary, and short films made between 1918 and 1933. … Most of the silent film screenings will be accompanied by music played live by internationally renowned musicians.”

Return of the “Wilden Zwanziger”

The historical image of the Weimar Republic has long been dominated by the trope of the “Wilden Zwanziger”: the juxtaposition of an all-consuming crisis with a supposedly uniquely modern culture and decadent nightlife. In the past decade or so, historians have questioned and complicated this cliché (see the Reading List on this site), but to no avail: this year, Babylon Berlin, the most expensive TV series every produced in Germany and which promises to be an international hit, has reanimated the view of 1920s Berlin full of “growing poverty and unemployment [that] stand in stark contrast to the excesses and indulgence of the city’s night life and its overflowing creative energy”. Continue reading “Return of the “Wilden Zwanziger””

Exhibition on Alfred Flechtheim

Alfred Flechtheim, the art dealer who brought Picasso to Berlin and founded the magazine Querschnitt, was one of the most important figures of Weimar Germany’s cultural scene. 80 years after his death, the Georg Kolbe Museum has put on a show about his life and work, featuring works by the artists he represented: Continue reading “Exhibition on Alfred Flechtheim”

Exhibition: Berlin 1937

“Give me four years’ time” – with this slogan Hitler promised a total transformation of German society in 1933. The new exhibition Berlin 1937 at the Berliner Stadtmuseum looks at daily life in the German capital after Hitler’s four years and “the National Socialist dictatorship had permeated every aspect of German everyday life”: “What was the city like for its residents as they went from their homes to school or to work, to the church or to the synagogue, to air raid exercises or to dance? What changed under Nazi rule; what stayed the same? What were the consequences for individuals and for societal groups? And: To what degree was it possible to recognise the system’s criminal nature before the war and the Holocaust began?”

Walking in Berlin in 2017

In The Guardian, the journalist Vanessa Thorpe follows in the footsteps of Franz Hessel, author of the 1929 book Walking in Berlin. Quite remarkably, she contends that “the city that comes to life on Hessel’s pages could be straight out of Cabaret, based on Christopher Isherwood’s novel Goodbye to Berlin” – a book published 10 years later. If anything, Isherwood took inspiration from Hessel rather than the other way round.

Weimar 2.0 in Berlin?

A slightly different take of the currently popular Weimar comparisons in the Berlin-based expat magazine Exberliner: “Our new issue looks at the impact that Weimar’s gay sexologists, expat authors, cabaret dancers and Dadaist visionaries had on today’s Berlin and asks: How close are we to Weimar 2.0?”

Karl Schenker exhibition

The Museum Ludwig in Cologne is hosting an exhibition of works by Karl Schenker, one of Weimar’s most famous society photographers: “Everybody who was anybody had their portrait taken in his Berlin studio on the famous Kurfürstendamm.” Many thanks to Dorothy Price for drawing our attention to this fabulous show! Continue reading “Karl Schenker exhibition”

Mobile Phones in Weimar Berlin

Already in 1926, the satirical magazine Simplicissimus had a premonition how Berliners would take to mobile phones. A great example of Weimar science fiction, from the collection of the Staatsbibliothek Berlin.

It’s Weimar Time Again!

Over the past weeks, three new exhibitions have opened on two different continents, almost at the same time, that put Weimar culture back into the spotlight of wider public attention.
In New York, Berlin Metropolis: 1918-1933 at the Neue Galerie “explores the city using a multi-media approach, revealing this complex period through painting, drawing, sculpture, collage, photography, architecture, film, and fashion.” In LA, New Objectivity: Modern German Art in the Weimar Republic, 1919-1933, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art claims to be “the first comprehensive exhibition in the United States to explore the dominant artistic trends of this period.” Meanwhile, in Berlin, Tanz auf dem Vulkan. Das Berlin der Zwanziger Jahre im Spiegel der Künste at the Stadtmuseum Berlin promises to deliver for the first time a “comprehensive overview” of Berlin’s status as the European centre of the avant-garde in Europe during this period. Continue reading “It’s Weimar Time Again!”

“Dancing on the Volcano” exhibition

The myth of the “Roaring Twenties” and of 1920s Berlin is rearing its head again. From September, the Stadtmuseum Berlin hosts the exhibition “Dancing on the Volcano. The Berlin of the Twenties as Reflected in the Arts” aiming at showcasing “the mood and social climate in the 1920s, particularly in the pulsating metropolis of Berlin”.

Sadly, there seems to be no historical awareness of the “legend of the Twenties” (in Helmuth Plessner’s words) and its retrospective, nostalgic quality.