If you are in London this weekend, make sure to visit the The Rest is Noise festival at the Southbank Centre. Saturday and Sunday are dedicated to ‘Berlin in the 20s & 30s’, featuring plays, talks, lectures, workshops and films, including a rare production of Brecht and Weill’s Songspiel. The Guardian has more info.
Category: Cultural History
Cabaret Berlin blog
Brendan Nash runs an interesting blog ‘exploring the entertainment of the Weimar era’, covering topics like the 1920s roots of David Bowie’s famed Dschungel on Berlin’s Nürnberger Strasse or the history of the Titania-Palast, Weimar Berlin’s grandest cinema. He also organises walking tours ‘through the Schöneberg of the late 1920s as seen by Christopher Isherwood’.
Journal review: German Life & Letters, 1/2013
In the current issue of German Life and Letters, Kristen M. Hylenski analyses Valeska Gert’s four autobiographical texts, Mein Weg (1931), Die Bettlerbar von New York (1950), Ich bin eine Hexe (1968), and Katze von Kampen (1973), revealing ‘the ways in which Gert revisits and revises her life story. While each text recycles material from the previous ones, Gert continually reframes her narrative according to the changing audiences and historical contexts. Continue reading “Journal review: German Life & Letters, 1/2013”
Martin Miller Archive opened
For anyone interested in Weimar-era theatre, the IGRS has just opened the private collection of Martin Miller to interested researchers. The on-going archival process is documented in a blog: ‘The Martin Miller and Hannah Norbert Miller collection is one of a number of important archives relating to German theatre and exile studies held by the Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies (IGRS) at the University of London. Continue reading “Martin Miller Archive opened”
Weimar politics in Britain, 1929-1939
Bernhard Dietz’s new study on British ‘Neo-Tories’ adds much-needed insight into the neglected social and cultural history of interwar Britain (which Richard Overy’s Morbid Age has started to draw attention to). Dietz describes British conservatives of the 1930s as an equivalent to the German ‘Konservative Revolution’, sympathizing with Italian fascism and cultivating an antifeminist ‘ideology of masculinity’.
New Study on Photojournalism
Penn State University Press have just published Daniel Magilow’s new book on The Photography of Crisis. The Photo Essays of Weimar Germany. Magilow examines the phenomenon of photojournalism and “photo books” by art photographers as a turning point in Weimar’s visual culture and important commentary to Germany’s history:
‘The fifteen years in Germany between the end of World War I and the National Socialists’ rise to power in 1933 stand out as one of the twentieth century’s most tumultuous periods. These years of political and economic upheaval famously spawned significant and lasting Continue reading “New Study on Photojournalism”
Weimar Dance, Nudity and Movement
WSN member Annie Stieglitz has found this excellent online publication on modern dance in the Weimar Republic: Karl Toepfer: Empire of Ecstasy. Nudity and Movement in German Body Culture, 1910-1935.
‘Empire of Ecstasy offers a novel interpretation of the explosion of German body culture between the two wars–nudism and nude dancing, gymnastics and dance training, dance photography and criticism, and diverse genres of performance from solo dancing to mass movement choirs. Karl Toepfer presents this dynamic subject as a vital and historically unique construction of “modern identity.” Continue reading “Weimar Dance, Nudity and Movement”
Musical trade between London and Berlin
West End and Friedrichstraße. Cross-Cultural Exchange in Popular Musical Theatre 1890-1939, an interesting international research project based at Freie Universität Berlin and Goldsmiths College London, considers the cultural transfer between Berlin’s and London’s musical districts. A report on a recent conference on the topic can be found online (in English).
Gender and the State in Weimar Germany and Austria
For the whole of its existence, Weimar democracy was a contentious and hotly debated topic: which form should the new state take exactly? The volume Staat in Unordnung? Geschlechterperspektiven auf Deutschland und Österreich zwischen den Weltkriegen sheds some light on the contemporary debate in Germany and Austria, with a focus on the aspect of gender. In these countries, the profoundly changed image of the role of women in society after the Great War was often related to the establishment of a democratic regime, so this study promises some important insights for this field of study.
The volume has been edited by Stefan Krammer, Marion Löffler and Martin Weidinger, all based at the University of Vienna’s research centre ‘Tropen des Staates‘.
Weimar Berlin reconsidered
The enduring allure of the Weimar Republic is inextricably intertwined with its capital city, Berlin. However, the problem of Berlin’s historical image has always been the fact that it largely relies on a handful of canonical texts, most of which supply a seriously skewed image of the city, variously describing it as ‘Germany’s most American city’, ‘Chicago an der Spree’ and ‘Spree-Athen’; Christoper Isherwood’s famous account of Berlin’s debauchery further added to its mystery – which is being reanimated today.
New Perspectives on Weimar
The new book Beyond Glitter and Doom. The Contingency of the Weimar Republic, edited by Jochen Hung, Godela Weiss-Sussex and Geoff Wilkes and based on the proceedings of a conference of the same name, gathers the latest research on Weimar history and culture:
‘The Weimar Republic has received more attention in academic research and popular culture than almost any other period in German history. Nevertheless, its prevailing historical image remains surprisingly simplistic: it is often seen as an era of accelerated cultural progress on the one hand and extreme political unrest, social upheaval and economic crisis on the other, a view epitomized in the ubiquitous image of the ‘dance on the volcano’.
A new approach to Weimar?
In the new Oxford Handbook of Modern German History the Weimar Republic is not treated as a discrete era, but is incorporated into longer periods from the Kaiserreich to the Third Reich. This certainly helps to highlight continuities, but is this a step back to treating Weimar merely as a ‘transition period’ (Übergangszeit)? Continue reading “A new approach to Weimar?”
Journal Review: German History 2/2012
The current issue of German History (June 2012) features several interesting reviews of:
Anna von der Goltz: Hindenburg: Power, Myth, and the Rise of the Nazis (by David Thomas Murphy)
Katie Sutton: The Masculine Woman in Weimar Germany (by Helen L. Boak)
Ernst Hanisch: Der Grosse Illusionist: Otto Bauer (1881–1938) (by Nancy M. Wingfield)
There is also a very insightful article about ‘German Polycentrism and the Writing of History’ by H. Glenn Penny
Hollywood in Weimar
This new study – the product of Ursula Saekel’s PhD project at Bremen University – analyzes the role of American film as an agent of Western modernity and consumerism in Weimar Germany.
German Minorities and Interwar Eugenics
The proceedings of the conference ‘The German Archipelago. German Minorities and Interwar Eugenics’, hosted at Balliol College, Oxford, on 16 – 19 December 2011, are now available on pulse-project.org.
Panels of the conference included ‘Eugenics and National Identity’ and ‘Volksdeutsche and Nazi Germanys’ Racial Policy’, among others.