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Category: History of the Everyday

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.

Continue reading “Moderate Modernity: The Newspaper Tempo and the Transformation of Weimar Democracy”

Cabaret Berlin blog

cabaret-berlin-bannerBrendan 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’.

German Digital Library online

The beta version of the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek goes live today. Financed by the Federal Government, by the states and by local authorities, the DDB offers ‘everyone unrestricted access to Germany’s cultural and scientific heritage, that is, access to millions of books, archived items, images, sculptures, pieces of music and other sound documents, as well as films and scores, from all over Germany.’

German History in Documents and Images

German History in Documents and Images (GHDI) is a comprehensive collection of primary source material documenting Germany’s political, social, and cultural history from 1500 to the present, created by the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C. in cooperation with the Bildarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz, and IEG-MAPS (Institute for European History, Mainz). It comprises original German texts, all of which are accompanied by new English translations, and a wide range of visual imagery, including maps.

The section on Weimar Germany has been curated by Eric Weitz and Eric Roubinek and is divided into 14 categories, including Politics, Economics and Society, Architecture and Urban Life and Bodies and Sex. Featured documents include the Stinnes-Legien Agreement of 1918, Walter Gropius’ Program of the State Bauhaus in Weimar (1919), data on regional secondary school enrollment (1911, 1926/27, and 1938) and George Grosz’s painting ‘Pillars of Society’ (1926).

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History Workshop Online is a forum, laboratory, and virtual coffeehouse devoted to the practice of radical history. Launched in 2011 by the editorial collective of History Workshop Journal, it offers debates, reflections, tools, and resources for anyone interested in connecting historical research with present-day politics, whether through engagement with public history, social history, the history of sexuality and gender, or intimate histories of everyday life.

Fashion and the Modern Woman

The new study Dressing Modern Frenchwomen. Marketing Haute Couture, 1919–1939 sheds some light on the role of fashion in the construction of a new conception of women after the First World War:

‘At a glance, high fashion and feminism seem unlikely partners. Between the First and Second World Wars, however, these forces combined femininity and modernity to create the new, modern French woman. In this engaging study, Mary Lynn Stewart reveals the fashion industry as an integral part of women’s transition into modernity.’

>> Review (subscription only)

Club life in Britain and Germany

Clubs and associations have played an important role in both German and British society. The new study Or­gan­is­ierte Gesel­ligkeit. Deutsche und brit­ische Ver­eine im 19. und 20. Jahrhun­dert compares their historical development in both countries over the last two centuries and includes an extensive chapter on the interwar years.

>>> Review (in German)

Study on Weimar State Representation

Nadine Rossol’s study Performing the Nation in Interwar Germany. Sport, Spectacle and Political Symbolism, 1926-36 shows that Weimar’s political culture and especially its state representation in mass events and sports meetings wasn’t as weak as normally thought:

‘Performing the Nation in Interwar Germany challenges the notion that the Nazis invented the use of aesthetics for the staging of their mass events. Instead, the book argues that the period from the mid-1920s to the mid-1930s can be considered as a whole in regards to the development of political aesthetics and festive culture. “Nazi aesthetics” were less quintessentially “Nazi” but expressed the Zeitgeist of the 1920s and 1930s.’

Weimar Culture Revisited

Weimar culture has often been portrayed quite one-dimensionally as a ‘dance on the volcano’, a surge of avant-garde, high art before the backdrop of political and economic crisis. The contributors to the new publication Weimar Culture Revisited (ed. by John A. Williams) take a different apporach:

‘Since the 1990s there has been a dramatic shift in the research on culture in general away from the strict focus on high arts and literature to everyday popular culture. A younger generation of scholars now takes the broad view of culture as not merely the work of elite artists and intellectuals, but as constructed in everyday practice and thorough popular participation.’