Popular Culture – 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.

BBC Weimar Essays

On BBC3, on the occasion of the foundation of the Weimar Republic in November 1918, five experts give a personal takes on the history of the Weimar Republic, including Katie Sutton on sexuality, Jochen Hung on Weimar memory and Ute Lemper on Weimar music!

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 fashion back in fashion

Following the succes of the silent film The Artist, the British newspaper The Guardian looks to stars of Weimar and early Hollywood cinema for fashion advice. (Sadly, there is no mention of the most fashionable of them all, Lili Damita and Claudette Colbert.)