Research on the history, culture and society of the Weimar Republic
In 2019 Germany celebrates 100 years of Bauhaus. The centenary year is packed with events and exhibitions, including the opening of two new museums, a Bauhaus festival, and even a major TV series based on the romantic relationship between Walter Gropius and Dörte Helm.
There is a dedicated website listing all events all over Germany, from Ulm to Weimar.
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”
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.”
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””
The journalist Pamela Hutchinson is regularly writing about the history of silent film and its stars. For her column “Silent but deadly!“, appearing fortnightly in The Guardian, she has covered Clara Bow, Lotte Reiniger, and Rudolph Valentino. She also writes for Sight&Sound and Silent London. An interesting resource for any scholars of silent cinema!
The Royal Opera House in London is staging Brecht and Weill’s The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny as a parable on the current financial crisis. Philip Hensher has written an interesting background piece about the history of the opera in The Guardian.
In the current edition of German Studies Review, published in February, Maria Makela argues that the contemporary popularization of scientific knowledge about gonads and their hormonal secretions was an inspiration for much visual and literary culture produced in Germany in the 1920s: Continue reading “Journal Review: German Studies Review 1/2015”
In March, the Konzerthaus on Gendarmenmarkt is hosting Festival Mythos Berlin, a series of concerts and events celebrating 1920s Berlin. The highlight of the festival is the European premiere of Marc Blitzstein’s 1928 one-act opera Triple Sec. Die Sünde des Lord Silverside.
Unfortunately, the organisers have missed the opportunity to include the Konzerthaus’s own role in Weimar history as the backdrop of Gustaf Gründgens‘ career in the early 1930s – the subject of Klaus Mann’s infamous novel Mephisto.
Kate Elswit’s new study Watching Weimar Dance puts the focus on the audience, bringing insights from Dance, Theatre, and Performance Studies to Weimar Studies and offering a new view on Weimar culture with a focus on spectatorship: ‘Watching Weimar Dance asks what audiences saw on stages from cabaret and revue to concert dance and experimental theatre in the turbulent moment of the Weimar Republic.
Spectator reports that performers died or became half-machine archive not only the physicality of past performance, but also the ways audiences used the temporary world of the theatre to negotiate pressing social issues, from female visibility within commodity culture to human functioning in an era of increasing technologization. Continue reading “New Study on Weimar Dance”
In reading popular films of the Weimar Republic as candid commentaries on Jewish acculturation, Ofer Ashkenazi’s Weimar Film and Modern Jewish Identity ‘provides an alternative context for a re-evaluation of the infamous “German-Jewish symbiosis” before the rise of Nazism, as well as a new framework for the understanding of the German “national” film in the years leading to Hitler’s regime.’
Two articles in the current issue of the German Studies Review approach Weimar politics and culture:
Michael P. Ryan: Fritz Lang’s Radio Aesthetic: M. Eine Stadt sucht einen Mörder.
On the day of the last (at least somewhat) democratic elections in Germany, on 5 March 1933, the American journalist Cornelius Vanderbilt IV, heir to the Vanderbilt empire, apparently interviewed Hitler in the wings of the Sportpalast. Some scenes have resurfaced in this anti-Nazi movie from 1934.
The European Film Gateway is a single access point to films, images and texts from selected collections of 24 film archives across Europe: ‘The EFG Portal gives you quick access to hundreds of thousands of film historical documents as preserved in European film archives and cinémathèques: photos, posters, programmes, periodicals, censorship documents, rare feature and documentary films, newsreels and other materials.’
Accompanying the focus on Soviet film at last year’s Berlin Film Festival, this collection of essays on the Russian production companies Meshrabpom and Prometheus shines some light on the neglected topic of film collaboration between Soviet Russia and Weimar Germany.
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.
