Literature and Culture of the Weimar Republic

*Winner of the Peter C. Rollins Prize for Best Book of the Year from the Northeast Popular Culture Association*
An investigation of the irrational and the unconventional currents swirling behind the Bauhaus's signature sleek surfaces and austere structures.

The Bauhaus (1919–1933) is one of the twentieth century's most influential art schools, celebrated as the archetypal movement of rational modernism and famous for bringing functional and elegant design to the masses. In Haunted Bauhaus, art historian Elizabeth Otto liberates Bauhaus history, uncovering a movement that is vastly more diverse and paradoxical than previously assumed. Otto traces the surprising trajectories of the school's engagement with occult spirituality, gender fluidity, queer identities, and radical politics. The Bauhaus, she shows us, is haunted by these untold stories.

The Bauhaus is most often associated with a handful of famous artists, architects, and designers―notably Paul Klee, Walter Gropius, László Moholy-Nagy, and Marcel Breuer. Otto enlarges this narrow focus by reclaiming the historically marginalized lives and accomplishments of many of the more than 1,200 Bauhaus teachers and students (the so-called Bauhäusler), arguing that they are central to our understanding of this movement. Otto reveals Bauhaus members' spiritual experimentation, expressed in double-exposed “spirit photographs” and enacted in breathing exercises and nude gymnastics; their explorations of the dark sides of masculinity and emerging female identities in design; the “queer hauntology” of certain Bauhaus works; and the school's communist period (1928–1932), when Bauhäusler put their skills into the service of the revolution―even as Nazism emerged and entered the Bauhaus itself.

With Haunted Bauhaus, Otto not only expands our knowledge of a foundational movement of modern art, architecture, and design, she also provides the first sustained investigation of the irrational and the unconventional currents swirling behind the Bauhaus's signature sleek surfaces and austere structures. This is a fresh, wild ride through the Bauhaus you thought you knew.

Katrin Holland wurde als Autorin von mehr als 40 Unterhaltungsromanen bekannt, darunter einige Bestseller. Ihren ersten Roman "Man spricht über Jacqueline" veröffentlichte sie als 20-Jährige 1930 bei Ullstein. Als 1942 ihr erster englischsprachiger Roman "No Surrender" in den USA erschien, wechselt sie ihr Pseudonym und publizierte fortan unter dem Namen Martha Albrand. Ihre frühen Texte spielen oft im Milieu der lebenslustigen europäischen Hautevolee. In den 1940er-Jahren beginnt sie ihre Narrationen politisch zu färben, zunächst im Kampf gegen den Nationalsozialismus, später schreibt sie auch gegen den Kommunismus.

Das Undbild von Kurt Schwitters und die Philosophie des Und von Franz Rosenzweig stehen im Zentrum der hier vorgetragenen Überlegungen. Beide Arbeiten, die künstlerische wie die philosophische, entstanden unabhängig voneinander, jedoch im nämlichen Zeitraum (ca. 1920). Ohne voneinander zu wissen, haben Schwitters sowie Rosenzweig auf je verschiedene Weise die Konjunktion thematisiert. Diese eigenartige Koinzidenz markiert eine historische Situation, deren Charakteristika genauer zu betrachten sind. Künstlerisch betrachtet erweist sich das Und als epochales Grundwort für Collage und Montage. Philosophisch bedacht führt die Konjunktion auf eine sprachphilosophische Wende sowie auf eine radikale Kritik der Hegelschen Dialektik (lange vor aller postmodernen "Logik des Und"). Ziel des Vortrags ist es, Bild und Buch in wechselseitiger Verschränkung zu befragen.

Published in 2004, this essay focuses on the communist-activist artist Alice Lex-Nerlinger who, working during the closing years of the Weimar Republic, created works ranging from subtle photomontages that were reproduced in Werner Gräff's Es kommt der neue Fotograf! to didactic stencils intended to be mass-reproduced on photo paper. With her images she fought for such causes as workers’ rights, anti militarism, and the elimination of the Weimar constitution’s notorious paragraph 218, the anti abortion clause. Working during the late 1920s and early 1930s along with other members of the activist artists group Die Abstrakten, Lex-Nerlinger sought to use art as a weapon but would ultimately be silenced by National Socialism.

Ein weiterer Zug seiner Originalität liegt in der Art, wie er deutsche und französische Kultur verarbeitet und zusammenführt. Ich wüßte keinen Kritiker in Europa, der mit derselben Sympathie und demselben Verständnis über Madame de Noailles und Simmel, über Marcel Proust und Max Scheler zu schreiben vermöchte.

In Yiddish Writers in Weimar Berlin, Marc Caplan explores the reciprocal encounter between Eastern European Jews and German culture in the days following World War I. By concentrating primarily on a small group of avant-garde Yiddish writers—Dovid Bergelson, Der Nister, and Moyshe Kulbak—working in Berlin during the Weimar Republic, Caplan examines how these writers became central to modernist aesthetics. By concentrating on the character of Yiddish literature produced in Weimar Germany, Caplan offers a new method of seeing how artistic creation is constructed and a new understanding of the political resonances that result from it.

Yiddish Writers in Weimar Berlin reveals how Yiddish literature participated in the culture of Weimar-era modernism, how active Yiddish writers were in the literary scene, and how German-speaking Jews read descriptions of Yiddish-speaking Jews to uncover the emotional complexity of what they managed to create even in the midst of their confusion and ambivalence in Germany.

Caplan's masterful narrative affords new insights into literary form, Jewish culture, and the philosophical and psychological motivations for aesthetic modernism.

https://iupress.org/9780253052001/yiddish-writers-in-weimar-berlin/

Die Problematik der Gattungszuordnung von Döblins Erzählung "Die beiden Freundinnen und ihr Giftmord" wird im Verlauf der Arbeit präsentiert.
Darstellungsbezogene Merkmale sollen eine Antwort auf die aufgeworfenen Fragen liefern, sodass das Fazit die Untersuchung mit einem Vorschlag für eine angemessene literarische Auswertung und Zuordnung des Textes abschließt.

This book chapter offers a new interpretation of Hans Prinzhorn’s 1922 Artistry of the Mentally Ill [Bildnerei der Geisteskranken] by taking as its point of departure the material presentation of the book itself (cover, layout, illustrations) as a manifesto for the controversial theoretical ambitions of Prinzhorn’s work, largely based on Ludwig Klages’ anti-rationalist views.

Unlike many other publications on Nazi culture, this book is not primarily about what has been called "the Nazification of the arts," based upon state-supported use of the arts  for propaganda, a curtailment of freedom in art criticism, and the political and legal Gleichschaltung, "the forcing into conformity" under a hierarchical, dictatorial leadership (Führerprinzip) of all aspects of the various branches of national and local government, the civil service, education, public finance, business, the professions, and the arts.  To complement earlier studies of Gleichschaltung, the essays in this anthology explore the underlying beliefs of the Nazi racist state as they were developed and propagated in various fields of artistic activity.

This work is a comparative analysis of the image of the black-African in the novels Der Neger Jupiter raubt Europa of Claire Goll and Batouala of René Maran. It tries to bring answers to questions such as how the two novels present the black-African, how the identity and the cultural position of the authors influence the way the presented images are chosen and interpreted, how the novels put in scene the reaction of the black characters to the discourses which describe, fix and marginalize them. Using concepts and categories from the postcolonial discourse such as Edward Said’s orientalism and Homi K. Bhabha’s mimicry, I’ve come to the conclusion that the two novels portray the black-African under almost the same aspects, namely as primitive, superstitious, barbarian and savage.  However, he appears in Claire Goll’s novel also as the Noble Savage, in difference to René Maran. Hence while René Maran’s novel defends the principle of colonialism as a humanistic mission though denouncing the degrading practices of the colonizers in the colonies, Der Neger Jupiter raubt Europa can be read as Goll’s critic at the French (and in general the European) society of the 1920s which is characterized through its fascination for the black plastic and visual art as well as for the black music, while disdaining and scorning the black-African himself.
The two novels diverge also in the way they put in scene the reactions of the black characters to the colonial and racist discourses. Accordingly, the black characters in Maran’s novel subvert the authority of the colonial master by displaying the so-called “authorized version of otherness” (Bhabha) only in his presence. They appear therefore as partial and false copy of the white man. In Goll’s novel, we have to do with a character who interiorizes the racist discourses which marginalize him and tries to become like the white man, in order to be accepted as ‘normal’ man. However, he also becomes a false and partial copy of the white man, since all his attempts to be assimilated fail.
In conclusion, the two novels give us to acknowledge that identity is everything but fixed, natural and original. On the contrary, it experiences perpetual changes. Thus the encounter with the Other engages always a negotiation process which questions the essentialist conception of identity, as well as the binary opposition of Self and Other.

As a long-time Hesse reader and scholar, it was a great honor for me to give a talk at the Hermann Hesse Museum in his birth town Calw on the Eastern slopes of the Black Forest. This paper deals with Hesse's ambivalent, even uneasy position within the literature and esthetics of the Weimar Republic. A revised and expanded version was published in: Hermann-Hesse-Jahrbuch 12 (2021), 23-50.

When the handprints of Albert Einstein sold in 2013 at Sotheby's for £55,000, no one queried how Einstein might have come to allow the chiromancer Marianne Raschig to read his hands. It is symptomatic of a wider lack of interest in the art of reading hands, which remains underresearched territory. This essay fills such a gap in connection with Einstein, arguing that the art of reading hands (chiromancy, chirology) was popular in the Weimar Republic, and that in addition to Raschig at least three others analysed Einstein's hands. Pictures of his hands also appeared in magazines, and they were once sculpted. Obviously, being a famous man, Einstein was "exploited" by people, also by hand readers. Furthermore, this essay argues that Einstein had an interest in the occult. He was stunned, for instance, after he had witnessed a séance organised by the salonière Edith Andreae-Rathenau for the Dutch medium Coba Akkeringa-Kromme. Shortly thereafter, Einstein withdrew from research into the occult, but did so half-heartedly.

Amerikanismus und Amerikanisierung waren in der Weimarer Republik wichtige Schlagwörter. Das Interesse der Deutschen an Amerika resultierte nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg vor allem aus seiner "beherrschenden politischen Stellung" und "seinen wirtschaftlichen Kräften". Werden Technisierung und ökonomische Modernisierung von vielen Zeitgenossen noch vornehmlich positiv beurteilt, so gelten die möglichen Wirkungen der Amerikanisierung auf die Kultur der Deutschen zumeist als Gefahr. Theodor Lüddecke befürchtet in seinem Essay Amerikanismus als Schlagwort und Tatsache: "Die Persönlichkeit geht doch immer mehr unter in der auf rein rechnerisch zu erfassende Gewinne eingestellten Maschinerie. Die menschlich-kulturellen Gefahren, die das Vorwärts-dringen der amerikanischen Wirtschaftsmacht unmittelbar für Deutschland in sich birgt, liegen in der absoluten ‚Verwirtschaftlichung' des Menschen, die, individualistisch-liberalistisch orientiert, den Menschen allmählich zum bloßen ‚Luxusheloten' macht, dessen höhere Lebensziele sich in Automobilen, Villen, Radio, Kino, Patentkochherden, Eisschränken und ‚parties' erschöpfen." Die Amerikanisierung macht also vor keinem Lebensbereich Halt, auch nicht vor dem Persönlichsten, der subjektiven Lebenseinstellung und – wie wir sehen werden – der Liebe.

Engl.: Bernhard H. Bayerlein: No antifascism without antistalinism. Willi Münzenberg, "Die Zukunft" and the Antistalinist Turn in the German speaking Emigration 1933-1940. In: Global Spaces for Radical Transnational Solidarity, Bayerlein/Braskén/Sonnenberg (eds.), e-book, Berlin, 2018, p. 218-270. https://www.muenzenbergforum.de/ebook, freely accessible
This essay article attempts to show how Stalinism as the ideology and methodology of the Communist Parties and the Communist International not only contributed to the German and European catastrophe of 1933 and the defeat without a major fight of the world’s strongest labour movement and German Communism against Hitler, but also to the weakening of anti-fascism and the decline of German-speaking political emigration in the years to follow until the outbreak of WWII in the “midnight of the century”. The article critically scrutinizes not only the retrograde path of orthodox party anti-fascism which together with the Social Democratic Party SPD inhibited a united front and united action against Hitler in 1933, but also looks empirically for clues and arguments for the emergence of a counter-reaction of the political and social movements and outstanding contemporary actors.
In doing so, the article provides clear evidence of the unfolding of a widespread anti-Stalinist reflex and even a Stalinism-critical transformation and reorientation of the German (and partly also European) anti-Hitler opposition between 1933 and 1940 as a consequence of the establishment of the system of state terror and modern slavery in the Soviet Union and follows the different paths and transmissions of this new type of disastrous political culture and methodology on a transnational level. Besides giving some rather spectacular empirical hints, the article analyses this transnational paradigmatic shift and response to Stalinism which is often neglected in historical writing or political analysis, denying its significance for the traditional workers' movement and the left and democracy as a whole. The traditional workers movement with its instrumental party Marxism, nevertheless, was finally not strong enough to oppose orthodox Stalinist and social-democratic party politics and perished under fascist and Stalinst rule in the barbarism of the Second World war.
This shift in political and cultural history, crucial for the understanding of the 20th century, has often been overlooked and even denied by mainstream historiography and was later in a certain way pasted up by the victory of Stalin and the allies in 1945. Therefore, the article criticizes a trend that considers Stalinism either as a revolutionary and antifascist movement or as simply not existing, denying it or treating it as an irrelevant problem. Specially, its corrosive, disrupting and demoralizing influence on the history of German-speaking political emigration in Europe and the Americas has often been considered as trivial. The argumentation of the article is based on new research results mainly on the German émigré community in France and Mexico as well as on the modes of entanglement of the transnational network triangle connecting Germany, Russia and the Comintern. It mainly goes back to the history of the German-speaking world of political emigration and anti-fascist articulation. In this respect, the party-induced history of antifascism in the German émigré community proves to be a sequence of open or more or less covert political scandals, hostilities, acts of defamation and criminalisation of honest persons, independent personalities, among them outstanding critics, authors or organizers like Kurt Tucholsky, Walter Benjamin, Willi Münzenberg or Gustav Regler. In most cases, these developments can be empirically traced back to Stalinist practices of "line communism" in the words of Babette Gross (she was the wife of Willi Münzenberg and sister of Margarete Buber-Neumann). These practices arose from Great Russian nationalism and “Socialist colonialism” (Lenin), in the 1930s, this led to a global process of sometimes hybrid, sometimes brutal de-internationalisation of the communist movement.
This longer essay is also based on a research project on Münzenberg's weekly newspaper “Die Zukunft” (The Future) (1938-1940) at the Institute for Social Movements at the Ruhr University Bochum, with a two-year grant from the Fritz Thyssen Foundation. My thanks go to Uwe Sonnenberg (Berlin) for important hints.

Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau, which took shape in Hannover, Germany, between 1923 and 1936, is one of the most problematical artworks of the 20th century. The Hannover Merzbau and its two lesser-known successors, constructed by Schwitters in exile, present an unusual challenge to art historians because so little remains of them: the first was destroyed in 1943, nothing survives of the second, constructed in Oslo, and the last, in Elterwater, England, was never completed. Despite the painstaking investigations of Werner Schmalenbach, Dietmar Elger and John Elderfield between the 1960s and 1980s, the Hannover Merzbau in particular has amassed so many myths and legends since Schwitters’ death in 1948 that the reception of the work may be said to have established a dynamic of its own. The combination of the lack of originals and a plethora of misunderstandings about the evolution of the Merzbauten has meant that these sculptural interiors are frequently misconstrued as essentially ludicrous, macabre or regressive works that are hardly to be taken seriously within the framework of the 20th century avant-garde.
  The main aim of this dissertation is to relocate the Merzbauten in their historical context by building on the often forgotten work of early researchers. It includes an examination and assessment of a selection of scholarly studies, a review of the evidence that draws on new archival discoveries, critical analyses of key sources such as Schwitters’ few published statements on his constructions, his personal correspondence and the visual material, and a revised chronology that not only calls into question many of the numerous anecdotes, legends surrounding the Merzbauten, but also most of the accepted art-historical theories. The concluding chapter examines various aspects of the complex interweaving of the public and private facets of the Merzbauten and suggests ways in which the revised chronology can alter our understanding of these works and in addition, redefine them as works of exile.

The psychedelic community is popularly conceived as having a liberal, anti-authoritarian outlook that seeks to extend civil liberties. However, the cultural history of psychedelics does not support the assumption that this is necessarily the case. Colin Campbell’s concept of the ‘cultic milieu’ is used to describe the cultural arena in which psychedelic culture operates. Because of a number of overlapping negations, psychedelic culture converges with groups such as Traditionalists, which may shade into racist and nationalist values. The nature of the ‘cultic milieu’ provides an easy environment for ‘entryism’ in the form of deliberate or casual importation of alien ideologies. The political outlooks of three influential twentieth century drug adventurers Ernst Jünger, Julius Evola and John Michell, demonstrate varying shades of reactionary conservatism. The central question of the relation of reactionary politics and psychedelics is addressed by asking why the writings of Julius Evola, who had a close relationship with both Fascism and Nazism, have been republished by a New Age publisher that is also a major publisher of important works on psychedelics. Different ways of explaining and understanding the commonalities of New Age culture in general with the reactionary conservatism of the New Right, with reference to psychedelic culture in particular are considered. Walter Benjamin’s concept of ‘profane illumination’ emerging from his drug experiences, places Benjamin as a left wing analogue of Ernst Jünger. Jünger, Evola and psychedelic culture all place a value on extreme experience as a form of heroic initiation. Given these commonalities, what can the psychedelic community learn an examination of these issues? A video of the talk itself can be found at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gMu7m5A7qQ

This essay uses Guy Debord's 1967 Society of the Spectacle as a lens in order to reexamine an earlier but parallel set of critical ideas at the Bauhaus, attempts to awaken vision and the other senses in order to reject the society of the spectacle's mode of unilateral communication. It focuses particularly on visual engagements with the spiritual--Spirit Photography, drawings of mediums and ghosts, and other representations that engage with experimental religions of the early twentieth century.

This essay analyzes Arnold Schoenberg's opera fragment Moses und Aron in conjunction with Walter Benjamin's theories of the Baroque Trauerspiel ("play of mourning," distinct from Tragedy in the classical sense of the term) to understand the aesthetic significance of both the opera and the Trauerspiel in the context of the Weimar Republic. By considering the dramatic character of the Trauerspiel in comparison with the religious resonances of Schoenberg's compositional theories of 12-tone technique, a sense of what Schoenberg's rapprochement with Jewishness signifies for him, and why the opera had to remain incomplete for both aesthetic and ethical reasons--for reasons in which ethics and aesthetics interpenetrate one another--becomes clearer.

Despite the fact that in the history of Croatian architecture of the interwar period Expressionism neither took firm hold nor had the significance and reception like it had in Germany, there exists a whole series of architectural designs which display a pronounced influence of this style. In Croatian architecture Expressionism appeared roughly from around 1922 until the end of the 1920s and in the work of some architects even later, in the course of the 1930s. It occurred mainly under the influence of German and partly Austrian architecture and as a reflection of the incursion of Modernism, not as a result of the chaotic post-war climate, inflation or other economic changes. Architects of Croatian Expressionism did not form a homogenous group – they neither shared the same formation or social convictions, nor belonged to the same political circles. What they had in common were aspirations for the accommodation of architecture to the new world, its new needs and technical possibilities. Two German architects had a profound influence on the emergence of Expressionism in Croatian architecture – Hans Poelzig and Peter Behrens. Hans Poelzig trained three Croatian architects who in the course of the 1920s produced designs influenced by Expressionism: Drago Ibler, Zdenko Strižić and Josip Pičman. Especially important is the oeuvre of Drago Ibler, who created a whole series of Expressionist projects, most of which remained unbuilt. Particularly significant are his designs for the Epidemiology Institute (1922), for the Central Workers’ Insurance Office (1923) and for the Trading High School (1928) in Zagreb. His most important executed work of the 1920s was the interior of the theatre section of the pavilion of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes at the 1925 Exposition internationale des Arts décoratifs et industriels modernes in Paris. Between 1926 and 1943 Ibler was the head of the Department of Architecture of the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb. Some of the architects trained at the Department, like Stjepan Planić, embraced Expressionist aesthetics. Peter Behrens’s influence on the emergence of Expressionism in Croatian architecture occurred through the work of his disciples educated at the Viennese Akademie der bildenden Künste (his most important Croatian disciple was Juraj (Georg) Neidhardt), as well as through his participation in the construction of the Zagreb City slaughterhouse complex. Behrens was the representative of architect Walter Frese from Berlin, who in 1928 produced the design for the city’s slaughterhouse, constructed between 1929 and 1931. Stylistic features of the buildings of this complex display a combination of elements of Expressionist and Neue Sachlichkeit architecture. Besides Behrens’s and Poelzig’s disciples, a number of Zagreb architects of the older generation also designed under the influence of Expressionist aesthetics. Among the most important is Ignjat Fischer, designer of the interior of the City Café at the Ban Jelačić Square in the very centre of Zagreb. It was executed in the years 1929-31 and represents the most important example of Expressionist architecture in Croatia. The City Café was designed under the influence of Poelzig’s works, more precisely of his most important building, the Grosses Schauspielhaus in Berlin. Almost at the same time, in 1928-30, the same square was embellished by the hotel and department store building owned by Svetozar Milinov and designed by Dioniz Sunko, which originally included an advertising tower with elements of Backsteinexpressionismus. A number of designs related to Expressionist architecture can be associated with the so-called Foundation block planned in the centre of Zagreb in late 1920s and early 1930s (among which stand out designs by Stjepan Planić, and Josip Pičman and Josip Seissel). From that time on, the International Style started to become fully dominant in Croatian architecture.

This paper discusses the aesthetic and political motivations of the great importance that Walter Benjamin gives to Charlie Chaplin in Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (1935-1936). First, it proceeds to identify the main paragraphs that Benjamin devoted to Chaplin's films in the different versions of his famous essay. Then it examines Chaplin's reception in Weimar Germany both in the field of avant-garde art and that of press criticism, highlighting the philosophical, ethico-political and psychological arguments exchanged in a wide and intensive debate on the human dimension of the Tramp character.

Hermann Detzner’s 'Vier Jahre unter Kannibalen' (1921) purports to chronicle the author’s sojourn in the jungles of Kaiser-Wilhelmsland, the German colony on Papua New Guinea, during World War I. While the narrative is based on facts, much of it is fictionalized and embellished. Written in the early days of the Weimar Republic by an alienated member of the so-called 'Frontgeneration,' the text reflects the author’s yearning for a return to the imperial era. 'Vier Jahre unter Kannibalen' tries to align New Guinea, its landscapes and native inhabitants, with the German homeland and thus to make the case for Germany’s continued right to overseas colonies. While Detzner’s generation was heavily implicated in the rise of Nazism, Detzner, despite his ardent nationalism, seems to have steered clear of the movement. His exposure to radical alterity in New Guinea might have played a part in making a racist ideology unappealing to him.

Abstract
This essay examines Irmgard Keun's novelDas kunstseidene Mädchen (1932) against the backdrop of Weimar-era discourses on the emancipatory potential of vision. While the narrative's thematization of vision has been productively analyzed from the perspective of feminist and film theory, less attention has been paid to its ties to contemporary discourses concerned with retooling a vision enhanced by new technologies like film into an instrument of emancipatory self-fashioning. As the article shows, Keun's novel reflects critically on these discourses by casting its heroine's sentimental journey in terms of an education in vision that leads to acknowledging the distance between the visual as a mode of inscription and the visible as a domain of perception. In so doing the novel delivers a critical commentary on contemporary discourses that located agency in a conquest of the visible attained by manipulating the visual.

In 1919, the program of the State Bauhaus promised a modern education for the talented, regardless of age and gender, which drew many young women to apply. The “Bauhaus-Girl Type,” described in a January 1930 issue of the magazine The Week, knew what she wanted and would succeed. This volume’s essays question the euphoria of the time period with the knowledge of Bauhaus members’ subsequent destinies. These essays take as exemplary the biographies of Gertrud Arndt, Marianne Brandt, Margarete Heymann, and Margaretha Reichardt, both during their training and as Bauhaus graduates.
This 336-page book is the catalogue to the exhibition of the same name at the Angermuseum in Erfurt, Germany, March-June 2019.