German History & Politics Essay

The prosperous years between 1924 and 1929 are usually considered to have been the most affluent and stable in the history of the Weimar Republic. Certainly there were no major attempts at revolutionary change and the economy and culture seemed to recover steadily after the hyperinflation of 1921-23. Beginning from 1924 there were no further attempts to overthrow the Republic to compare with the Spartacist uprising (1919), the Kapp Putsch (1920) and the Munich Putsch (1923). The political life of the parties hostile to the Republic seemed to be in decline, both on the left and on the right. This can certainly be seen as statistical confirmation of political and cultural stability. The period between 1924 and 1929 in Weimar Republic is usually seen as an interlude of social change between the more repressive periods of the Second and Third Reichs. The Weimar Republic in this period had the most explicit statement of civil rights ever produced in a constitutional document. Germans were guaranteed ‘equality before the law’ (Article 109) and ‘liberty of travel and residence’ (Article 111). Their ‘personal liberty’ was ‘inviolable’ (Article 114), while ‘the house of every German’ was ‘his sanctuary’ (Article 115). In addition, each individual had ‘the right†¦ to express his opinion freely by word, in writing, in print, in picture form, or in any other way’ (Article 118): indeed, censorship was ‘forbidden’ (Article 142) (Eyck 10). The Weimar Republic produced probably the most advanced welfare state in the western world. In the following this paper will discuss the culture and politics in the prosperous years of the Weimar Republic. Weimar Germany’s Modernist Political Project: Theory and Practice The project of establishing a pluralist consensus in the Weimar Republic could confront its supporters and detractors alike with parliamentary deadlock and coalition politics, on the one hand, and with violent extra-parliamentary struggles, on the other (Kaufmann 90). The new democratic structures which made contestation possible were established in the constitution. The values and principles it enshrined show that the decision to convene in Weimar was not simply dictated by a need to get away from the upheavals in Berlin (Kaufmann 29). The choice of the former residence of German culture’s two greatest sons, Goethe and Schiller, reflected a desire amongst the designers of the constitution that the new Republic should turn its back on Germany’s nationalist and authoritarian past and promote instead the cosmopolitan universalist values of Humanitat and Bildung. With its emphasis on personal freedom, equality before the law, the right to assembly, freedom of thought, and the right to form political parties and independent trade unions, the Weimar constitution embodied a central concern of modernism, the desire for greater equality and emancipation. Above all it was intended to produce a society based on tolerance, mutual respect, openness, and democracy, where the social, political, and economic conditions that had given rise to the carnage of the First World War would be banished once and for all. In practice, however, various negative factors were to prevent a genuine democratization of German society. Foremost amongst these was the crippling task of reorganizing an economy not only devastated by four years of war, but also forced to meet the massive reparations payments that had been imposed by the Allies. Analysing the ‘Psychology of Nazism’, Fromm noted that Hitler was well aware of the Germans’ difficulties in embracing a more open society that required active participation in the body politic (Kaufmann 134). Faced with the disorientating complexity of pluralism and its apparent inability to guarantee economic security, many frustrated and resentful Germans ultimately opted for the certainty of totalitarianism (Lee 13). This ‘fear of freedom’ was not, however, typical of all sections of the population. Non-aligned leftists and liberals in the cultural sphere wholeheartedly embraced, and actively worked to extend, the new freedoms offered by the constitution. It was their commitment to democracy which provided one of the main motivating forces behind Weimar culture. But one of the tragedies of that culture was that it never gained acceptance by certain significant social classes. Weimar Culture: The Birth of Modernism In the course of the nineteenth century a consciousness emerged which reduced the Modern to a mere resistance to the past and its legacy. At this point the optimism of an eighteenth-century understanding of modernity was already in decline in the Weimar Republic. Enlightenment thinkers expected the arts and sciences to harness the forces of nature, to give meaning to the world, to promote moral progress and social justice, and ultimately to guarantee human happiness. Horkheimer and Adorno traced out the way in which this positive project for human and social development had been hijacked by the instrumental rationality of capitalism (Lee 59). What had been progressive had become, in the growth of the culture industry, exploitative. The transformation of cultural production occurred as a result of crucial social, technical, political, and artistic developments between the world wars. In the 1924-29 there are still remnants of the old project of a liberated humanity. It is precisely that active relation between the social and the aesthetic which characterized so many cultural projects in the Weimar years, from the Bauhaus to popular illustrated papers, and from the documentary theatre to Dadaist montages. What was progressive in Weimar culture was informed by aspirations derived from a basic tenet of modernism. That is the belief that technological change could effect a positive transformation of the environment and an improvement of the human condition. Introducing a new edition of his essays from the 1924-29s, Ernst Bloch recalled in 1962 that the famous Golden Twenties were a time of transition. Extremists on both left and right saw the first German democracy not as an end in itself, but the incidental means by which a new Germany was to be created. A look back to the Weimar years from the post-war period, across the gulf of the Third Reich, confirms their reputation for cultural vitality and innovation. The extent of this sea change in the nature of German culture is demonstrated by Thomas Mann 1928 essay ‘Kultur und Sozialismus’ (Hans 9). Here the erstwhile champion of the automony of art acknowledges that Kultur and politics were no longer mutually exclusive spheres. Mass audiences for mass circulation media could scarcely be encompassed by traditional patrician or elitist ways of understanding what a culture was. What Mann calls the ‘socialist class’ (for so long held in deep suspicion by the educated middle class) is entrusted by him with no less a task than preserving the traditional heart of German self-understanding in the new democratic future. Systematically blurring the lines between political discourse and cultural activity, Mann asserts the need for Geist (‘the inwardly realized state of knowledge achieved already and in fact by the summit of humanity’) to become manifest in the material world of legislation, constitutionality, and European coexistence (Lee 29). However, some of the most striking developments in the political appropriation and use of culture were promoted by political parties in the context of the working-class movement. The Social Democratic Party (SPD) had traditionally viewed culture with suspicion, as essentially middle-class in origin and intent, and therefore inappropriate to the purposes of the working-class struggle (Kolb 78). At most the Social Democratic promotion of a proletarian lay theatre had an educational aim which survived into Brecht’s conception of the didactic play ( Lehrstuck). Nevertheless, before the war a number of organizations connected with the SPD promoted sport and gymnastics, choral singing, and even tourism – as well as amateur dramatics. After the successes of the working class and the increasing confidence they brought, there was a growing sense among socialists. The middle years of the Republic saw a great blossoming of organizations, supported by the Communist Party and the Social Democratic Party, providing for workers’ leisure, education, and practical training in various cultural skills: Proletarian FreeThinkers, Nudists’ Clubs, Worker Speech Choirs and Dance Groups, Worker Photographers (whose pictures were used by John Heartfield), Radio Clubs, and Film-Makers (Lee 46). Enormous numbers were actively involved in these organizations. Almost half a million people sang in workers’ choral societies in the Weimar Republic. The performances of works for speech choir (involving a kind of collective dramatic speech) were often conceived on an epic scale as the climax of festivals and celebrations laid on by the parties of the left and the trade unions. Apart from a few texts by Ernst Toller and Bruno Schonlank, few of these organizations left behind accessible artefacts, but the movement associated with the Communist Party that promoted proletarian writing of various kinds exemplified the issues of aesthetic intention involved. The KPD, as part of its effort to establish a basis of mass membership, developed factory cells and with them factory newspapers. To these publications ‘worker correspondents’ were encouraged to contribute accounts of their day-to-day experience in the workplace. Their ranks eventually contributed important members to the BPRS ( League of Proletarian Revolutionary Writers, founded in 1928): Willi Bredel, Erich Grunberg, Hans Marchwitza, and Ernst Ottwalt. Developing a highly simplified form of naive realism, works such as Bredel Maschinenfabrik N & K (1930) reflect the increasing material impoverishment of the working class and its organization as a movement. The representation of class divisions was not the exclusive territory of the proletarian authors; similar trends were clear in writers as different as Fallada (in Kleiner Mann, was nun? , for instance) and Arnold Zweig, in his epic war novel Der Streit um den Sergeanten Grischa ( 1927). What was striking about the specifically proletarian novel was its tight focus on its own class interests. Here working-class experience was isolated in a functional and instructive narrative. Other authors developed the accounts of first-hand experience provided by the worker correspondents to create critical reportage addressing the class-based nature of Weimar institutions, such as Ernst Ottwalt’s ironically titled ‘factual novel’ on the legal system Denn sie wissen, was sie tun ( 1931) or Ludwig Turek’s autobiographical Ein Prolet erzahlt ( 1930). Yet both of these forms of proletarian writing eventually attracted the ferocious criticism of Georg Lukacs, the most influential cultural theorist of the Communist Party (Lee 78). Modernism and its Malcontents The simmering resentment in conservative circles against Weimar modernism and the cultural degeneracy it allegedly encouraged came to a head in a protracted and heated Reichstag debate in 1926 on a motion, proposed by the German National People’s Party, which sought to ban ‘trash’ and ‘filth’ from publication, performance, or screening (Haarmann 89). For members of the Catholic Centre Party and their allies further to the right economic prosperity had produced a dangerous development towards ‘economic individualism and Mammon’. It threatened to destroy the classical and religious foundations of German culture. Offering a fascinating mixture of conservative and progressive ideas the Catholic deputy Georg Schreiber called for a campaign against the profit motive in culture and a struggle for the ‘soul’ of the German worker. He proclaimed that the restoration of German national dignity could not be achieved by politics and economics alone. The conservatives’ mission was to reassert the best traditions of Germany’s cultural heritage by stemming the influx of alien cosmopolitanism which, they lamented, was engulfing Germany in a tide of commercialism. Their fears were underlined in more extreme fashion by the Nationalists, who railed against the ‘excesses of destructive sensual pleasure’ and the worship of ‘the body, nudity, and lasciviousness’. Germany, they proclaimed, was faced with nothing less than a moral decline of Roman proportions. At the other end of the political spectrum, the Communists lambasted the proposal as a thinly disguised attempt to increase state control over art, designed to impose bourgeois standards of morality on newly emerging proletarian culture. Citing the effective banning of Eisenstein Battleship Potemkin by local censorship boards in Wurttemberg, they pointed out that regional governments had already made use of legal powers that were designed to preserve moral decency in order to ban politically unacceptable works of art. Opposition to the proposal also came from the Social Democrats, who feared that the absolute freedom of art was being jeopardized by concessions to petty-bourgeois philistinism. Eduard David, in a speech on the day in December 1926 when the proposal was passed by a majority of 92 votes, expressed particular concern that the decision to devolve decisions on censorship to regional testing commissions (Landesprukfstellen) meant a return to the pre-unification spirit of petty provincialism ( Kleinstaaterei), and therefore a threat to the cultural integrity of the Republic. Thus he saw 3 December 1926 as a black day for German culture. Appealing in vain to the traditions of cultural liberalism in the Centre and Democratic Parties, he proclaimed that the freedom of art was a cornerstone of the constitution and that any form of censorship was an attack on the very foundations of the Republic (Haarmann 35). The parliamentary debate was merely a prelude to an even more lively public dispute. Groups of prominent members of the nonaligned left, proclaiming the sanctity of spiritual freedom, lined up against a rag-bag of ultra-conservative and nationalist organizations, such as the German Women’s League against Degeneracy in the Life of the German People, the Richard Wagner Society, and the German National Teachers’ League (Lee 78). All they zealously followed the call to organize against the alleged corruption of the German spirit that they saw as endemic in the new Weimar culture. The panoply of works banned by some of the new regional censorship committees was very broad indeed. That it included not only popular French magazines with fascinating titles such as Paris Flirt, Frivolites, Paris Plaisirs, and Eros, but also Soviet films and Brecht’s debut play Baal merely confirmed the worst fears of those opposed to the legislation (Haarmann 45). The debate on trash and filth, coming as it did in the mid- 1920s, when the distinctively new cosmopolitan, commercialist character of Weimar culture was becoming increasingly apparent, provided telling evidence of the extent to which culture remained a burning political issue. Many who supported the legislation did so out of a conviction that the Republic’s claim to be the legitimate home of Germany’s classical cultural heritage was a hollow one. In their estimation the reality was tasteless commercialization and a total loss of standards.