This chapter charts the development of literature during the years of the Weimar Republic. Three tendencies were particularly important. (1) Literature turned towards politics with an unprecedented intensity, attempting to influence the republic’s political and social development. It became a ‘weapon’, fostering the ‘formation of a frontline’ between different political, social, and cultural camps. This included the dispute over the lost war and the revolution. (2) A broad Zeitliteratur (literature of that time) on modern life emerged—on the metropolis, the world of industrial labour, being a white-collar employee, women’s emancipation—but also on tensions between progressive and conservative forces, and between metropolis and province. (3) All three literary genres, lyric, drama, and epic, showed new approaches by productively connecting innovative and traditional creative patterns, particularly in the exemplary works of Alfred Döblin, Gottfried Benn, and Bertolt Brecht, that represented a new kind of ‘reflective modernity’.
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