Weimar Republic

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Silas Peterson
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Mass Culture ◽  
Weimar Republic ◽  
Federal State ◽  
Political Crisis ◽  
German History ◽  
World War ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Internal Struggle ◽  
German Reich

The Weimar Republic (1918/1919–1933) is a term used to describe the German Reich (Deutsches Reich) after the end of World War I and after the dissolution of the German monarchy up to 1933 with the establishment of Nazi Germany. It refers first to the new federal state, constitutional government and parliamentary democracy that initially convened in Weimar. The term also refers to a cultural period of German history associated with the Golden Twenties, Expressionism and the rise of mass culture. It can be divided into three periods: 1919–1923, the founding of the Republic and internal struggle; 1924–1929, the phase of relative stability; and 1930–1933, the phase of economic and political crisis.

scholarly journals Either-Or: The Narrative of “Crisis” in Weimar Germany and in Historiography

2010 ◽  
Vol 43 (4) ◽  
pp. 592-615 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rüdiger Graf
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
National Socialism ◽  
German History ◽  
World War ◽  
Weimar Germany ◽  
Political Forces ◽  
Public Debates ◽  
History Of ◽  
National Socialists ◽  
The Republic

The notion of “crisis” plays an important role in both the history of the Weimar Republic and the historiography on this period of German history. Modifying Max Horkheimer's famous dictum on the intrinsic connection between capitalism and fascism, one might even say that anyone who does not want to talk about “crisis” should remain silent about Weimar Germany. In the brief period between 1918 and 1933 Germany not only had to cope with the consequences of World War I and the Versailles Treaty, but also it was struck by two severe economic crises. Moreover, strong political forces relentlessly tried to overcome the unpopular democratic political system. After the National Socialists finally succeeded in overthrowing the republic, Weimar came to be conceptualized as the ill-born precursor of National Socialism, as the critical stage of German history before the establishment of a rule of terror that intentionally led into the most devastating war in human history. This perspective on the failure of Germany's first democracy stems largely from the dominance of National Socialism as a negative point of reference in historical as well as public debates in the Federal Republic.

Introduction

2005 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 593-596
Author(s):  
James C. Albisetti
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
Weimar Republic ◽  
German History ◽  
Political Regimes ◽  
World War ◽  
Continuity And Change ◽  
East German ◽  
Degree Of Stability ◽  
Willy Brandt

All historians must grapple with the complexities of continuity and change. Yet those who study twentieth-century German history face greater difficulties than most, given the variety of political regimes Germany experienced in that era and their major differences in ideology, degree of stability, and relations with their neighbors. Some Germans, such as former West German Chancellor Willy Brandt, born in 1913, and former East German leader Erich Honecker, born in 1912, experienced all the changes, from childhood under the Kaiser through World War I, the Weimar Republic, the Nazis' “Twelve-Year Reich” (in exile and prison, respectively), the occupation regimes, forty years of what Brandt called “two states in one nation,” and the (re)unification of 1990.

scholarly journals The Weimar Republic and the War of Memory

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (2, 2021) ◽  
Author(s):  
Madeline Dixon
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Weimar Republic ◽  
Political Conflict ◽  
World War ◽  
Political Debate ◽  
Total War ◽  
Imperial Germany ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Republic ◽  
The Great War

World War I dismantled Imperial Germany and, long after the fighting had ceased, continued to shape the newly-born Weimar Republic. This paper argues that a war over the memory of the Great War in Germany led to Weimar’s downfall. The Weimar Republic’s lack of a collective memory of the first total war became the center of the political debate on the republic’s viability and Germany’s future. This war debate was potently wielded in the arenas of literature and art to heighten political conflict and ensure that the war’s memory seeped into every aspect of society. Ultimately, Weimar’s inability to promote any consensus on the war’s meaning in the face of opposition from the conservative and extremist right weakened the republic significantly and led to its downfall.

Prisoners’ fantasies in Weimar film

2009 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 290-304 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ofer Ashkenazi
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Weimar Republic ◽  
Law And Order ◽  
World War ◽  
Modern City ◽  
The Public ◽  
Bourgeois Society ◽  
Weimar Cinema ◽  
Public Criticism

Prison cells constituted a unique sphere in post-World War I German films. Unlike most of the modern city spheres, it was a realm in which the private and the public often merged, and in which reality and fantasy incessantly intertwined. This article analyses the ways in which filmmakers of the Weimar Republic envisaged the experience within the prison, focusing on its frequent association with fantasies and hallucinations. Through the analysis of often-neglected films from the period, I argue that this portrayal of the prison enabled Weimar filmmakers to engage in public criticism against the conservative, inefficient and prejudiced institutions of law and order in Germany. Since German laws forbade direct defamation of these institutions, filmmakers such as Joe May, Wilhelm Dietherle and Georg C. Klaren employed the symbolism of the prisoner’s fantasy to propagate the urgent need for thorough reform. Thus this article suggests that Weimar cinema, contrary to common notions, was not dominated by either escapism or extremist, anti-liberal worldviews. Instead, the prison films examined in this article are in fact structured as a warning against the decline of liberal bourgeois society in the German urban centres of the late 1920s.

Ernst Jünger and Storms of Steel

2019 ◽  
pp. 22-35
Author(s):  
Elliot Neaman
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Weimar Republic ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Local Culture ◽  
World War ◽  
The Third ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Third Reich

This chapter discusses the life and work of Ernst Jünger, who was part of a strain in modern German conservatism that tested the limits of modernity and Enlightenment rationality. He catapulted to fame as a young man on the basis of his World War I memoirs, In Storms of Steel, which made him part of the antidemocratic forces of the Weimar Republic, but he retreated into the inner emigration during the Third Reich. After 1950 he lived a reclusive life but published a stream of essays and books and an impressive diary that chronicled almost four decades of life with sharp observations on a wide range of topics. He was a cultural pessimist who thought that the rise of a unifying planetary technology and the loss of local culture meant that we were entering into a posthistorical world of fragmentation, and new forms of cultural and political tyranny.

Ottoman ghosts and legacies: A drift through the Dead Zone in Cyprus

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (5) ◽  
pp. 586-588
Author(s):  
Alev Adil
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Dead Zone ◽  
Border Zone ◽  
World War ◽  
Turkish Republic ◽  
Greek Cypriot ◽  
Northern Cyprus ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Republic Of Cyprus ◽  
Commercial Street

This creative piece explores traces and erasures of a Cypriot Ottoman heritage by transposing autoethnographic and psychogeographical practice to Europe’s southernmost capital, Nicosia. It walks the border zone in Nicosia, once the site of the river Pedios, later a major Ottoman commercial street, a boundary from 1958 to 1974, and since then, a Dead Zone and the internationally contested border between the Republic of Cyprus and the unrecognized Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. Photography and writing are presented in conjunction with pages in Ottoman Turkish by my great-grandfather, the poet Imam Mustafa Nuri Effendi, who made a notebook from the English periodical The War Pictorial while incarcerated as an enemy alien in Kyrenia Castle by the British during World War I. I explore how these pages speak of my transcultural Ottoman, Turkish-Greek-Cypriot and English heritages and of changes in Cypriot culture in the century between his war and ours.

“Ballad for Americans”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Gough ◽  
Peggy Seeger
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
World War I ◽  
Mass Culture ◽  
Political Activism ◽  
Music Programs ◽  
Musical Expression ◽  
World War ◽  
Post World War Ii ◽  
Cultural Productions

This chapter argues that overtly political themes never dominated Federal One productions. Yet, some of the beliefs espoused by the 1930s Left took root and found appeal among subsequent generations of Americans. Much as pre-World War I bohemians saw many of their ideas absorbed into the mass culture of the 1920s, so did the goals and convictions of the 1930s Left enter mainstream social movements of the post-World War II period. These causes found inspiration to varying degrees in musical expression, as well as particular elements of the radical political activism of the 1930s. Though notably less contentious than other WPA cultural productions, the Federal Music programs in the regional West should also be viewed as harbingers of these later social developments.

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