Weimar Culture

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Weimar Republic refers to the years (1919-1933) in German history. Politically and economically, the nation struggled with the terms and reparations imposed by the Treaty of Versailles (1918) that ended World War I, and endured punishing levels of inflation. 1920s Berlin was at the hectic center of the Weimar Culture.

The fourteen years of the Weimar were also marked by explosive intellectual productivity. German artists made significant cultural contributions in the fields of literature, art, architecture, music, dance, drama, and the new medium of the motion picture. Political theorist Ernst Bloch described Weimar culture as a Periclean Age.

Weimar culture encompassed the political caricature of Otto Dix and John Heartfield and George Grosz, the futuristic skyscraper dystopia of Fritz Lang's 1927 film Metropolis and other products of the UFA studio, the beginnings of a new architectural style at the Bauhaus and the mass housing projects of Ernst May and Bruno Taut, and the decadent cabaret culture of Berlin documented by Christopher Isherwood.

Writers such as Alfred Döblin, Erich Maria Remarque and the brothers Heinrich and Thomas Mann presented a bleak look at the world and the failure of politics and society through literature. The theatres of Berlin and Frankfurt am Main were graced with drama by Bertolt Brecht, cabaret, and stage direction by Max Reinhardt and Erwin Piscator. Concert halls and conservatories exhibited the atonal and modern music of Alban Berg, Arnold Schoenberg, and Kurt Weill.

During the era of the Weimar Republic, Germany became a center of intellectual thought at its medieval universities, and most notably social and political theory (especially Marxism) was combined with Freudian psychoanalysis to form the highly influential discipline of Critical Theory—with its development at the Institute for Social Research (also known as the Frankfurt School) founded at the University of Frankfurt am Main.

With the rise of Nazism and the ascension of Adolf Hitler to power in 1933, many German intellectuals and cultural figures fled Germany for Turkey, the United States, the United Kingdom, and other parts of the world. Those who remained behind were often arrested, or detained in concentration camps. The intellectuals associated with the Institute for Social Research (also known as the Frankfurt School) fled to the United States and reestablished the Institute at Columbia University in New York City.

In the words of writer Marcus Bullock, "Remarkable for the way it emerged from a catastrophe, more remarkable for the way it vanished into a still greater catastrophe, the world of Weimar represents modernism in its most vivid manifestion."

Contents

1 Notable Cultural Figures of the Weimar Era

1.1 Art
1.2 Architecture
1.3 Literature
1.4 Music
1.5 Theater and Film
1.6 Intellectuals

2 See also

Notable Cultural Figures of the Weimar Era

Art

Ernst Barlach – sculptor
Max Beckmann – painter, printmaker
Otto Dix – painter
Max Ernst – painter
Conrad Felixmueller – painter
George Grosz – painter
John Heartfield – photomontage artist
Erich Heckel – painter
Herbert Bayer – painter and designer
Käthe Kollwitz – printmaker, sculptor, artist
Wassily Kandinsky – painter
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner – painter
Paul Klee – painter
Gerhard Marcks – sculptor, woodcuts, lithographer, ceramics
Otto Mueller – painter
Gabriele Munter – painter
Emil Nolde – painter
Max Pechstein – painter
Karl Schmidt-Rottluff – painter
Kurt Schwitters – painter

Architecture

Peter Behrens – architect
Walter Gropius – architect, founder of the Bauhaus
Hugo Häring – architect
Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky – the first female architect in Austria and designer of the Frankfurt kitchen
Ernst May – architect
Erich Mendelsohn – architect
Adolf Meyer – architect
Hans Poelzig – architect
Bruno Taut – architect and city planner
Mies van der Rohe – architect

Literature

Bertolt Brecht – playwright (The Threepenny Opera)
Alfred Döblin – novelist (Berlin Alexanderplatz)
Hermann Hesse – novelist (Siddartha)
Christopher Isherwood – novelist
Ernst Jünger
Heinrich Mann – novelist (Der Untertan)
Klaus Mann
Thomas Mann – novelist (Death in Venice, Buddenbrooks, The Magic Mountain)
Erich Mühsam – poet, playwright, anarchist
Erich Maria Remarque – novelist (All Quiet on the Western Front)
Anna Seghers – novelist
Kurt Tucholsky – satirist

Music

Alban Berg – composer (Wozzeck)
Paul Hindemith – composer, violist (Mathis der Maler)
Otto Klemperer – conductor and composer
Arnold Schoenberg – composer (Transfigured Night)
Anton Webern – composer
Kurt Weill – composer (The Threepenny Opera)

Theater and Film

Marlene Dietrich – actress
Arnold Fanck – director, producer and editor of Mountain films
Greta Garbo – actress
Brigitte Helm – actress
Erika Mann – theatre producer, playwright, journalist, cabaret and film actress.
Pola Negri – actress
Leni Riefenstahl – controversial dancer, actress, and film director (directed many technically acclaimed films including several infamous NAZI propaganda films)
Max Reinhardt – theatre producer
Lotte Reiniger – pioneering animator
Fritz Lang – filmmaker Metropolis (1927)
Ernst Lubitsch – film director
Erwin Piscator – theatre and film producer
Hans Richter – filmmaker, actor, writer
Leontine Sagan – actress and filmmaker Mädchen in Uniform (1931)
Josef von Sternberg – filmmaker The Salvation Hunters (1925), The Blue Angel'' (1930)
F.W. Murnau – director "The Last Laugh" or "The Last Man" (1925)
Walther Ruttman – director "Opus series", "Berlin: Symphony of a Great City"
Conrad Veidt – actor
Anita Berber – actress

Intellectuals

Theodor W. Adorno
Walter Benjamin – critical theorist
Albert Einstein – physicist
Erich Fromm – psychologist and philosopher
Sigmund Freud – psychoanalyst
Max Horkheimer – critical theorist
Carl Jung – psychoanalyst
Siegfried Kracauer
Franz Oppenheimer – sociologist and political economist
Max Weber – political theorist