Weimar culture
Weimar culture was the emergence of the arts and sciences that happened in Germany during the Weimar Republic, the latter during that part of the interwar period between Germany's defeat in World War I in 1918 and Hitler's rise to power in 1933. 1920s Berlin was at the hectic center of the Weimar culture. Although not part of the Weimar Republic, German-speaking Austria, and particularly Vienna, is also sometimes included as part of Weimar culture.
Germany, and Berlin in particular, was fertile ground for intellectuals, artists, and innovators from many fields during the Weimar Republic years. The social environment was chaotic, and politics were passionate. German university faculties became universally open to Jewish scholars in 1918. Leading Jewish intellectuals on university faculties included physicist Albert Einstein; sociologists Karl Mannheim, Erich Fromm, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse; philosophers Ernst Cassirer and Edmund Husserl; political theorists Arthur Rosenberg and Gustav Meyer; and many others. Nine German citizens were awarded Nobel Prizes during the Weimar Republic, five of whom were Jewish scientists, including two in medicine. Jewish intellectuals and creative professionals were among the prominent figures in many areas of Weimar culture.
With the rise of Nazism and the ascent to power of Adolf Hitler in 1933, many German intellectuals and cultural figures, both Jewish and non-Jewish, fled Germany for the United States, the United Kingdom, and other parts of the world. The intellectuals associated with the Institute for Social Research fled to the United States and reestablished the Institute at the New School for Social Research in New York City. In the words of Marcus Bullock, Emeritus Professor of English at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, "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 manifestation." The culture of the Weimar period was later reprised by 1960s left-wing intellectuals, especially in France. Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Michel Foucault reprised Wilhelm Reich; Jacques Derrida reprised Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger; Guy Debord and the Situationist International reprised the subversive-revolutionary culture.
Social environment
By 1919, an influx of labor had migrated to Berlin turning it into a fertile ground for the modern arts and sciences, leading to booms in trade, communications and construction. A trend that had begun before the Great War was given powerful impetus by fall of the Kaiser and royal power. In response to the shortage of pre-war accommodation and housing, tenements were built not far from the Kaiser's Stadtschloss and other majestic structures erected in honor of former nobles. Average people began using their backyards and basements to run small shops, restaurants, and workshops. Commerce expanded rapidly, and included the establishment of Berlin's first department stores, prior to World War I. An "urban petty bourgeoisie" along with a growing middle class grew and flourished in wholesale commerce, retail trade, factories and crafts.Types of employment were becoming more modern, shifting gradually but noticeably towards industry and services. Before World War I, in 1907, 54.9% of German workers were manual labourers. This dropped to 50.1% by 1925. Office workers, managers, and bureaucrats increased their share of the labour market from 10.3% to 17% over the same period. Germany was slowly becoming more urban and middle class. Still, by 1925, only a third of Germans lived in large cities; the other two-thirds of the population lived in the smaller towns or in rural areas. The total population of Germany rose from 62.4 million in 1920 to 65.2 million in 1933.
The Wilhelminian values were further discredited as a consequence of World War I and the subsequent inflation, since the new youth generation saw no point in saving for marriage in such conditions, and preferred instead to spend and enjoy. According to cultural historian Bruce Thompson, the Fritz Lang movie Dr. Mabuse the Gambler captures Berlin's postwar mood:
Politically and economically, the nation was struggling with the terms and reparations imposed by the Treaty of Versailles that ended World War I and endured punishing levels of inflation.
Sociology
During the era of the Weimar Republic, Germany became a center of intellectual thought at its universities, and most notably social and political theory was combined with Freudian psychoanalysis to form the highly influential discipline of critical theory—with its development at the Institute for Social Research founded at the University of Frankfurt am Main.The most prominent philosophers with which the so-called 'Frankfurt School' is associated were Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Jürgen Habermas and Max Horkheimer. Among the prominent philosophers not associated with the Frankfurt School were Martin Heidegger and Max Weber.
The German philosophical anthropology movement also emerged at this time.
Science
Many foundational contributions to quantum mechanics were made in Weimar Germany or by German scientists during the Weimar period. While temporarily at the University of Copenhagen, German physicist Werner Heisenberg formulated his Uncertainty principle, and, with Max Born and Pascual Jordan, accomplished the first complete and correct definition of quantum mechanics, through the invention of Matrix mechanics.Göttingen was the center of research in aero- and fluid-dynamics in the early 20th century. Mathematical aerodynamics was founded by Ludwig Prandtl before World War I, and the work continued at Göttingen until interfered with in the 1930s and prohibited in the late 1940s. It was there that compressibility drag and its reduction in aircraft was first understood. A striking example of this is the Messerschmitt Me 262, which was designed in 1939, but resembles a modern jet transport more that it did other tactical aircraft of its time.
Albert Einstein rose to public prominence during his years in Berlin, being awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1921. He was forced to flee Germany and the Nazi regime in 1933.
Physician Magnus Hirschfeld established the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft in 1919, and it remained open until 1933. Hirschfeld believed that an understanding of homosexuality could be arrived at through science. Hirschfeld was a vocal advocate for homosexual, bisexual, and transgender legal rights for men and women, repeatedly petitioning parliament for legal changes. His Institute also included a museum. The Institute, museum and the Institute's library and archives were all destroyed by the Nazi regime in 1933.
In German-speaking Vienna, Mathematician Kurt Gödel published his groundbreaking Incompleteness Theorem during the Weimar years.
Education
New schools were frequently established in Weimar Germany to engage students in experimental methods of learning. Some were part of an emerging trend that combined research into physical movement and overall health, for example Eurythmy ensembles in Stuttgart that spread to other schools. Philosopher Rudolf Steiner established the first Waldorf education school in 1919, using a pedagogy also known as the Steiner method, which spread worldwide. Many Waldorf schools are in existence today.The arts
The fourteen years of the Weimar era were also marked by explosive intellectual productivity. German artists made multiple 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.German visual art, music, and literature were all strongly influenced by German Expressionism at the start of the Weimar Republic. By 1920, a sharp turn was taken towards the Neue Sachlichkeit New Objectivity outlook. New Objectivity was not a strict movement in the sense of having a clear manifesto or set of rules. Artists gravitating towards this aesthetic defined themselves by rejecting the themes of expressionism—romanticism, fantasy, subjectivity, raw emotion and impulse—and focused instead on precision, deliberateness, and depicting the factual and the real.
Kirkus Reviews remarked upon how much Weimar art was political:
One of the first major events in the arts during the Weimar Republic was the founding of the Novembergruppe on 3 December 1918. This organization was established in the aftermath of the November beginning of the German Revolution of 1918–1919, when communists, anarchists and pro-republic supporters fought in the streets for control of the government. In 1919, the Weimar Republic was established. Around 100 artists of many genres who identified themselves as avant-garde joined the November Group. They held 19 exhibitions in Berlin until the group was banned by the Nazi regime in 1933. The group also had chapters throughout Germany during its existence, and brought the German avant-garde art scene to world attention by holding exhibits in Rome, Moscow and Japan.
Its members also belonged to other art movements and groups during the Weimar Republic era, such as architect Walter Gropius, and Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht. The artists of the November Group kept the spirit of radicalism alive in German art and culture during the Weimar Republic. Many of the painters, sculptors, music composers, architects, playwrights, and filmmakers who belonged to it, and still others associated with its members, were the same ones whose art would later be denounced as "degenerate art" by Adolf Hitler.
Visual arts
The Weimar Republic era began in the midst of several major movements in the fine arts that continued into the 1920s. German Expressionism had begun before World War I and continued to have a strong influence throughout the 1920s, although artists were increasingly likely to position themselves in opposition to expressionist tendencies as the decade went on.Dada had begun in Zurich during World War I, and became an international phenomenon. Dada artists met and reformed groups of like-minded artists in Paris, Berlin, Cologne, and New York City. In Germany, Richard Huelsenbeck established the Berlin group, whose members included Jean Arp, John Heartfield, Wieland Hertzfelde, Johannes Baader, Raoul Hausmann, George Grosz and Hannah Höch. Machines, technology, and a strong Cubism element were features of their work. Jean Arp and Max Ernst formed a Cologne Dada group, and held a Dada Exhibition there that included a work by Ernst that had an axe "placed there for the convenience of anyone who wanted to attack the work". Kurt Schwitters established his own solitary one-man Dada "group" in Hanover, where he filled two stories of a house with sculptures cobbled together with found objects and ephemera, each room dedicated to a notable artist friend of Schwitter's. The house was destroyed by Allied bombs in 1943.
The New Objectivity artists did not belong to a formal group. However, various Weimar Republic artists were oriented towards the concepts associated with it. Broadly speaking, artists linked with New Objectivity include Käthe Kollwitz, Otto Dix, Max Beckmann, George Grosz, John Heartfield, Conrad Felixmüller, Christian Schad, and Rudolf Schlichter, who all "worked in different styles, but shared many themes: the horrors of war, social hypocrisy and moral decadence, the plight of the poor and the rise of Nazism".
Otto Dix and George Grosz referred to their own movement as Verism, a reference to the Roman classical Verism approach called verus, meaning "truth", warts and all. While their art is recognizable as a bitter, cynical criticism of life in Weimar Germany, they were striving to portray a sense of realism that they saw missing from expressionist works. New Objectivity became a major undercurrent in all of the arts during the Weimar Republic.