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Weimar Berlin as a Foreshadow

Essay By: Carl Halling

An Essay, also known as "Weimar Shadow of Future Things".

Submitted:Jul 21, 2010    Reads: 86    Comments: 0    Likes: 0   



Indeed, it could be said that much of what's happened to the West since the end of the second world war was to some degree presaged by the Berlin of the 1920s, familiar to millions through Bob Fosses' superb movie version of the Kander and Ebb musical "Cabaret", itself a descendant of one of Christopher Isherwood's two Berlin stories, "Goodbye to Berlin", penned in 1933, but referring to incidents that took place between six to eight years earlier.

Germany was of course the birthplace of Luther and the Great Protestant Reformation that has exerted such a monumental influence on the evolution of Biblical Christianity. At the same time, by the dawn of the Weimar Republic in 1919, it had long been associated with myriad revolutionary and esoteric ideas .


Despite the fact that the bona fide Weimar era was set to dawn in all its gaudy decadent glory in early 1923, Germany was yet a terribly ravaged and traumatised land as a result of a long series of crises leading back to the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm III and military defeat in the First World War.
The liberal democratic Weimar Republic was established soon afterwards, but Germany's post-war miseries had only just begun. During the debates in Weimar, A Soviet Republic was declared in Munich which was crushed by the Freikorps, resulting in the proliferation of far right movements throughout Bavaria. One of these was the German Worker's Party, and several of its key founding members went on to exert a powerful influence on a young war hero by the name of Corporal Adolf Hitler with their shadowy brand of nationalism.
The following month, while still in the army, Hitler was sent as a police spy by German Army Intelligence to infiltrate the ranks of the previously mentioned German Worker's party in the mistaken belief that it was Socialist in ideology.
Many Germans, including skilled workers, started working for the bare minimum necessary for the sustenance of life, as the nation started to become increasingly afflicted by unemployment, poverty, hunger, and even malnutrition, leading to widespread bitter unrest and resentment, one of whose expressions was the infamous Beer Hall Putsch of 8-9 November 1923. This was an attempt by Hitler's National German Workers Party, including paramilitary storm troopers under the leadership of Ernst Röhm, as well as future leading Nazis, Hess, Göring and Rosenberg, at a revolution modelled on the Fascist March on Rome of the previous October. Of all the putschists, it was World War I hero General Ludendorff who demonstrated the greatest courage under fire, but he was to subsequently disown Hitler. As to the latter, he spent just a little over a month in Landsberg Prison after the putsch was decisively put down by the Army, where he dictated his memoirs, "Mein Kampf" to his friend and fellow inmate Rudolf Hess.
Somehow, however, total economic collapse was halted under the chancellorship of Gustav Streseman - who was both charismatic and democratic, at a time when such politicians were in desperate need in Germany - by the replacement of the worthless Papiermark with the new Rentenmark, which was introduced on the 19th of November 1923. Streseman had earlier sought peace with Germany's enemies by calling off all passive resistance of striking German workers in the Ruhr Valley, an act which while having a beneficial effect on the economy, served also to fan the flames of nationalist rage. Millions of middle class Germans had been left ruined and embittered by the period of hyperinflation, with the result that they became susceptible to extreme right wing propaganda, while many workers turned to Communism.
For the time being, though, Germany - and specifically Berlin - became the supreme world epicentre of Modernism, of creative and intellectual foment not just in the fields of literature, architecture, music, dance, drama, cinema, and the visual arts, but of science as well. While she'd been a cradle of the Modern Impulse for centuries - a distinction she shared with several other Western nations including her closest European intimates, France and Britain - it could be argued that never before had she been quite so fiercely inclined in a cultural sense towards the radical and left-leaning, the experimental, the iconoclastic, the frankly scandalous, nor on so large a scale, as in the Weimar era.
Artistic innovation wildly thrived in Berlin in the years 1924-'29 in the shape of, among other phenomena, the painters of the Neue Sachlichkeit movement, such as Beckmann, Dix and Grosz, Berg's ground-breaking opera "Wozzek" (1925), as well as the staccato cabaret-style music of Kurt Weill, Fritz Lang's dystopian "Metropolis" (1927), the spectacles of cabaret queen Anita Berber and her enigmatic companion Sebastian Droste, and so on. The same applies to that lost city's notorious sexual liberalism, which still has the power to shock as seen in pictorial and photographic depictions of her cabarets and night clubs in which license and intoxication flourished unabated.

So much of what has become familiar to the West and beyond in the last half-decade, from the philosophies that have dominated our academia for decades, such as Critical Theory and Deconstruction, all the way to the theatre of outrage that is the essence of Rock music pre-existed in some form in the Golden Twenties. But beneath the glittering carapace she carried within her the seeds of her own ruin, for despite the genius that flourished alongside the licentiousness, she was operating largely in defiance of the Judaeo-Christian moral values that have long formed the basis of Western society.

Given that several other European and American cities were hardly less hysterically dissolute than Berlin, it's little wonder that this key Modernist decade has been described by some critics as the beginning of the end of Western civilisation. In its wake came the Great Depression, the ineffable horrors of the Second World War, and the collapse of the greatest empire the world has ever seen, all of which were succeeded in turn by the dawning of the Rock and Roll era with its quasi-religious exaltation of youth…rebellion…sexual libertinism… and the universal use of mind expanding drugs.

Since the inception of this Social Revolution, many of its core values have supplanted the old traditional Judaeo-Christian - once damned as Bourgeois by artistic and political rebels - within the Western cultural mainstream. For some this might beg the question: Could a time be coming when the disasters that befell the once glorious Weimar Republic will appear to those of us still alive in the contemporary West to be little more than a dress rehearsal in comparison? For my part, I hope this will not be case, but needless to say the future's not in my hands.

This essay was based on portions of the story "The Triumph of Decadence", chapter two of "Rescue of a Rock and Roll Child", and was composed in a spirit of truth and integrity to the best of my ability.


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