CHAPTER 5 - The Twenties in Berlin

Abstract

This chapter discusses the economical and social condition of Berlin in twenties. It also discusses the achievements of German arts and science in the twenties. The twenties in Berlin was a period of exceptional creative output in every branch of the arts. New techniques were explored, startling experiments attempted, and innovations in one art form gave impetus to another. This was the age of the silent film—The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and ‘The Student of Prague—and of the great producers and stars—Emil Jannings and Conrad Veidt, Elisabeth Bergner and Marlene Dietrich. This was the age of “-isms,” that is, Dadaism, Cubism, Expressionism, Impressionism and of the artists of the Blaue Rei ter group, Nolde, Kokoschka, Feininger, Franz Marc, Berlach, Max Liebermann and George Grosz, the caricaturist of the Kaiserreich, and the Prussian military caste. The chapter also discusses F. E. Simon's life in twenties. From 1928 until he went to England, he edited with Max Bodenstein the Zeitschrift fuer Vhysikañsche Chemie, in which he was largely responsible for the physical side of this subject, and in 1929, he was honored by his election to the Commission Scientifique de l’lnstitut International du Froid. Outside the laboratory, his name was sufficiently respected for him to be asked by the German State Railways to investigate the factors that influenced the working life of metals and in particular of rails. One of the more interesting empirical results of this study was that he discovered that rails wear at the rate of one molecular layer every time a wheel passes over them.