Hans-Albert Walter (review)

Abstract

876 Reviews (p. 197) in her novel Der grofieKrieg in Deutschland, and the lack of stylistic features employed by Doblin (p. 199), appear subjective and simply partisan. It is proof of Wallenstein's complexity that Quack, despite arguing forits coherence, only brieflyseems to hazard an overarching interpretation of it(pp. 281-83). His study makes a compelling case that there is more worthwhile work still to be done. St Hugh's College, Oxford Steffan Davies Deutsche Exilliteratur 1933-1950. Vol. 1: Die Vorgeschichte des Exils und seine erste Phase, 1.1: Die Mentalitdt der Weimardeutschen/Die 'Politisierung' der Intellektuellen . By Hans-Albert Walter. Stuttgart and Weimar: Metzler. 781 pp. ?99.95. ISBN 3-476-00536-4. When Hans-Albert Walter began publishing his monumental study of German exile literature in the 1970s, the priority for such an enquiry lay with the rehabilitation of authors whose reputations had been blighted or obliterated under National Socialism. The present volume focuses instead on the mentality those authors had brought with them into the Weimar Republic in the firstplace. The motivation for this change is most readily apparent at the points where Walter takes issue with accounts of the Weimar period which German historians have published in the meantime. He finds Heinrich August Winkler's study of the working-class movement (Arbeiter und Arbeiterbewegungin der Weimarer Republik, 3 vols (Berlin: Dietz, 1984-87)) incomplete because it discusses events without assessing the mentalities that contributed to their outcomes, while Hagen Schulze (Weimar: Deutschland 191 y-19 33 (Berlin: Severin & Siedler, 1982)) exemplifies a broader tendency to condemn political behaviour in the Weimar period fromthe moral vantage point of historical hindsight. Walter's purpose now is to nurture understanding forpolitical, social, and cultural attitudes which have become foreign to readers who grew up in the post-1945 world, where parliamentary democracy seemed comfortingly stable. Even German intellectuals who are commonly thought of as tenacious opponents of Wilhelmine militarism, he points out, brought with them into the Weimar period a legacy of social conditioning and mental habits which contributed to the reality of a 'Republic without republicans'. Such seemingly diverse figures as Alfred Kerr and Erich Muhsam, the SPD leader Otto Braun, the liberal newspaper-owner Theodor Wolff, and the diarist and professor of Romance literature Victor Klemperer were united by the veneration of authority, hierarchy, and the Obrigkeitsstaat that had been instilled in them, often by violent means, in their youth. The impulse to combat an authoritarianism that was part of their own personalities, Walter argues, led the left-wingjournalist Carl von Ossietzky (like Muhsam, an early victim of Nazi terror) to adopt his rigidly oppositional stance, and the artist George Grosz to produce his venomous anti-militaristic caricatures. Walter peels away the layers oflegend which have hitherto obscured the biographies of prominent anti-Nazis?not only Brecht and the brothers Mann, whose cases are well known, but more particularly Egon Erwin Kisch, who painstakingly concealed his earlier German nationalism, Oskar Maria Graf, who continued to embroider his account of his wartime dissidence well beyond the 1920s, Kurt Tucholsky, who evidently disapproved of the war but focused his wartime effortson securing the continuity of his writing career, and Rene Schickele, who emerges as less ofa political dissenter than is usually supposed. Walter does not aim to discredit such authors, but to dispel commonly held illusions about their attitudes and behaviour. In a similar spirit, he emphasizes that Jewish figures shared the same social conditioning and cultural values as other citizens of the Weimar Republic; and he is trenchant in his critique of political journalism where he recognizes it to be founded on an unrealistic assessment of the circumstances of the time. He shows how cavalier some of MLR, 100.3, 2005 877 the commentaries and satires in Die Weltbuhne could be: Ossietzky was too quick to personalize his criticisms of the establishment, while Tucholsky was too quick to generalize on the basis of particular incidents. By contrast, Walter highlights the virtues of the other major journal on the liberal left, Leopold Schwarzschild's Tagebuch, notably in his discussion of the 'Berliner Blutmai' of 1929, where his analysis of the documentary evidence brings out the obduracy of...