Weimar Republic Research Articles

Das Wagnis der Interpretation zwischen Geistesgeschichte und Werkimmanenz

Abstract Work-immanent interpretation (Werkimmanentes Interpretieren) is a theoretically, methodologically and practically interesting topic with a colorful history. By using Paul Kluckhohn, Fritz Martini, and Heinz Otto Burger as examples, the article traces the lines of development of interpretation in German studies from the Weimar Republic, under Nazism, and to the 1950s. I demonstrate that the didactic and propaedeutic practice of work-immanent interpretation in schools was complementary to the university curriculum from an early stage, balancing, for example, the abstract programs of Geistesgeschichte. The praxeology of German studies has to take these entanglements of school and academic practices into account.

Hildegard von Bingen’s Scivias in Weimar Germany: Media Theory by Hand

Abstract Between 1929 and 1930 a feud over the legitimacy of reproductions of works of art erupted in the pages of the culture periodical Der Kreis. Later dubbed the Hamburg Facsimile Debate, the dispute involved many of the day’s most eminent curators and academics in art and art history and became a focal point for emerging ideas about authenticity and the educative impact of the replica in the Weimar Republic. Even as the intelligentsia were publicly quarreling over the epistemological stakes of the facsimile, four nuns at Eibingen Abbey were meticulously hand-copying the most renowned illuminated twelfth-century manuscript of Hildegard von Bingen’s visionary summa, Scivias. This essay pits the Facsimile Debate against the facsimile craft of the Eibingen nuns, situating both within the context of new reproductive technologies devised specifically for representing medieval artifacts. It argues for a historicizing approach to the notion of authenticity, which bears on how we think about mediation and the surrogate in our research and teaching today.

Frieda Wunderlich: Feminist research and activism in Berlin

In this article, we map the idiosyncratic social research career of Frieda Wunderlich during her years in Berlin (1884–1963). We recover elements of Wunderlich’s unique deployment of social data and her analyses that are emblematic of contributions she made and that have been previously overlooked. We highlight Wunderlich as she lived and worked alongside other women in Berlin who shaped discourse and practice on social protections during a unique moment in the Weimar era. As a scholar and practitioner, Wunderlich helped transform the significance of the relationship between economy and society by insisting on the primacy of humane labor conditions. Our research explores two elements of Wunderlich’s contributions in this context: (1) her efforts to integrate academic social research into public policy and (2) her participation in active, feminist spaces for new policy practices, politics and education. To analyze Wunderlich’s career in Berlin, we refer to three interrelated arenas where she made significant contributions: the German Association of Female Civil Servants of Welfare (1919–1933), the German Democratic Party (1925–1933), the German Academy for Women’s Social and Educational Work (1925–1933). In our exploration of Wunderlich’s scholarship and policy practice within these arenas, we situate her contributions alongside other women including Dorothea Hirschfeld, Hedwig Wachenheim, Cora Berliner, Gertrud Bäumer, Helene Lange, Marianne Weber, Hanna Meuter, Alice Salomon, and Hilde Lion. Recovering and bringing into conversation several figures, we find that theory and praxis concurrently informed Wunderlich’s career, as it did for many of the women around her.

Berlin i Niemcy w dwóch adaptacjach filmowych powieści Alfreda Döblina Berlin Alexanderplatz

The subject of this paper is the image of Berlin and Germany that emerges from two film adaptations of the novel Berlin Alexanderplatz. The first one, a 1980 TV series by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, closely follows the letter and spirit of the original 1929 novel; we see a faithful recreation of the material world and the mindset of German society in the final years of the Weimar Republic. In the second one, a 2021 cinema production by Burhan Qurbani, the plot is modernised. The main context of the film is the plight of refugees and economic migrants in contemporary Germany and the problems portrayed are linked to issues of race and post-colonialism.

Political transit in Germany in the 20–30s XX Century: background, Course, features

This article examines the problem of regressive political transit in Germany in the 20–30s of the last century, which led to the transition from the bourgeois-democratic Weimar Republic to the criminal terrorist regime of the Third Reich. The general theoretical provisions on political transit are revealed, the influence of political transformation on all components of society is analyzed. The course of changes in the way of life and militarization of the German economy is outlined, the homogenization of the political field that led to the establishment of a one-party dictatorship is described, the political and philosophical features of the unification of the ideological field are revealed. It is noted that the totalitarian nature of transit was postulated both by the Nazis themselves, who saw in the comprehensive absorption of society the benefit and expression of their own power, and by convinced opponents of the racist dictatorship, who rightly opposed total expansion, irredentism and anti-semitism. In conclusion, it is stated that in the sphere of power relations, the Nazi transit entailed the complete sterilization of the political field, the purification of space from competitive forces through intimidation and destruction, a change in the way of life from mixed to command-administrative with a bias towards militarization took place in the economy, a single nazi idea of racial domination was established in the spiritual and moral sphere the “aryans” and the apology of force, aggression and suppression was fixed

The Concept of ‘Militant Democracy’ in the Context of Russia’s Armed Aggression Against Ukraine

Background: The fall of a dictatorship is accompanied by a period of democratic transit, which necessitates the use of special measures to protect a young and, thus far, unstable democracy. This model’s use began in practice after the Second World War in connection with the spread of the doctrine of "democracy capable of defending itself," also known as militant democracy (English) or Wehrhafte (Streitbare) Demokratie (German). The flagship here was the German science of constitutional law, which formed the tools for the creation of a new legal system accounting for the mistakes of the Weimar Republic. This experience is especially relevant for Ukraine, as since 2014, it has faced external armed aggression by revanchist forces that took power from the heir of the Soviet empire, Russia, in which a totalitarian regime was established and became a full-fledged aggressor state. Methods: The following methods were used in the work to study the concept of militant democracy in the conditions of Russia's armed aggression against Ukraine. The system multi-structural method was utilized to discover the means of militant democracy in Ukraine (ban of political parties, lustration, etc.), as well as problems associated with the use of certain militant democracy means. The logical-legal method made it possible to identify the essence of the decisions of the constitutional, supreme, and other courts, the decisions of the European Court of Human Rights, in which the means of militant democracy were used or the legality of their use was assessed (legality, constitutionality, or compliance with the European Convention on Human Rights). The comparative method justified the implementation of different countries’ experience (primarily, European) in reforming the constitutional and legislative regulation of the militant democracy in Ukraine and the mechanisms required for further action. Results and Conclusions: The work contains proposals for the constitutional and legislative improvement of the regulation of the means of militant democracy in Ukraine, which are based on the pre-existing experiences across the world and the use of already existing practices that have been successfully tested and achieved results.

The Promise of Participation: European Reconstruction Work in Early Weimar Germany’s Political Culture

Abstract Material reconstruction after the First World War was closely linked to German reparations, yet it is curiously underrepresented in the historiography of the Treaty of Versailles as well as in studies on interwar Germany. In the Weimar Republic, political leaders, economic actors and large parts of the population supported the idea of sending building material and even labourers to neighbouring countries. This far-reaching planning process began before and continued after the signing of the peace treaty, as the Allies remained hesitant but not fully hostile to the German proposals. Material reparation potentially mobilized a wide range of goods and labour, and it was thus particularly prone to expectation, but also to disappointment in a broad segment of the population. Against the backdrop of war destruction and the international peace negotiations in 1919, this article investigates the way in which European reconstruction was discussed formally and informally in Weimar Germany. By focusing on the communicative channels and media that promoted German participation in building work abroad, it discusses how expectations were raised, managed and disappointed at the intersection of foreign and domestic policies. While there had only been minor destruction in German territory between 1914 and 1918, the republic’s political culture proved to be deeply affected by the material reconstruction on the European continent, even though most of the far-reaching plans did not result in building sites on the ground.

The economic constitution and the political constitution: seeking the common good in the post‐national setting

AbstractIn the post‐national setting, the concept of the ‘economic constitution’ has been seen as design template and saviour; whether based on transactional certitude or founded on ordoliberal precepts, the economic constitution is assumed to legitimate economic integration across national borders in the absence of comprehensive political settlement. Nevertheless, recent tensions – not only within the European Union (EU) but also, more strikingly, within the World Trade Organization context – indicate the limits of economic constitutionalism. This article seeks to identify the roots of recent dysfunction within the history and theory of economic constitutionalism. It traces the evolution of an adjudicational economic constitutionalism and its place within the EU legal order, including the new EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, and contrasts this vision with the more comprehensive and/or socialized models of economic constitutionalism found not only within the Weimar Republic but also within the post‐revolutionary/post‐conflict constitutional context. The article also places a major emphasis on theorizing around the apex of economic‐constitutional thought, ordoliberalism, but concludes that no concept of the economic constitution can be seen in isolation from its social‐political context, or from notions of the common good. To this exact degree, failures in modern economic constitutionalism may derive from a misplaced universalism – a technocratic absolutism that abdicates political responsibility for the common good, locating it instead in an ‘idolatry of the factual’ or a new naturalism of market inevitability.

Wilhelm Speyer's best‐selling novels of 1927 and male responses to female emancipation

AbstractThe Weimar Republic witnessed significant advances in the professional, political, and social opportunities available to German women, as well as a substantial increase in the visibility of women within the German public sphere. Existing research into the reactions of German men to female emancipation during this period has tended to focus on the fear and hostility that were most noticeable during the early years of the Republic. In contrast, this article discusses two more supportive responses to female liberation: Wilhelm Speyer's best‐selling novels Charlott etwas verrückt (1927) and Der Kampf der Tertia (1927). These novels depict their unconventional and powerful women protagonists in a sympathetic light, but their emancipatory potential is limited by the use of traditional motifs and perspectives within their descriptions of female characters.

The Total State of the Torah: Isaac Breuer and the Foundations of Radical Orthodox Politics

Abstract: When did Orthodox Jewish politics become radical? Some contemporary forms of Orthodox politics incline indeed toward "totality" and antiliberalism; however, until the 1930s, Orthodox politics was mostly conservative and not radical. This essay excavates the invention of radical Orthodox politics in the writings of one of Agudath Israel's prominent ideologues, Isaac Breuer. Struggling with the crisis of modernity as it came to light in the Weimar Republic of the 1920s, Breuer developed a Gnostic worldview that deemed reality a site of corruption and sin. To rectify this situation, Breuer formulated a Jewish version of the "Conservative Revolution," calling to establish a "total state of the Torah" based on "the national socialism of the state of God." The essay reveals how deeply German right-wing thought influenced Breuer and his circle, and it presents the ideational context of Orthodox radicalism, pointing to Breuer's struggles with his early neo-Kantianism.

Prihod k vlasti nacistov i problemy modernizacionnyh processov v Germanii: slozhivshiesya podhody v istoriografii

The article is devoted to the problem of modernization in Germany in the post-revolutionary time -the period of the Weimar Republic and the rise to power of the Nazis in their approaches to the study of these processes in historiography. The authors raise issues of changes in political, social and economic structures during the period from the November Revolution to the post-war period, indicating ongoing modernization processes.

Communication Breakdown: Sports Federations and Media Politics in the Weimar Republic

Abstract Organized sport in the Weimar Republic was dominated by three strands—so-called bourgeois sport, the gymnastics movement (Turnen) and the workers’ sports movement (Arbeitersport). While scholarship has rightly pointed out the differences between their federations, it has neglected a significant feature they had in common: the struggle to communicate key messages to their members. For the first time, this article examines debates about and developments in the communications of Weimar’s leading sports organizations. It shows that through the 1920s producing journals, running news services and lobbying the press became as important as competing in or watching sport itself, as the organizations sought to raise their profile, gain new members and retain the members they already had. Each of them, while envying the others, failed to meet its goals for similar reasons: inadequate internal structures, poor decision-making and the allure of commercialized sport and the papers and magazines it fed and produced. While scholarship has often noted the high level of sports coverage in the mainstream press, it has not explored the dynamic pull of such reporting on readers. By examining the effects of the professional media on the active members of the three main federations, this article therefore also sheds light on the power of new forms of writing and entertainment to influence individuals as the shift to consumer habits increased in all social classes throughout the Weimar Republic. In doing so, it bridges between empirically orientated forms of sports history and cultural histories of the press.

Transnational Propaganda and National Media Cultures in Weimar Political Thought

Abstract This contribution analyses the discourse on propaganda during the Weimar Republic as a medium of transnational self-positioning and identity construction. The perception of mass media modernism in the 1920s was deeply shaped by the world war, and the concept of ‘propaganda’ dominated reflection on it. Early reviews of the propaganda war revolved around the question of how Germany could regain its former world-power status through propaganda. Two transnational propaganda campaigns are examined in closer detail: the German struggle against the Versailles ‘war-guilt clause’ and the fight against the Allied occupation of the Ruhr. They illustrate how exaggerated expectations of the power of propaganda were accompanied by conceptual ambiguities and inconsistencies. One important reason for this simultaneity was that Germans discussed propaganda in the light of national media cultures and constructed it as alien to the German nature. Many authors distinguished supposedly genuinely German values such as ‘truthfulness’, decency and profundity from the values of other national cultures, simultaneously complaining that Germany was struggling harder in the field of propaganda than other countries because of this deep-seated disposition. Such national auto-stereotypes extended into the scholarly study of propaganda, making it difficult to conceptualize it as a phenomenon of modern mass communication. The Germans’ ambivalent relationship to propaganda was also evident in politics: while the Weimar governments displayed uneasiness towards propaganda, the Nazi movement called for its unscrupulous use. In this way, the Nazis not only prepared for the destruction of democracy, but also stood for a different understanding of ‘Germanness’.

Introduction: Communication in the Weimar Republic

Abstract Communication has always featured prominently in Weimar research. Disputes about how the war was lost, the disdain in which the republic was held by its foes, the scepticism with which it was regarded by many of its citizens, and the manifold ways its various crises were interpreted—the history of the republic offered many angles from which to assess how communication was used to process events. Taking their cue from more recent trends in Weimar scholarship, however, the essays in this issue set new emphases. Not only have their authors chosen innovative topics, but they have approached them with an acute sensitivity to situations, settings, discourses and practices. They pose questions about the specific conditions, channels and practices of communication in the Weimar Republic and consider the complex mixture of interconnected communicative actions between different groups at different levels of society, nationally and internationally. By so doing they address the issue of communication as one of the most vibrant aspects of a society that was marked by rapid technological developments as well as political change.

Moderate Modernity: The Newspaper Tempo and the Transformation of Weimar Democracy

Moderate Modernity: The Newspaper Tempo and the Transformation of Weimar Democracy

Prichiny padeniya Vejmarskoj respubliki: problemnye voprosy istoriografii

The articleis devoted to the analysis of the causes of the fall of the Weimar Republic in modern historiography. The author examines the main provisions and problem areas of historiography in the topic of the transition from the Weimar Republic to the Third Reich.

The Expression of Feminism in Portrait Works of Hannah Höch by Using Photomontage during Weimar Germany

This paper focuses on analyzing the expression of feminism in Hannah Höch’s portrait works by using photomontage during Weimar Germany. Hannah Höch (1889-1978) is the only female Dadaist of Berlin Dada. Dada movement prevailed in Germany after the First World War and was influenced by the changes in politics, society, and economics. At the same time, photomontage was popular among Dadaists, which was made from cutting up photographs, newspapers, drawings, etc. for political propaganda, social criticism and advocation of Dada movement. Besides, during Weimar Republic (1918-1933), because of the changes in the society, women found new social values and roles, and people’s feminism consciousness was awakened. While most of the Dadaists used Photomontage to advocate their propositions of politics and society, Hannah Höch paid more attention to feminism. This paper starts by introducing the education and working experience of Hannah Höch as well as the influence of Dada movement and Weimar period on her. Then it analyses the development of Dadaism and photomontage as well as their relationships to lay a foundation for deeper discussions of Höch’s way and purport of photomontage creation. Then, this paper focuses on analyzing two pieces of photomontage portrait work of Hannah Höch and contrasts them respectively with two pieces of work of Kurt Schwitters. Finally, it concludes that Hannah Höch’s photomontage portrait works are not only extraordinary in her way of creation but also outstanding for her firm and thorough feminism.

Instruments of Power. The affective power of sound design in American music education

Music education in the United States has increasingly focused upon student creativity and practices such as improvisation. While such practices and changes are often conceptualized as flexible, inclusive reforms about making kinds of children, historically the curriculum has little to do with music and is instead concerned with taming uncertainty in the governing of child. We examine the Orff-Schulwerk pedagogy in the teaching of music, thought of as a progressive reform which emphasized improvisation and creativity. Exploring briefly Orff-Schulwerk’s production in the Weimar Republic as it travels and translated into the post-war United States, we consider the curriculum as formed through psychological research about rationality, choice, and creativity. The focus is on the system of reasoning embodied in the curriculum as generating principles about desired kind of persons in a stable, secure future related to salvation narratives- principles different in the Weimar Republic and US. The shifting design of people in Orff-Schulwerk curriculum and classroom instruments for learning of sound are, we argue, practices in governing of the body and soul. The fabricating and mapping in the music curriculum is about kinds of populations required as evidence of the progressive desires that simultaneously distributes differences.

New research issues in the history of German sexology and sexual medicine

New research questions in the history of German sexology and sexual medicine include anew look at the Imperial and the Weimar Republic periods and Magnus Hirschfeld as aprotagonist, as well as the contemporary history of the discipline in the Federal Republic with the two formative institutes in Frankfurt (Volkmar Sigusch) and Hamburg (Eberhard Schorsch). In the post-war period, the tendency to try to solve social problems through endocrinological and surgical approaches continued. This included the (voluntary) castration of sex offenders, which has been regulated by law in the West Germany since 1969. Questions of gender identity do not only arise in the context of gender reassignment surgery. They also have high social relevance and have become increasingly politicized in recent years. These questions are also persistently relevant for urology and clinical sexual medicine.

On the Construction of Jewishness and the Inescapable Jewish Fate: The Cases of Werner and Gershom Scholem

Abstract The two youngest brothers of the Scholem family, Werner and Gerhard (later Gershom), became prominent personalities, each in his field. Werner was one of the leaders of the KPD, the German Communist Party, and Gershom became the founder of the field of Kabbalah research at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. As a result of this prominence, both brothers were confronted throughout their lives with reactions to their physical appearance, which was perceived by the people they met as typically Jewish. These reactions came to reflect their exceptional position as political, philosophical and scholarly vanguards. Both Werner and Gershom were well aware of the reactions that their faces evoked, and each of them dealt with these ascriptions in different ways at different times: by either ignoring or employing them as they pursued their social and political goals, the brothers defined—and redefined—their relationship to Germany and developed a performative level of Jewishness. This article explores the questions: in what sense did their physical appearance in the eyes of others shape the self-perception of the two youngest Scholem brothers? And to what extent did this perception influence their complex relationship to Germany and Germans during the height of their public fame in Germany—in Werner's case the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany, and for Gershom the post-war period? Although both of them were proponents of utopian ideas that offered a kind of salvation to the Jewish condition in turn-of-the-century Europe, this article argues that their looks and habitus determined their German-Jewish fate.