Weimar Research Articles

Bloodlines: National Border Crossings and Antisemitism in Weimar Germany

This article argues that national border crossings act as focal points for xenophobia. Two mechanisms converge to produce this pattern. First, when the nation-state is under pressure, border crossings make cross-national differences salient, producing a perceived link between international forces and socioeconomic problems of vulnerable social classes. Second, border crossings come to symbolize international threats and attract aggressive nationalist mobilization by radical movements who frame ethnic outsiders as an international evil. In this distinct spatial landscape, ethnic outsiders become scapegoats for broader social problems among individuals losing social status. I develop my argument through the study of local variation in antisemitism in Weimar Germany before the Holocaust. Statistical analysis of Jewish bogeymen and an in-depth exploration of local reports on antisemitism reveal how pluralism in the Weimar Republic started eroding among members of the lower-middle class living at the margins of the state. In doing so, I draw attention to the spatial sources of xenophobia and demonstrate that borders between nations activate borders within nations, shedding new light on the complicated relationship between pluralism and state formation.

How to Capture Movement

How to Capture Movement

The Educational Philosophy of the Closed Stack System in Weimar Germany

The Educational Philosophy of the Closed Stack System in Weimar Germany

Contractual Saving for Housing as Early Financial Development and its Clients in Weimar Germany

Contractual Saving for Housing as Early Financial Development and its Clients in Weimar Germany

MAKING THE CASE AGAINST PARAGRAPH 218: NARRATIVE AND DISCURSIVE STRATEGIES IN ELSE KIENLE'S FRAUEN: AUS DEM TAGEBUCH EINER ÄRZTIN★

AbstractThis article analyses Dr Else Kienle's 1932 text Frauen: Aus dem Tagebuch einer Ärztin within the context of the debates around women's access to abortion in Weimar Germany. Access to abortion was a widely debated topic in Weimar Germany and public demonstrations against Paragraph 218 of the Weimar penal code, which outlawed abortion, occurred following the 1931 arrest of Dr Kienle. I argue that, as a non‐partisan work written from the perspective of a practising doctor, Kienle's text offers an innovative contribution to these debates. While Kienle's arrest is frequently cited as a key moment in the Weimar abortion debates, her writing has received limited critical attention. My analysis of the literary and discursive strategies employed by Kienle in Frauen: Aus dem Tagebuch einer Ärztin reveals that Kienle goes beyond the arguments of the women's and socialist movements. Kienle's text should be read as an attempt to broaden the reach of the campaign against Paragraph 218. The book adopts an innovative and experience‐led approach, which reveals the medical, psychological, and social implications of limiting women's access to abortion, and which only re‐emerged in the Federal Republic of Germany in the 1970s.

The world of deviance in the classroom: Psychological experiments on schoolchildren in Weimar Germany.

The article uses three case studies from the 1920s to explore how psychologists and elementary school teachers employed psychological techniques to gain knowledge about elementary school children and their milieu. It begins by describing the role of the elementary school and the elementary school teacher in the Weimar Republic. It then discusses the so-called "observation sheets" that were used in elementary schools in the 1920s to gain insights into the mental and moral characteristics of pupils. Third, it examines psychological experiments undertaken in elementary school classrooms based on the exemplar case of a single teacher/experimenter, before concluding with a comparison of the two practices. I argue that psychology gained in standing through this history, becoming recognized as a foundational science in the context of education. Teachers used the professionalization of observation techniques in school to enhance their socio-epistemic status.

Classical Music in Weimar Germany: Culture and Politics before the Third Reich. By BrendanFay. Bloomsbury Academic. 2020. viii + 203pp. £90.00 (hb). £28.99 (pb).

Classical Music in Weimar Germany: Culture and Politics before the Third Reich. By BrendanFay. Bloomsbury Academic. 2020. viii + 203pp. £90.00 (hb). £28.99 (pb).

Mendelssohn on the Edge: Memory, Agency, and National Belonging in Weimar Germany

Abstract In times of great political unrest and disorientation, societies generally invent and reinvent myths. As unrest and disorientation were among the most striking characteristics of the Weimar era, it is not surprising that the bicentenary celebrations of Moses Mendelssohn’s birth, held in 1929, constituted the peak of the Enlightenment philosopher’s popularity as a German-Jewish patron saint. This article argues that the commemoration of Mendelssohn on the eve of catastrophe, four years before the Weimar Republic’s collapse, serves as a particularly precise indicator of ambivalent German-Jewish agency at the time, due to its political, social, and cultural implications. Whereas the bicentenary celebrations—featuring the Republic’s most prominent representatives, state-of-the-art exhibitions, cultural events in prestigious locations, and extensive media coverage—attest to the considerable leeway German Jewry had in shaping social reality, the continuing absence of Mendelssohn in the canon of German poets and thinkers illustrates the limits of German-Jewish agency in the cultural imaginary of the German nation.

‘Leaders, not Lords’: Führertum, Democracy and Nazism in the Weimar Republic

Abstract This article examines the use of the concept of Führertum (leadership) in Weimar Germany. From a historical perspective, scholars tend to analyse the discourse on leadership through the lens of Nazi dictatorship. Yet the picture changes if we take the end of the old monarchy as the starting point. In particular, this article analyses how democrats and liberals developed their own ideas on Führertum. It argues that this concept was in vogue in Weimar because it signified a deviation from the hierarchical order of the traditional Obrigkeit and the established societal authorities of monarchical institutions. A leader had no subjects, only voluntary supporters. In this sense, ‘leadership’ seemed to correspond to popular sovereignty and had populist, even democratic, connotations. This article draws on publications of both well-known political theorists and amateur authors such as high school teachers and civil servants. In Weimar, the term Führertum was used by a variety of political groups and led in multiple ideological directions. Simultaneously, this political contingency facilitated political communication between Nazis and democrats. I argue that seemingly participatory and ‘democratic’ definitions of leadership eventually invited democrats to take part in the ‘national community’ of Nazi Germany. Specifically, this article shows how authors of interwar media believed they were rediscovering democratic ideas in the Nazi Party and how their understanding of democracy influenced their reactions to constitutional changes such as the Enabling Act of 1933. Paradoxical as it may be, discourse on leadership allowed many democrats to identify with Nazi ideology.

Arms intervention: Weimar Germany, post-imperial influence and weapons trafficking in warlord China

The Treaty of Versailles aimed to strip Germany of both its colonial empire and the global reach of its arms industry. Yet the conflicts in warlord-era China led to the reestablishment of German influence on the other side of the world via the arms trade. Weimar Germany had declared a policy of neutrality and refused to take sides in the Chinese civil war in an effort to demonstrate that as a post-colonial power, it could now act as an honest broker. From below, however, traffickers based in Germany and German merchants in China worked to evade Versailles restrictions and an international arms embargo to supply warlords with weapons of war. Although the German state officially aimed to remain neutral, criminal elements, rogue diplomats, black marketeers and eventually military adventurers re-established German influence in the region by becoming key advisors and suppliers to the victorious Guomindang. Illicit actors in Germany and China proved to be crucial in linking the two countries and in eventually overturning the arms control regimes that were imposed in the wake of World War I.

When the “Ostjuden” Returned: Linguistic Continuities in German-Language Writing about Eastern European Jews

Abstract This article examines the dynamics that allowed the derogatory term “Ostjuden” to reappear in academic writing in post-Holocaust Germany. This article focuses on the period between 1980’s and 2000’s, complementing earlier studies that focused on the emergence of the term “Ostjuden” and on the complex representations of Eastern European Jews in Imperial and later Weimar Germany. It shows that, despite its well-evidenced discriminatory history, the term “Ostjuden” re-appeared in the scholarly writing in German and has also found its way into German-speaking public history and journalism. This article calls for applying the adjectival term “osteuropäische Juden” (Eastern European Jews), using a term that neither essentializes Eastern European Jews nor presents them in an oversimplified and uniform manner.

When the “Ostjuden” Returned: Linguistic Continuities in German-Language Writing about Eastern European Jews

Abstract This article examines the dynamics that allowed the derogatory term “Ostjuden” to reappear in academic writing in post-Holocaust Germany. This article focuses on the period between 1980’s and 2000’s, complementing earlier studies that focused on the emergence of the term “Ostjuden” and on the complex representations of Eastern European Jews in Imperial and later Weimar Germany. It shows that, despite its well-evidenced discriminatory history, the term “Ostjuden” re-appeared in the scholarly writing in German and has also found its way into German-speaking public history and journalism. This article calls for applying the adjectival term “osteuropäische Juden” (Eastern European Jews), using a term that neither essentializes Eastern European Jews nor presents them in an oversimplified and uniform manner.

Purpose – to recognize Germany. About some activities of the Polish intelligence in the 1920s

After World War I, Weimar Germany did not recognize the western borders of the Second Polish Republic. They did not accept the result of the defeat they suffered. Poland was referred to as the ‘Saisonstaat’, which was synonymous with aggression for the Germans. The Weimar Republic sought to rebuild its military potential and demanded the abolition of all forms of control and revision of the Versailles Treaty. From the moment Poland regained independence, the security of the state was threatened by Germany and Russia. In this situation, the identification of threats was of particular importance. Secret service structures were created under very difficult conditions. In the early 1920s, the intelligence reconnaissance of Germany was not sufficient. The organizational changes and improved methods of operation carried out in the second half of this decade had a positive impact on the effects of work. The head of the Berlin intelligence facility, codenamed ‘In 3’, captain, and later major, Jerzy Sosnowski provided the headquarters of the Second Department of Polish General Staff with valuable information on the expansion of the German armed forces. Also, field offices were actively exploring Germany. Agents played a special role in the activities of the intelligence service. Therefore, the process of their selection, conducting, training and supervision, on which the effects of work depended, deserves attention.

From Photobook to Digital Book: Curating Weimar Germany’s New Visual Literacy Online

This contribution focuses on the digital curation of Weimar Germany’s new visual literacy, using Kurt Tucholsky and John Heartfield’s photobook Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles as a case study to examine in which ways a photobook and accompanying research can be showcased online. Tucholsky and Heartfield’s work is an example of the photobook genre that rose to prominence in the 1920s, also for its potential to serve as an “Übungsatlas” (Walter Benjamin) for the new visual literacy. In curating the photobook online, using the publishing platform Scalar and the media repository Critical Commons, the photobook and the accompanying research not only become easily accessible to fellow researchers, students, and the public, but it also becomes possible to emulate and thus explore Weimar Germany’s new visual literacy online. Curating Tucholsky and Heartfield’s photobook and the related analysis online allows for a reflection on digital curation as scholarship, its use in the classroom, and its implications for the trajectory of photobook research.

Days of the Cavemen? Adorno, Spengler, and the Anatomy of Caesarism

Abstract This article addresses the controversial question of Theodor W. Adorno’s debt to right-wing Zivilisationskritik by a close reading of his essay “Spengler after the Decline” (1950). The article shows that despite Adorno’s harsh polemics against Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West (1918, 1922), he sought to make Spengler’s analysis of Weimar Germany’s undemocratic tendencies—“Caesarism”—serve progressive ends. However, Adorno’s essay was not just an effort at “coming to terms with the past” in Adenauerian West Germany. Reading the essay’s original 1941 version together with Adorno’s correspondence with Max Horkheimer sheds light on Spengler as an overlooked key (next to Max Weber, Sigmund Freud, and Walter Benjamin) to their Dialectic of Enlightenment, written in 1941–44. Adorno’s daring effort to appropriate Spengler’s analysis of Caesarism makes Adorno’s critical theory an asset in understanding today’s authoritarian populism.

Primordial Haptics, 1925–1935: Hands, Tools and the Psychotechnics of Prehistory

‘Psychotechnics’, Weimar Germany’s science du jour, typically is framed as a symptom of ‘technological media’ – obscuring the persistent significance of ‘dexterity’, ‘skill’ and ‘manual labour’ at the time. More broadly, there is a tendency to construe ‘the haptic’ as predominantly a casualty of modernity: skilled hands replaced by conveyor belts; skilled hands defended by the rearguard actions of arts-and-crafts movements; skilled hands destroyed by industrialized warfare. Drawing on contemporary investigations into the ‘organ of touch’, this essay aims to complicate this picture by reconstructing the proto-ergonomic project of Friedrich Herig, a German engineer, amateur prehistorian and expert on craft labour who rose to distinction in the 1920s as a designer of ‘ideal’ hand tools. Herig’s eclectic sources of inspiration reveal that matters of ‘touch’, far from obsolete, were intimately bound up with matters of tools – their design, uses and putative origins – and thus, with matters of (manual) labour.

Classical Music in Weimar Germany: Culture and Politics Before the Third Reich

Classical Music in Weimar Germany: Culture and Politics Before the Third Reich

The landmark nature of visual art in of Weimar Germany and the principle of visual narrative

The subject of this research is the art practices of Weimar Germany, first and foremost displayed in photomontage works of the Dadaist artists, as well as paintings and photographic compositions of the representatives of “New Objectivity” since the early 1920s until coming to power of the Nazi in 1933. The relevance of this topic is substantiated by the heightened interest of modern researchers in the cultural processes of the early XX century, which had a significant impact upon the establishment of modern visual imagery system. Within the framework of study, the author also touched upon the problem of assimilation of modern art practices associated to the integration of art into all spheres of social life. The interpretation of this trend is one of the most relevant vectors of modern art history. The novelty of this work lies in the use of complex methodology that implies the unity of socio-analytical and philosophical-anthropological approaches, as well as the method of structural-semiotic analysis that leans on both classical theories and works of the contemporary art historians and culturologists of post-structuralism (P. McBride, R. Krauss, B. Buchloh, P. Stettler, and others.). The result of the conducted research lies in determination of interinfluence of photomontage practices of the Dadaists and the art of “New Objectivity”, which clearly demonstrate the “landmark” nature of the works created during the indicated historical period. The acquired conclusions may be valuable for further research of the German art of “New Realism”, reflected in the works of the artists of “New Objectivity” and “Magic Realism”, and as well as the upcoming trends in art of the XX century.

Rediscovering Afghan Fine Arts: The life of an Afghan student in Germany, Abdul Ghafur Brechna

AbstractIn 1919, Afghanistan embarked on a series of reforms that led to the presence of Afghan students at various European universities, facilitating the circulation of peoples, ideas, and goods. Focusing on one of these cases, this article examines how an Afghan student engaged critically with ‘Western’ art and translated artistic ideas and technologies through the grid of Afghanistan's own history of the fine arts. Through an exploration of the work of Abdul Ghafur Brechna (1907–1974)—artist, music composer, poet, and writer—I argue that, despite his desire to train at German technical schools, Brechna translated, then connected, his Western training to restore Afghanistan's traditional visual and literary arts, making it problematic to define his oeuvre as purely ‘modern’ or ‘traditional’. The first aim is to situate Brechna within the intellectual milieu of Weimar Germany, placing emphasis on how he curated the course of his education to support his aims. By tracing out the evolution of his artistic knowledge to Afghanistan, the second part of this article connects his earlier training to the newly emerging scholars in Kabul who also grappled with national renewal and an ‘Aryan’ literary and cultural heritage. Lastly, I discuss his attempt to rewrite the history of the arts by closely analysing his visual and literary work, emphasizing in particular his attempt to reconnect to themes and genres that had previously been lost or neglected.

The Transatlantic Dynamics of European Cultural Diplomacy: Germany, France and the Battle for US Affections in the 1920s

The article explores the role of cultural diplomacy in Weimar Germany and France's competing efforts to win the sympathies and support of the United States after the First World War. In the post-war United States, both France and Germany used cultural initiatives to pursue their opposing visions of the new international order: France to maintain and extend wartime cultural alliances beyond the armistice and implement the provisions of the peace treaty; Germany to overturn these very alliances and build a desirable transatlantic ‘friendship’ in line with its efforts to revise the Versailles Treaty. By focusing on the Franco–German rivalry for US affinities, the article calls attention to the transatlantic dynamics of interwar cultural diplomacy. It shows that the emergence of German cultural diplomacy was strongly shaped by French competition for the affections of politically isolationist Americans and that, in general, the rapid expansion of cultural diplomacy in interwar Europe arose from mutual feelings of crisis, starkly competing ambitions as well as the rapid circulation of ideas and practices.