A laboratory for competing visions of modernity, the Weimar Republic
(1918-1933) continues to haunt the imagination of the twentieth century.
Its political and cultural lessons retain uncanny relevance for all who
seek to understand the tensions and possibilities of our age. The
Weimar Republic Sourcebook represents the most comprehensive
documentation of Weimar culture, history, and politics assembled in any
language. It invites a wide community of readers to discover the
richness and complexity of the turbulent years in Germany before
Hitler's rise to power.
Drawing from such primary sources as magazines, newspapers, manifestoes,
and official documents (many unknown even to specialists and most never
before available in English), this book challenges the traditional
boundaries between politics, culture, and social life. Its thirty
chapters explore Germany's complex relationship to democracy, ideologies
of "reactionary modernism," the rise of the "New Woman," Bauhaus
architecture, the impact of mass media, the literary life, the tradition
of cabaret and urban entertainment, and the situation of Jews,
intellectuals, and workers before and during the emergence of fascism.
While devoting much attention to the Republic's varied artistic and
intellectual achievements (the Frankfurt School, political theater,
twelve-tone music, cultural criticism, photomontage, and urban
planning), the book is unique for its inclusion of many lesser-known
materials on popular culture, consumerism, body culture, drugs,
criminality, and sexuality; it also contains a timetable of major
political events, an extensive bibliography, and capsule biographies.
This will be a major resource and reference work for students and
scholars in history; art; architecture; literature; social and political
thought; and cultural, film, German, and women's studies.
