In the late 18th century, Weimar was the center of the German Enlightenment. Home to Goethe, Schiller, and the philosopher-poet Johann Gottfried Herder, this small Thuringian town became “Athens on the Ilm.” A little more than a century later, Weimar witnessed a new cultural flowering as the headquarters of the Bauhaus school. The aesthetics could not have been more different. While Weimar classicism harked back to the elegance and nobility of ancient Greece, Bauhaus believed in functionalism, simplicity, mass production, and utilitarianism—the justifications for most of the horrors of modern architecture. Yet they both depended upon a specific cultural and political freedom: the enlightened rule and artistic patronage of Duchess Anna Amalia of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach on the one hand, and the febrile politics of Germany following her defeat in the First World War and the collapse of the Kaiserreich on the other.
As Harald Jähner shows in this informative and enjoyable study, to live through the Weimar decade—Germany between 1918 and 1933—was a dizzying experience. Four years of unceasing slaughter had ended suddenly and without adequate explanation. The Hohenzollern dynasty, which had ruled the German Empire since 1871 and Brandenburg-Prussia since the 16th century, collapsed overnight. Revolution was in the air and on the streets. The birth of German democracy was chaotic and bloody, with running battles between hastily formed paramilitaries and 354 political assassinations by right-wing extremists between 1919 and 1922 alone.
