Weimar Culture
The Weimar period has gone down in history as a period of remarkable artistic energy – a roaring surge of modernist art, music, theatre, design, dance and film, when the constraints of 19th-century manners and mores were torn down, and experimentation of all kinds remade the cultural landscape. The surprising thing is that the legend is true, at least in outline. For an all-too-brief window during the ‘golden 1920s’ and early 30s, while Germany’s political life was in turmoil and the country was being battered by an economic hurricane, the arts had rarely been so vibrant. It is no exaggeration to say that in the Weimar years, Germany was the most exciting place in Europe to be. Possibly even the world.
What made this possible?
- the Weimar Republic, which was founded in 1919 – promoted openness and tolerance, underpinned by radical social democracy – created a new and more liberal atmosphere.
- The constitution guaranteed every German the right to ‘express his opinion freely in word, writing, print, picture or in any other manner,’ and
- German artists, many of whom had been exposed to modernist movements in France, Italy and America, rushed to find forms that could reflect the tumultuous realities that surrounded them.
Enter Walter Gropius
One innovation emerged in Weimar, the town where the 1919 assembly ratified the German Republic’s new constitution (in, as it happened, the town theatre, where Goethe and Schiller had once directed plays). That same year, the young architect Walter Gropius founded a school that would unite the applied arts in a new organisation he christened the Bauhaus (roughly ‘house of building/architecture’). Gropius’s vision was of a community which could collaborate in what he described as ‘the new building of the future, which will be everything together, architecture and sculpture and painting, in a single shape, rising to heaven from the hands of millions of craftsmen as a crystal symbol of a new emerging faith’.
One innovation emerged in Weimar, the town where the 1919 assembly ratified the German Republic’s new constitution (in, as it happened, the town theatre, where Goethe and Schiller had once directed plays). That same year, the young architect Walter Gropius founded a school that would unite the applied arts in a new organisation he christened the Bauhaus (roughly ‘house of building/architecture’). Gropius’s vision was of a community which could collaborate in what he described as ‘the new building of the future, which will be everything together, architecture and sculpture and painting, in a single shape, rising to heaven from the hands of millions of craftsmen as a crystal symbol of a new emerging faith’.
Offering tuition in a remarkable variety of activities – furniture design, painting, photograpy, typography, factory planning, ceramics, theatre design, textiles, architecture, dancing – the Bauhaus was part artistic movement, part utopian social commune, and as much of an experiment as the Weimar Republic itself. Artists from many areas of Europe passed through: painters Paul Klee, Vasily Kandinsky and Josef Albers were on the visual arts faculty, designer Marcel Breuer taught cabinet-making, and the constructivist photographer and painter László Moholy-Nagy offered instruction in metalworking.
After moving to a purpose-designed building by Gropius in Dessau in 1925, the Bauhaus became celebrated for promoting a rational and functionalist style, elegant in its restraint, often using cutting-edge materials such as aluminium, chrome and glass. Its products – Breuer’s tubular steel chairs, Wilhelm Wagenfeld’s bulbous lamp – brought high-concept modernism to mass consumers, and reflections of bold, clean Bauhaus lines are visible in product design even today.
Art
The era of decay - In ArtOther artists saw the bleaker side of Weimar life. The expressionist painter Otto Dix, haunted by his experiences as a machine-gunner during the First World War, channeled his energies into sardonic and often ghoulish depictions of Berlin. The central panel of Dix’s famous triptych Metropolis (1927–28), portrays a jazz club teeming with jitterbugging, bobbed ‘New Women’, but its side panels tell a different story. In one, a wounded veteran stands by, his companion dead on the pavement; in the other a crowd of scantily clad young females streams past, insensible to the suffering that surrounds them.
Film
Two of the most remarkable films of the Weimar boom in film-making, Robert Wiene’s Das Cabinet des Dr Caligari (1920) and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), also tend towards the realm of nightmare – Caligari plays up to contemporary fears about Lustmord (sexual violence) with a Gothic saga of a hypnotist who manipulates a patient to commit murder on his behalf, while Metropolis offers a dystopian vision of the future, set in a city segregated between wealthy industrialists and a numberless army of drones who toil in underground factories. Though hugely different in form, both works could be said to reflect the schisms that divided German society in the ‘golden 1920s’.
Short lived |
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After the Nazis came to power, Clubs and theatres were shut, books were burned on the streets of Berlin, and fierce campaigns against feminism, jazz, modern architecture and much else were launched. Experimental art was held up to public ridicule – most infamously in the 1937 exhibition of ‘degenerate’ art, which paraded works from what Goebbels labelled ‘the era of decay’, among them canvases by Klee, Dix, Max Beckmann and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. Many artists – particularly those who were Jewish – fled overseas, never to return. Less than 15 years after it had begun to stir, the first truly modern culture that Germany had known was brought brutally to a halt.
