Weimar Culture Revisited

For decades after the Second World War, historians and writers depicted cultural life in Germany's Weimar Republic (1918-1933) as an unstable mixture of avant-garde experimentation, decadence, and proto-fascist tendencies. However, they defined "culture" in terms of a canon created by elites, excluding the everyday practices and popular participation that were crucial aspects of Weimar. Bringing together a remarkable array of research, this volume provides an accessible cross-section of recent work on the era's cultural history. Included here are investigations of visual and political culture, of transnational currents in the mass media and religious thought, and of the intense popular interest in sports, health, and nature. Weimar Culture Revisited attests to the extraordinarily multi-faceted nature of German history between the First World War and the Third Reich.

John Alexander Williams is an Associate Professor of modern European history at Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois. He is the author of Turning to Nature in Germany: Hiking, Nudism, and Conservation, 1900-1940 and the editor of Berlin Since the Wall's End: Shaping Society and Memory in the German Metropolis since 1989.

Revolution and the Weimar Avant-Garde: Contesting the Politics of Art, 1919-1924; D.Lewer
Cinema, Radio, and 'Mass Culture' in the Weimar Republic: Between Shared Experience and Social Division; C.Ross
Blue Angel, Brown Culture: The Politics of Film Reception in Göttingen; D.Imhoof
Middle-Class Heroes: Anti-Nationalism in the Popular Adventure Films of the Weimar Republic; O.Ashkenazi
Exotic Attractions and Imperialist Fantasies in Weimar Youth Literature; L.Springman
How Can a War Be Holy? Weimar Attitudes Toward Eastern Spirituality; T.Neuhaus
Visualizing the Republic: State Representation and Public Ritual in Weimar Germany; N.Rossol
The Party Does Indeed Fight Like a Man: The Construction of a Masculine Ideal in the Weimar Communist Party; S.A.Sewell
Sweat Equity: Sports and the Self-Made German; E.Jensen
Friends of Nature: The Culture of Working-Class Hiking; J.A.Williams