Literature in Weimar Germany

Peter Gay dashed off Weimar Culture: Insider as Outsider in six months during the electrifying year of 1968; the Weimar Republic was, after all, as close to him as the late seventies and early eighties are to us.1 He had grown up with its protagonists, and history and memory still cross-dissolved in his reconstruction of the period. His was, then, a very personal and specific Weimar—the Weimar of Gustav Stresemann and Friedrich Meinecke, Harry Graf Kessler and Thomas Mann, Max Liebermann and Walter Gropius. Since the renewed interest in Weimar culture in the 1960s, there have been various iterations of Weimar, often filled with personalities who played at best cameo roles in Gay’s extended essay – Adorno and Benjamin, for example, who Gay only referenced in passing, or Rosenzweig and Scholem, who received no mention at all. In Gay’s Weimar, the treatment of film remained cursory, mainly focusing on...