The arbiters of taste had spoken. No more androgynous tubes or practical office suits. German women now wanted to look “feminine, modest and helpless”, maybe assisted by “a little cape, a beret and a muff made of fur”. Lucy von Jacobi issued her sartorial decree in Tempo magazine on January 30 1933. On that day, elsewhere in Berlin, Adolf Hitler became chancellor.
Historians of the Weimar Republic, which Hitler and his National Socialists extinguished within weeks, face a special challenge. The world-shaking cultural trends that make Germany’s trajectory from 1918 to 1933 so dynamic — from film to fashion, shopping to sexuality — all had causes and courses of their own. Big-picture politics alone cannot explain fluctuating hemlines or, say, the revolution in home design that turns any trip to Ikea in 2024 into a consumer tribute (from cutlery to chairs) to the Bauhaus workshops of 1924. Yet the republic’s catastrophic finale casts a heavy backward shadow. Those lurching years of experimental democracy can look in retrospect like (in Harald Jähner’s words) “the pre-history of its conclusion”.
In this energetic and engaging narrative, editor-turned-historian Jähner largely dodges the traps of hindsight. He aims to recreate not how the era looked in retrospect but how it felt at the time, as he did in a previous work about post-Third Reich Germany, Aftermath. Nothing about the totalitarian takeover was preordained: “People had a choice . . . including in the polling booth”. Indeed, the Nazi vote slid just as the state’s reckless patrician elite invited Hitler into office as a “containment strategy”.
Rather than viewing each arena of convulsive change — department stores, dance crazes, motoring, sport, radio — as a prelude to calamity, Jähner follows the turbulent feelings that Weimar’s whirlwind of innovation deposited in its wake. From the liberated ecstasy of chic women in fast cars (a “magical combination”) to the post-1930 “crisis of communication”, when “Germans could no longer hear one another”, Vertigo presents not a chronicle of events but a tapestry of mass emotions.
For history and literature alike, this is well-mapped ground. Readers keen to explore the terrain behind, say, the fiction of Alfred Döblin or the drama of Bertolt Brecht can already consult a historical shelf that stretches from classics such as Eric Weitz’s Weimar Germany to Frank McDonough’s recent The Weimar Years. Jähner’s approach not only carries a heavy cultural spin but puts the politics of collective feeling — from exhilaration to despair — centre stage.
The new-minted freedoms of the 1920s bequeathed models of “self-actualisation” to future generations, from keep-fit regimes and back-to-nature activism to gay nightclubs, but often left the hard-pressed urban crowds behind, prey to “the ill-tempered vocabulary of cultural pessimism”. Political street violence, barely policed, painted a bloody backdrop to almost every scene. Jähner may shun trite comparisons, but the Weimar blend of lofty principles and vicious polemics seems painfully familiar today.
Vertigo draws well on the brilliant reporters and commentators of a time when journalism — as practised by giants such as Kurt Tucholsky or Joseph Roth — enjoyed a “stylistic and perceptive heyday”. In this edition, Jähner benefits hugely from Shaun Whiteside’s swift and agile translation, always alert to the edgy, crackling modernity of Weimar prose.
Keen-eyed, thin-skinned observers showed how politics, economics and technology seeped into German souls, whether the “mindboggling rage” of rightwing Great War veterans “betrayed by their own homeland” or the pivot of agony aunt “Frau Christine” towards “depth, seriousness, authenticity” after the “cheeky, frivolous arrogance” of the 1920s. Even the cosy, conservative waltz came back (Jähner treats dance-floor fads as diagnostic tools) in reaction to the solitary frenzy of shimmy and Charleston, with their “athletic and action-packed” equality.
The Weimar years raced towards no predestined terminus. Still, from hyperinflation in 1923 (when thieves would steal basketfuls of banknotes — and keep the basket) to credit collapse in 1931 and 30 per cent unemployment, successive shocks eroded faith in the institutions of democracy. When the slump hit, flailing centre-ground parties agreed on policies of punitive austerity. In reaction, far left and right would “come together in their hatred of the establishment”.
Amplified by excitable media, feelings of dread and disillusion crystallised into “crosses on ballot papers”. And the National Socialists, that “bizarre agglomeration”, an ill-assorted “party of brawlers and professors”, knew how to twist “an economic depression into a mental crisis” and profit from “overheated hopes of salvation”.
If Jähner shuns hindsight, he also steers clear of drawing simplistic parallels. Warnings for today nonetheless emerge as he tracks the polarisation that left “every milieu” as “an island in itself”, with all connecting bridges burnt. Radical critics railed in now familiar terms against the “mainstream media”, Systempresse. Even the angle of a house roof (flat or pitched?) became fodder for furious culture wars in a public realm “hollowed out . . . by rigorism and self-righteousness; like a lawn by moles”.
By 1933, “the opportunity for argument had gone”. A fake national unity procured by terror and fraud prevailed. Jähner gazes wistfully at the women weavers of the 1920s Bauhaus, with their bobs, slacks and defiant smiles, and notes “how little separates us from them”. If that kinship applies to forward-looking Weimar in its prime, let’s hope we can still unstitch the kind of snarling hatreds that hastened its fall.
Vertigo: The Rise and Fall of Weimar Germany 1918-1933 by Harald Jähner, translated by Shaun Whiteside WH Allen £25, 480 pages
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