German History & Politics Essay

The fortunate years between 1924 and 1929 are usu bothy considered to have been the closely affluent and stable in the history of the Weimar Re mankind. Certainly there were no major attempts at revolutionary change and the economy and flori assimilation seemed to detect steadily after the hyperinflation of 1921-23. Beginning from 1924 there were no further attempts to visit the Republic to compare with the Spartacist uprising (1919), the Kapp Putsch (1920) and the Munich Putsch (1923).The semipolitical brio of the parties hostile to the Republic seemed to be in decline, both on the odd and on the right. This can certainly be seen as statistical stay of political and cultural stability. The period between 1924 and 1929 in Weimar Republic is usually seen as an interlude of social change between the more repressing periods of the Second and Third Reichs. The Weimar Republic in this period had the closely unmistakable bring upment of civil rights ever produced in a cons titutional document.Germans were guaranteed comparability before the law (Article 109) and conversance of travel and residence (Article 111). Their personal liberty was inviolable (Article 114), while the house of every German was his sanctuary (Article 115). In addition, each individual had the right to express his opinion freely by word, in writing, in print, in picture compliance, or in whatever other way (Article 118) indeed, censorship was forbidden (Article 142) (Eyck 10). The Weimar Republic produced probably the most advanced welfare state in the western military man.In the sideline this paper will discuss the culture and political science in the prosperous years of the Weimar Republic. Weimar Germanys Modernist Political Project Theory and Practice The working furcate of establishing a pluralist consensus in the Weimar Republic could confront its supporters and detractors alike with parliamentary impasse and coalition politics, on the one hand, and with violent ex tra-parliamentary struggles, on the other (Kaufmann 90). The mod democratic structures which do contestation possible were established in the constitution.The value and principles it enshrined show that the decision to convene in Weimar was not simply visit by a need to get away from the upheavals in Berlin (Kaufmann 29). The excerpt of the former residence of German cultures two superior sons, Goethe and Schiller, reflected a confide amongst the designers of the constitution that the new Republic should turn its keep going on Germanys nationalist and authoritarian past and promote quite the cosmopolitan universalist values of Humanitat and Bildung.With its emphasis on personal freedom, par before the law, the right to assembly, freedom of thought, and the right to form political parties and indie trade unions, the Weimar constitution embodied a central apprehension of modernism, the desire for greater equality and emancipation. Above all it was intended to produce a soci ety based on tolerance, mutual respect, openness, and state, where the social, political, and economic conditions that had given heave to the carnage of the First World War would be banished once and for all.In practice, however, various negative factors were to prevent a genuine democratization of German society. Foremost amongst these was the crippling task of reorganizing an economy not only devastated by four years of contend, but withal forced to meet the capacious reparations payments that had been imposed by the solelyies. Analysing the Psychology of Nazism, Fromm noted that Hitler was well aware of the Germans difficulties in embracing a more open society that unavoidable active participation in the body politic (Kaufmann 134).Faced with the disorientating complexity of pluralism and its apparent inability to guarantee economic security, many frustrated and recalcitrant Germans in conclusion opted for the certainty of totalitarianism (Lee 13). This fear of freedom was not, however, typical of all sections of the population. Non-aligned leftists and liberals in the cultural sphere whole midpointedly embraced, and actively worked to extend, the new freedoms offered by the constitution. It was their commitment to democracy which provided one of the main motivating forces behind Weimar culture. provided one of the tragedies of that culture was that it never gained acceptance by certain world-shaking social classes. Weimar Culture The Birth of Modernism In the course of the ordinal century a consciousness emerged which reduced the Modern to a incorrupt resistance to the past and its legacy. At this point the optimism of an eighteenth-century understanding of modernity was already in decline in the Weimar Republic. Enlightenment thinkers expected the arts and sciences to attach the forces of nature, to give meaning to the world, to promote virtuous progress and social justice, and ultimately to guarantee human happiness.Horkheimer and Adorno traced out the way in which this positive throw away for human and social teaching had been hijacked by the instrumental rationality of capitalist economy (Lee 59). What had been progressive had reverse, in the growth of the culture industry, exploitative. The transformation of cultural mathematical product occurred as a result of crucial social, technical, political, and artistic developments between the world wars. In the 1924-29 there are still remnants of the old project of a liberated humanity.It is precisely that active relation between the social and the esthetical which characterized so many cultural projects in the Weimar years, from the Bauhaus to popular illustrated papers, and from the documentary planetary house to Dadaist montages. What was progressive in Weimar culture was informed by aspirations derived from a staple fiber tenet of modernism. That is the belief that technological change could effect a positive transformation of the environment and an improveme nt of the human condition.Introducing a new strain of his essays from the 1924-29s, Ernst Bloch recalled in 1962 that the famous Golden Twenties were a time of transition. Extremists on both left and right saw the first German democracy not as an end in itself, but the incidental office by which a new Germany was to be created. A look endorse to the Weimar years from the post-war period, across the gulf of the Third Reich, confirms their reputation for cultural vitality and innovation. The extent of this sea change in the nature of German culture is demonstrated by Thomas Mann 1928 essay Kultur und Sozialismus (Hans 9).hither the erstwhile indorse of the automony of art ac companionships that Kultur and politics were no longer mutually exclusive spheres. toilet audiences for mass circulation media could scarcely be encompassed by traditional patrician or elitist ways of understanding what a culture was. What Mann calls the socialist class (for so long held in deep suspicion by the educated meat class) is entrusted by him with no less a task than preserving the traditional heart of German self-understanding in the new democratic future.Systematically blurring the lines between political discourse and cultural activity, Mann asserts the need for Geist (the inwardly realized state of knowledge achieved already and in fact by the summit of humanity) to become manifest in the substantial world of statute, constitutionality, and European coexistence (Lee 29). However, some of the most striking developments in the political appropriation and use of culture were promoted by political parties in the context of the working-class movement.The affable Democratic caller (SPD) had traditionally viewed culture with suspicion, as essentially affection-class in ascendent and intent, and therefore inappropriate to the purposes of the working-class struggle (Kolb 78). At most the Social Democratic promotion of a proletarian lay theatre had an educational aim which su rvived into Brechts conception of the didactic play ( Lehrstuck). Nevertheless, before the war a number of organizations connected with the SPD promoted sport and gymnastics, choral singing, and even touristry as well as amateur dramatics.After the successes of the working class and the increasing confidence they brought, there was a growing sense among socialists. The middle years of the Republic saw a great blossoming of organizations, support by the commie company and the Social Democratic Party, providing for workers leisure, education, and practical educational activity in various cultural skills Proletarian FreeThinkers, Nudists Clubs, Worker Speech Choirs and trip the light fantastic Groups, Worker Photographers (whose pictures were used by John Heartfield), Radio Clubs, and Film-Makers (Lee 46). Enormous meter were actively involved in these organizations.Almost half a billion people sang in workers choral societies in the Weimar Republic. The performances of full tre atment for lyric choir (involving a kind of collective dramatic speech) were often conceived on an epos scale as the climax of festivals and celebrations laid on by the parties of the left and the trade unions. Apart from a few texts by Ernst toll agent and Bruno Schonlank, few of these organizations left behind accessible artefacts, but the movement associated with the Communist Party that promoted proletarian writing of various kinds exemplified the issues of aesthetic intention involved.The KPD, as part of its effort to establish a basis of mass membership, develop factory cells and with them factory newspapers. To these publications worker correspondents were encouraged to contribute accounts of their day-to-day have it away in the workplace. Their ranks eventually contributed important members to the BPRS ( League of Proletarian Revolutionary Writers, founded in 1928) Willi Bredel, Erich Grunberg, Hans Marchwitza, and Ernst Ottwalt.Developing a highly simplified form of nai ve realism, works such(prenominal) as Bredel Maschinenfabrik N & K (1930) reflect the increasing material impoverishment of the working class and its organization as a movement. The way of class divisions was not the exclusive territory of the proletarian authors similar trends were unload in writers as different as Fallada (in Kleiner Mann, was nun? , for instance) and Arnold Zweig, in his epic war novel Der Streit um den Sergeanten Grischa ( 1927).What was striking about the specifically proletarian novel was its tight focus on its own class interests. Here working-class experience was isolated in a functional and didactic narrative. Other authors developed the accounts of first-hand experience provided by the worker correspondents to create fine reportage addressing the class-based nature of Weimar institutions, such as Ernst Ottwalts ironically call factual novel on the legal system Denn sie wissen, was sie tun ( 1931) or Ludwig Tureks autobiographical Ein Prolet erzahlt ( 1930).Yet both of these forms of proletarian writing eventually attracted the furious criticism of Georg Lukacs, the most influential cultural theorist of the Communist Party (Lee 78). Modernism and its Malcontents The simmering resentment in conservative circles against Weimar modernism and the cultural degeneracy it allegedly encouraged came to a head in a protracted and heated Reichstag roll in 1926 on a motion, proposed by the German National Peoples Party, which sought to ban starter and filth from publication, performance, or screening (Haarmann 89).For members of the Catholic Centre Party and their ally further to the right economic prosperity had produced a dangerous development towards economic individualism and Mammon. It curseened to destroy the classical and religious foundations of German culture. Offering a fascinating mixture of conservative and progressive ideas the Catholic deputy Georg Schreiber called for a campaign against the profit motive in culture and a s truggle for the soul of the German worker. He entitle that the return key of German national dignity could not be achieved by politics and economics alone.The conservatives mission was to reassert the best traditions of Germanys cultural hereditary pattern by stemming the influx of alien cosmopolitanism which, they lamented, was engulfing Germany in a tide of commercialism. Their fears were underlined in more extreme fashion by the Nationalists, who railed against the excesses of destructive sensual diversion and the worship of the body, nudity, and lasciviousness. Germany, they proclaimed, was faced with nothing less than a moral decline of Roman proportions.At the other end of the political spectrum, the Communists lambasted the object as a thinly disguised attempt to increase state control over art, designed to impose bourgeois standards of morality on newly emerging proletarian culture. Citing the effective banning of Eisenstein Battleship Potemkin by local censorship board s in Wurttemberg, they pointed out that regional governments had already made use of legal powers that were designed to preserve moral decency in arrangement to ban politically unacceptable works of art.Opposition to the proffer also came from the Social Democrats, who feared that the absolute freedom of art was being jeopardized by concessions to petty-bourgeois philistinism. Eduard David, in a speech on the day in declination 1926 when the proposal was passed by a majority of 92 votes, expressed particular concern that the decision to devolve decisions on censorship to regional testing commissions (Landesprukfstellen) meant a return to the pre-unification lifetime of petty provincialism ( Kleinstaaterei), and therefore a threat to the cultural integrity of the Republic.Thus he saw 3 December 1926 as a black day for German culture. Appealing in vain to the traditions of cultural liberalism in the Centre and Democratic Parties, he proclaimed that the freedom of art was a corners tone of the constitution and that any form of censorship was an attack on the very foundations of the Republic (Haarmann 35). The parliamentary debate was merely a prelude to an even more lively public dispute.Groups of prominent members of the nonaligned left, proclaiming the sanctity of spiritual freedom, lined up against a rag-bag of ultra-conservative and nationalist organizations, such as the German Womens League against corruptness in the Life of the German People, the Richard Wagner Society, and the German National Teachers League (Lee 78). All they zealously followed the call to organize against the alleged corruption of the German spirit that they saw as endemic in the new Weimar culture.The panoply of works verboten by some of the new regional censorship committees was very bountiful indeed. That it included not only popular French magazines with fascinating titles such as Paris Flirt, Frivolites, Paris Plaisirs, and Eros, but also Soviet films and Brechts debut play Ba al merely confirmed the worst fears of those opposed to the legislation (Haarmann 45).The debate on trash and filth, coming as it did in the mid- 1920s, when the distinctively new cosmopolitan, commercialist character of Weimar culture was becoming increasingly apparent, provided telling tell apart of the extent to which culture remained a burning political issue. Many who back up the legislation did so out of a conviction that the Republics claim to be the legitimate home of Germanys classical cultural heritage was a hollow one. In their estimation the reality was unflavoured commercialization and a total loss of standards.