Weimar Culture & Society, 1924–1928 (AQA A Level History: Component 2: Depth study): Revision Note

Summary

• The years between 1924 and 1928 were years of significant cultural change in Germany

  • Germany, and Berlin in particular, became one of the world's leading centres of art, architecture, theatre and film

• The period also saw improvements to living conditions for many Germans

  • The economic boom led to business owners making more money

  • The wages of industrial working people increased

  • Pensions were introduced for war widows and the injured

  • Women in cities experienced new employment and social opportunities

• However, not everybody benefited economically during this time

  • There was also a backlash against the new culture from some parts of German society, which condemned it as 'degenerate', a term the Nazis would later use to justify banning it

Social welfare reforms

• The Weimar government wanted to keep the working classes happy to prevent the spread of Communism

  • The KPD's success in the Reichstag would threaten the success of German business

    • Communism was against owning private property or businesses. Any businesses that did operate would not be allowed to make a profit

• Therefore, the government introduced a series of reforms to improve working conditions:

  • They lowered the hours in a working week from 50 in 1925 to 46 in 1927

  • Workers’ ‘real’ wages rose 25% from 1925 to 1928

  • This measurement considers the cost of living and inflation to calculate the actual value of a worker's wages

• Unemployment increased as a result of industrial rationalisation

  • In 1924, 4% of the working population was unemployed

  • By 1926, this had increased to about 18% (3 million)

• The government passed the Unemployment Insurance Act in 1927

  • This money funded insurance that covered unemployment and sickness

  • 16.4 million workers had 3% of their wages diverted to the government

  • If an insured German did not have a job or was unable to work due to poor health, the scheme paid them 60 Reichsmarks per week

• The economic recovery and government legislation meant that, by 1928, the number of people unemployed had fallen to roughly 2%

The introduction of pensions

• The First World War had a devastating impact on the German people

  • Two million German soldiers died between 1914 and 1918, and four million more were wounded

• This created a large number of war widows

  • By 1920, there were an estimated 400,000 war widows in Germany

  • The widows struggled to provide for themselves and their families

• In 1920, the government decided to help war widows recover from the devastating impacts of the war

  • They passed the Reich Pension Law

  • Over 1.3 million people (widows and ex-soldiers) received a war-related pension

Weimar culture: Art, architecture and music

Art

• Expressionism in Weimar Germany used grotesque or exaggerated figures in violent scenes

• This aimed to make the audience uncomfortable

  • In doing so, the artist hoped people would begin to question the society in which they lived

    • Otto Dix was a famous New Objectivist artist in Weimar Germany

    • One of his paintings highlighted the issues war veterans had once they returned to Germany

    • George Grosz, like Dix a New Objectivist artist, painted 'Grey Day' (1921) to represent the boredom of day-to-day life

• Weimar Art horrified the conservative upper classes and the extreme right-wing

  • Traditionally, the more educated upper classes controlled and produced Germany’s cultural output

  • In the Weimar Republic, the upper classes no longer monopolised this power

  • The meanings of the artworks were unclear. The pictures had many interpretations 

  • These pieces could have undermined the authority of the upper class

  • Many artists had strong left-wing beliefs

  • This challenged the traditional ways of life valued by the right

Architecture

Bauhaus architecture

• In 1919, a new form of design called ‘Bauhaus’ emerged

  • Walter Gropius founded the movement in Weimar Germany in 1919

  • He aimed to create a unified style that connected all types of art forms

    • The Bauhaus design school existed in three German cities between 1919 and 1933: Weimar, Berlin and Dessau

    • Lecturers at Bauhaus College included the artist Paul Klee and the sculptor Oskar Schlemmer

• ‘Bauhaus’ architecture uses geometric shapes to create practical buildings

  • The movement saw the beauty of technology and the use of familiar materials in different ways

  • For example, they designed chairs made out of tubes used to make bicycle frames

Expressionist architecture

• There was also expressionist architecture, a style characterised by the work of architects such as Erich Mendelsohn

  • He designed the Einstein Tower, an observatory in Potsdam, to look like a rocket

Music

• German cities, especially Berlin, developed an exciting nightclub scene at this time

  • They embraced new forms of music from America, such as jazz and swing

  • Cabarets became extremely popular and often featured nudity and adult themes

• Classical composers broke away from what they saw as the constrictions of traditional music

  • Hindemith and Schoenberg were viewed as progressive composers who were taking music in entirely new directions

  • Hindemith pioneered Gebrauchsmusik which was music written for practical, everyday use

Theatre, literature and film

Theatre

• A new wave of highly political experimental theatre grew out of Weimar Germany

  • The playwright Bertolt Brecht worked with composer Kurt Weill

  • They created plays that were left-wing, anti-war, anti-nationalist and anti-capitalist

  • Brecht and Weill exemplified Zeittheater (theatre of the times) which was drama which engaged with political and social issues

"Yet Berlin’s best offerings during these years were the theatre performances; and they were the chief topic of many conversations. During the winters no week passed without my going at least once to the theatre. When at the end of the month my budget was exhausted and I could not afford a seat, it was “standing room.” I doubt that any city has ever had as many theatres playing simultaneously as Berlin did in the 1920s. There were three state theatres, four theatres under the direction of Max Reinhardt, a similar number under Victor Barnowsky, and many other theatres for serious plays and social comedies…

The theatre in Berlin was profoundly exciting not only because it was frequently great art, but also because it was intensely political. It was no longer an expressionist outcry against all social conventions, which it had been immediately after the revolution of 1917, but it was still a manifestation against old traditions, a place for social criticism and for denouncing restrictions of freedom. Not only did modern plays—those by Ernst Toller, Georg Kaiser, and Carl Zuckmayer, the most admired of the young poets—serve these purposes, but so did older plays like Schiller’s Don Carlos and Hauptmann’s Weber. Brilliantly produced and acted, these suddenly seemed to be written for our time and for us. The greatest and most unforgettable production, however, in which art and politics was beautifully combined, was Brecht and Weill’s Threepenny Opera, which played before full houses for years and which I must have seen three or four times. It gave a grim, hopeless picture of a world in which corruption controlled human life and society. Yet it had a fairy-tale ending: the mounted messenger of the king arrives at the last moment, saving the hero from execution."

The recollections of Felix Gilbert, who was a young university student in Berlin in the 1920s.

Literature

• The expressionism of Weimar Germany's painters greatly influenced the writers of the time

  • Novelists such as Thomas Mann focused on the mental state of their characters rather than plot or descriptions of wider society

Film

• The popularity of cinema exploded in the 1920s

• In the early 1920s, film did not allow the recording of sound

  • In the cinema, a pianist played the film's musical score in time with the pictures

  • Films with sound, called 'talkies', became available in 1927. This highlights the new technology available to filmmakers

• By 1929, there were roughly 5,000 cinemas across Germany

• Germany began to compete with American film production

  • The expressionist film The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari (1920) was one of the first horror films

  • The director, Robert Wiene, used a ‘plot twist’ ending which became one of the most influential in cinema history

• F. W. Murnau directed the film Nosferatu (1922)

  • It was one of the world's first vampire films

  • Many films today use the tension methods Murnau created while filming Nosferatu

• Metropolis (1927) was produced by UFA Germany's largest film studio

  • It cost 5 million Reichsmarks

  • The budget overrun was funded by loans from MGM and Paramount (American film studios) in the Parufamet deal

  • Fritz Lang created a modernist science-fiction film that centred on the impact of technology on 20th-century life

  • It was commercially unsuccessful at the time, but it has influenced many modern-day films, such as Star Wars

• Germany produced its first talking film in 1930

  •  The capability to play films with sound was available in 3,800 German cinemas by 1932

"There has perhaps never before been a time so determined as ours in its search for new forms of expression. Fundamental revolutions in painting, sculpture, architecture, and music speak eloquently of the fact that people of today are seeking and finding their own means of lending artistic form to their sentiments. Film has an advantage over all other expressive forms: its freedom from space, time, and place. What makes it richer than the others is the natural expressiveness inherent in its formal means. I maintain that film has barely risen above the first rung on the ladder of its development, and that it will become the more personal, the stronger, and more artistic the sooner it renounces all transmitted or borrowed expressive forms and throws itself into the unlimited possibilities of the purely filmic."

German film director Fritz Lang, writing about the artistic creativity in Germany in 1926.

Living standards and lifestyles

• There were positive changes to both living standards and lifestyles for many Germans between 1924 and 1928

  • Trade unions negotiated better wages and conditions for many workers

  • Business owners benefited from the economic boom

• Women, in particular, had new opportunities for employment in the major cities

  • This enabled them to enjoy a degree of independence and freedom unknown to previous generations

• There was a rise in youth unemployment during the 1920s

  • There was also widespread concern that young people were becoming more rebellious, and anti-social behaviour was becoming more common

• Youth groups had been a feature of life in Germany since the nineteenth century, and continued to be popular in the 1920s

  • One new development, however, was the creation of youth groups of political parties, including the KPD, the SPD and the Nazis

• Not all Germans experienced improvements in their living conditions during this time

  • Those who lost their savings during the hyperinflation crisis continued to suffer

  • Farmers and farm labourers continued to suffer financially because of low prices

How 'Golden' was the cultural life of Weimar Germany?

• Some see this period as Weimar's 'Golden' years, when Germany was at the centre of the cultural world

  • They argue that the explosion in creativity during this period affected all areas of the arts and society

• Others believe its influence has been exaggerated and that neither the cultural nor the economic developments were enjoyed or celebrated by all Germans

  • They argue that the changes upset and alarmed many sections of German society, who attempted to reverse the changes