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Weimar Publics/Weimar Subjects: Rethinking the Political Culture of Germany in the 1920s

2011; Oxford University Press; Volume: 30; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/gerhis/ghr084

1477-089X

Matthew Stibbe,

Italian Fascism and Post-war Society

As Kathleen Canning puts it in her introduction to this anthology of essays on Weimar political culture, what made this era stand out as a unique period in German history was its ‘bold embrace of living in the future tense’ (p. 2). This can be seen in the emergence of new publics: new voters, new consumers, new readers, new audiences, new activists and new street fighters; and of new subjects: welfare, sexuality, leisure, mass entertainment and mass migration. Different languages and rituals had to be found to express the complex range of emotions and sentiments that all this ‘newness’ gave rise to. And behind the constant soul-searching lurked the unexpected defeat of 1918, for—to cite Peter Fritzsche—the lost war was ‘at once the site of the invalidation of the past and the point of departure for the future’ (pp. 5 and 369). The extent to which this era might be understood in terms of a ‘crisis of modernity’, and the diverse meanings which were attached by contemporaries to the word ‘crisis’, has already been the subject of previous works. The editors and contributors to the present volume seek neither to refute nor to endorse the ‘crisis’ paradigm. Instead, they deploy cultural history methodologies to broaden our understanding of what constituted politics in Weimar Germany, emphasizing the subjectivities behind and the ‘emotional underside’ of new forms of citizenship, grass-roots campaigning and self-representation beyond formal structures of party and class (p. 12). As it is impossible here to cover all seventeen of the essays, this short review picks out a handful by way of example.