The 1920s And 1930s

It has frequently been held that the period of the Weimar Republic coincided with the triumph of the avant-garde in Germany, that ‘Weimar culture’ meant a radical break with the past and a hectic experimentalism in the arts which was terminated by the Nazis in 1933. Attempts have been made, however, to show that the revolution in poetry, the theatre and also the novel occurred in the years immediately preceding the First World War, that certain aspects of early expressionism anticipated the techniques of Neue Sachlichkeit and that the cynical, nonchalant Großstadtlyrik, associated with writers such as Bertolt Brecht, was already to be found as early as 1910 in the poetry of Gottfried Benn. It should also be remembered that figures such as Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Stefan George, Gerhart Hauptmann, Robert Musil, Thomas Mann and Hermann Hesse were writing throughout the Weimar period, that Rilke completed his Duineser Elegien in the same year that Brecht saw his first play on the stage, and that Franz Kafka’s Das Schloß was published by Max Brod in the same year as Hans Grimm’s enormously popular Volk ohne Raum. A recent study has quite rightly seen that it is pointless to limit ‘Weimar culture’ chronologically, even geographically: writing the history of art in the age of Stresemann is acknowledged to be a curious occupation. ¹ The legends created by the Weimar period, and particularly those centring on Berlin, may be fascinating, yet the student of modern German literature should be wary of them: ‘Weimar culture’ is as much Hofmannsthal’sZter Turm, Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg (picked out by his son Golo as being the representative novel of the whole Stresemann era), and Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf as well as the Brecht-Weill Dreigroschenoper. Before 1933 Robert Musil had published part one of Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften and Hermann Broch his trilogy Die Schlafwandler: as well as being an era of epic theatre, this is also the period of the monumental novel. Before looking at Brecht, Klabund, Fallada and Tucholsky, and others whose names are inseparably linked with the 1920s, it is appropriate to look at the writers of the older generation, who also lent Weimar its flavour, and indeed its greatness.