ABSTRACT
Quite apart from their intrinsic merit, the literature and culture of the Weimar Republic have much to offer the historian of the period. The bonfires which burned in May 1933, onto which the National Socialist students and their professors too, threw the quality literature of the Weimar Republic of which they disapproved, demonstrate that the Nazis arrived as a violent ending of a cultural period. Thomas Mann’s views on republican writers became part of the ‘conservative revolution’ in the Weimar Republic, part of the stream of increasingly aggressive ‘anti-democratic thought’ whose historian is Professor Sontheimer. Politically, of course, they disapproved of the Weimar Republic with which Mann was identified and were engaged in that fateful campaign against the ‘social fascists’. One often-remarked-upon example of the revanchist element in Weimar culture is the dispute that shook the literary section of the prestigious Prussian Academy of Arts in the years 1927 to 1933.
