ABSTRACT
Weimar society was characterized by political and social polarization, suffering as it did under the consequences of military defeat, especially the terms of Versailles with its humiliating war guilt clause and costly reparations. It was subject to economic and political instability, with twenty elections in fourteen years, political murders, galloping inflation, increasing urbanization and fear of crime and chaos. The revolutionary origins of the new Republic polarized attitudes. The conservative forces saw the revolution of 1918 as the triumph of the lowest elements of society and the liberal constitution as a symptom and cause of national decline, and they longed for a return to an imagined pre-war era in which gender certainties reflected an ordered universe. For socialists and those involved in the Movement for Sexual Reform, the republic seemed to offer a chance of founding a new, more humane moral order on the discredited ruins of the old. Under the new constitution, women received equality before the law as well as the right to vote and to stand for election to parliament. Censorship was also repealed, allowing the publication and distribution of politically and sexually outspoken material. The sex reformers were able to publish ‘enlightenment’ literature without fear of prosecution, while the conservatives deplored the ‘flood’ of pornographic images released onto the market. Among the many tensions underlying the troubled republic we can find the struggle for order over growing chaos, for tradition against modernity, for the old morality against the new.
