The Weimar Spectacle

Count Harry Kessler is remembered today less for what he did — though he did quite a lot — than for what he wrote. His diaries, kept over six decades, are among the most extraordinary documents of the twentieth century. They record conversations with everyone from Rodin and Rilke to Einstein, Strauss, Cocteau, Hofmannsthal, and Diaghilev. They also record his impressions of the great turning points of modern history: the First World War, the Weimar Republic, the rise of Nazism. In this ...

Okay, full disclosure, I started this podcast not for any deep political reason, but because I was fascinated by the culture of the Weimar Republic, the music, the arts, the architecture, the personalities. I didn’t start it because I thought that the political parallels between then and now were absolutely clear. But, there’s that thing that happens, where something's in your head and you start seeing it everywhere. Well, I feel like every time I read the news, turn on the radio, listen to a...

Today I’m interviewing Daniel Brook, the author of a new book on the pioneering sexual rights activist Magnus Hirschfeld, whose Berlin Institute of Sexual Science was a huge attraction in Weimar Berlin and was eventually destroyed by the Nazis, and whose theories are so contemporary they could be taken directly from modern debates about gender, sexuality, race and freedom. Magnus Hirschfeld (14 May 1868 – 14 May 1935) was a Jewish German physician, sexologist and LGBTQ+ advocate, whose German...

On 30 June 1937, Joseph Goebbels, the Reich Minister for Propaganda and Enlightenment, authorised the Director of the Reich Chamber for Culture, Adolf Ziegler, to select and confiscate paintings and sculptures from public collections for a major exhibition on 'degenerate art'. Ziegler said “What's been gathered together in [this] exhibition constitutes the portrayal of a true witches' sabbath and the most frivolous spiritual-artistic cultural bolshevism and a portrayal of the triumph of subhu...

George Grosz was a German artist known especially for his political cartoons and paintings of Berlin life in the 1920s. He was a prominent member of the Berlin Dada and New Objectivity groups during the Weimar Republic. He emigrated to the United States in 1933, and became a naturalized citizen in 1938. John Heartfield was a German visual artist who pioneered the use of art as a political weapon. Some of his most famous photo-montages were anti-Nazi and anti-fascist statements and he was hunt...

“Berlin was in a state of civil war. Hate exploded suddenly, without warning, out of nowhere; at street corners, in restaurants, cinemas, dance halls, swimming-baths; at midnight, after breakfast, in the middle of the afternoon ... From 1929 to 1933, I lived almost continuously in Berlin, with only occasional visits to other parts of Germany and to England. Already, during that time, I had made up my mind that I would one day write about the people I’d met and the experiences I was having. So...

On Oct 15th, 1923, Berlin resident Betty Scholem wrote to her son: “Conditions have taken a catastrophic turn here. This letter cost 15 million marks to send...and it will be 30 million beginning the day after tomorrow.” She estimated household expenses in the billions as the monthly rate of inflation approached 30,000 percent. In 1913, one US dollar was worth roughly 4 German marks. By November, 1923 in Germany, ten years later, hyper-inflation had pushed one US dollar to be wor...

“Let us consciously be ‘imaginary architects’! We believe that only a total revolution can guide us in our task. Our fellow citizens, even our colleagues quite rightly suspect in us the forces of revolution. Break up and undermine all former principles. Horse Shit! And we the bud in fresh dung.” So, said Weimar architect Bruno Taut!! And his contemporary, Walter Gropius replied: “Together let us desire, conceive an...

What do you get when you mix a bottle of Laphroaig Whiskey with three charming Weimar raconteurs? A freewheeling conversation that touches on the disturbing, occasionally hopeful, similarities of the Weimar period with our own days, the enduring importance and power of the poetry and plays of Bertolt Brecht, why New Orleans might be a last bastion of Weimar Culture, and on bringing to light some lesser known artists of 1920’s Germany. Over my kitchen table in New Orleans, I was joined by Sara...

Many years ago, I started my musical career singing, or maybe I should say screaming, with a Punk band, then eventually, through some very complicated in-between steps, I ended singing Opera, then on to musical theatre, then swinging it with jazz groups, and nowadays, mostly, I’m singing my own original songs. However through all of that, I've been enchanted, inspired, and more than a little obsessed, by the music of Kurt Julien Weill. I've sung Weill’s music in lovely concert halls and dark ...

On October 29th, 1918, only a few days before the official end of WW1, in Kiel, a naval port on Germany’s northern coast, sailors in the German Imperial Navy staged a mutiny that would spark revolutions across Germany, would lead to the formation of a new state with a constitution recognizing radical new human rights, and ultimately would lead to the rise of the Nazi Party. The Sailors were responding to the unauthorized decision by the Imperial Navy Command to take the entire fleet and engag...

We’re going to leap into some of the fun, crazy and sometimes completely mad of the Weimar days, i.e. the wild sexual revolution that appeared in in Berlin and to a lesser degree across Germany. My big idea for this episode is that in Post-WW1 Germany, people had seen so much death, they searched for life through sex and rejoicing in their bodies. The war had proved a beautiful body could be easily broken or snuffed out and so pleasure was not to be delayed. But sexuality became a brutal batt...

In this first episode we'll take a quick overview of birth, brief life and death of the Weimar Republic and ask the big, big question: 'Why care about a failed European state that only lasted 14 years and was a hot mess from the start'.