Society and Crisis:
Political Culture in the Weimar Republic

GERM 331 / ARTS 386

Professor Christian J. Emden
Professor Christina Keefe

Summary

Germany of the 1920s and early 1930s offers a dazzling look at the possibilities and limits of modernity.

Born out of the experience of the First World War and a political revolution that overturned traditional forms of authority, the Weimar Republic delivered one of the most liberal constitutions ever written, produced some of the most striking images and films of modern culture, and turned urban life into a spectacle of consumerism, architecture, fashion, and money.

Yet, the Weimar Republic is also a time of political and social crisis: inflation, the ever present spectre of revolution, and a constitutional crisis that ultimately led to the rise of Hitler. No other period shows the ambivalence of modernity as clearly as Weimar Germany.

In Fall 2009, the seminar will be co-taught by Christian J. Emden (German Studies) and Christina Keefe (Visual and Dramatic Arts) and include guest lectures by other faculty from Visual and Dramatic Arts, including Charles Dove on film in 1920s Germany and Paul Hester on Bauhaus architecture and photography.

Excursions

Films will be shown on the big screen at the Rice Media Center, including some of the boldest statements of modern cinema, such as Fritz Lang’s science fiction classic Metropolis (1927) and Leni Riefenstahl’s controversial but highly influential Nazi propaganda movie Triumph of the Will (1935).

On November 13, students will also attend the opening night of Bertolt Brecht’s and Kurt Weill’s famous Three-Penny Opera, which was first staged in Berlin in 1928. This is a tale of money, crime, prostitution, love, and death which the acclaimed director Leslie Swackhamer translated from Victorian England to 1920s Germany; the music will be conducted by Cristi Macelaru (Shepherd School of Music). 

Syllabus

•    Introduction

TOWARDS CIVIL SOCIETY

•    1918/19—Democracy or Dictatorship?
•    Max Weber and the Political
•    The Weimar Constitution

THE SPECTACLE OF MODERNITY

•    “It's All a Shamble”—Berlin Cabaret Songs
•    The City as Spectacle
•    Neue Sachlichkeit—Writing Weimar
•    Bauhaus Architecture and the Order of Modernity
•    Painting Unrest—Georg Grosz, Max Pechstein, Otto Dix
•    Social Images—Walter Benjamin and August Sander on Photography
•    Revolution on Film—Fritz Lang’s Metropolis
•    The Politics of Cinema—Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer

MONEY, SEX, AND CLASS

•    Georg Simmel on Money and Modernity
•    “The Salaried Masses”—Siegfried Kracauer on the New Economy
•    The Economy of Desire: Irmgard Keun on Girls, Fashion, and Social Justice

CONSTITUTIONAL CRISIS

•    Hans Kelsen and the Value of Democracy
•    Carl Schmitt and the State of Exception
•    Constitutional Endgames—Carl Schmitt in 1932
•    Politics as Myth—Leni Riefenstahl’s The Triumph of the Will