A society which, even in its best years, was
politically so insecure provided only the shallowest ground for the roots of
any creative cultural life. There is, indeed, little evidence that the
Weimar Republic constituted a distinctive cultural period. Attempts have
been made, to be sure, to supply the scaffolding for a separate cultural
history of Weimar, often with Thomas Mann as focus. But it seems hazardous,
to say the least, to read portents of general significance into the
differences between his prewar Buddenbrooks and his 1924 Magic Mountain.
Mann was much too self-conscious, controlled, and deliberate a writer to be
used as a mere cultural reflecting surface.
On the contrary: what is really suggestive about
the frequency with which Mann's name is bandied about is that it indicates
the extent to which the great names and achievements in literature and the
arts were in the Weimar period but not of it. Of course it is true, as it
was true of the preceding period, that Germany participated prominently in
many of the general tendencies of western culture: in virtuoso orchestral
conducting, for instance (Wilhelm Furtwängler, Otto Klemperer), in
theatrical production (Max Reinhardt, Erwin Piscator), above all, perhaps,
in the new art of the motion picture (every reader will have his own
favorite names). But in those areas where the German attainments were
distinctive they dated, for the most part, from the later years of the
Empire and merely achieved more widespread recognition after 1918.
Perhaps one should not say ''merely,'' because from the point of view of
intellectual history (as opposed to the history of art, or of literature, or
of philosophy) it is precisely the recognition or popularity of cultural
products, not their creation, that is of special interest. In this respect,
the gates were wide open after 1918.
The sheer intellectual productivity of the
Weimar period was enormous. It was not a question of a lifting of
censorship, for the imperial government had been very liberal in cultural
matters; but the chaos of defeat, revolution, and demobilization loosened
cultural habits and liberated the curiosity of the new ''mass society.'' In
this way, some of the works of the artistic and intellectual revolution that
had preceded the political one suddenly found new audiences. The plural is
important: there were all kinds of new audiences for all kinds of ideasideas
that often contradicted each other and sometimes even themselves. There was
a general consciousness of the end of an era; but the response could be
idealistic, or nostalgic, or cynical, or all of them by turns.
The Bauhaus
The cultural diversity or eclecticism of the
Weimar period was nowhere better symbolized than in the Bauhaus. This was a
combination of artistic vision and artistic reality, the work, above all, of
Walter Gropius. Buildings designed by him had been erected even before the
war, and during the war he had already pressed his demands for close links
between art and industry, for artistic assimilation of mass production and
standardization. By 1919 his manifesto calling for amalgamation of the arts
and crafts and obliteration of the class distinction between their
practitioners, as well as his technical ideas, fell on more fertile soil,
and Gropius opened an academy of fine arts in Weimar with financial support
from the provincial government. In 1923 he propounded the additional thesis
of necessary unity between art and technology.
But the obverse of these rationalistic ideas, calculated to take advantage
of the facts and needs of mass society, was a visionary romanticism in which
building (Bau) was to be the supreme unifying principle governing all the
arts; and in Gropius' academy (Bauhaus) students learned not only
architecture but the use of all kinds of materials for decorative or
functional purposes in a building. As a matter of fact, there was no course
in ''architecture'' for some years. The most brilliant instruction was given
in the general preliminary course, which Gropius entrusted to Johannes Itten.
But Itten was something of a mystic who did not hold the elements of
subjectivity and functionalism in the balance that Gropius desired, and
after a few years he was replaced by a more technologically oriented
teacher. The students, however, tended to prefer the esoteric approach and
clustered around such men as the painters Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky,
representatives of the school of Expressionism that bad formed in the decade
before the war. In 1928 Gropius himself resigned under attack and was
replaced as director by an extreme functionalist whose ideas outraged Klee
and Kandinsky.
Thus the Bauhaus contained within itself contradictory ideas; and if Gropius,
now living in America, is to the general public the grand old man of a
movement that has long since become international, in the art schools it was
Itten's ideas that were the more influential. But Itten, for all kn
subjectivism, breathing exercises, and oriental philosophy, had been
affected as much as Gropius by social realities. ''l became conscious,'' he
wrote, ''that our scientific-technical civilization had come to a critical
point,'' and a major contribution to his consciousness was the first volume
of The Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler.
Spengler and his work exhibited some of the same characteristics as the
Bauhaus. Conceived before the war, published just before the end of the war,
the book became a best-seller in the immediate postwar period (despite the
almost unanimous strictures of historians and other professional critics).
Spengler's discernment and diagnosis of cultural crisis had the good fortune
to be offered to a public to whom political and social events had suddenly
made the existence of crisis self evident. His prescribed remedy, also,
resembles the Bauhaus in its internal tensions and ambiguity.
He preached a cult of toughness and the necessity of facing the ''cold, hard
facts'' of a culture nearing its end: ''lt is the hard reality of living
that is essential, not the concept of life.'' The latter he attributed to
the ''ostrich-philosophy of idealism.'' But at the same time he repudiated
the charge of pessimism, and in fact he stood as much as almost any social
thinker for an idealism of his own-or, rather, for an idealism derived from
Nietzsche, whom Spengler acknowledged as one of his masters. This idealism
called for a new moral cohesion and an aristocratic leadership which would
(in a refurbished version of the ideas of Stoecker and Friedrich Naumann)
assimilate the validi.e., non-Marxist, non-materialist aspects of the
socialist tradition. It was an idealism maintained in the teeth of near
despair, a belief in the necessity of maintaining cultural values despite
political catastrophe and in the possibility, therefore, of somehow holding
one's own. Just as the thought of Schopenhauer attained prominence a
generation late, through Nietzsche, so Nietzsche, in turn, achieved his
maximum influence only in the Weimar period, through Spengler. These are the
sources of the desperately, perversely idealistic national revolutionaries,
with their tough airs, who belong more appropriately in a discussion of the
decline of Weimar.
Existentialist Philosophy
The paradoxical combination of alienation and commitment is also
characteristic of the dominant formal philosophy of the Weimar period, which
again had as godfather a figure oft he nineteenth century and was in all
essentials prepared before 1914. The existentialist thinkers Martin
Heidegger and Karl Jaspers drew upon the Danish philosopher Soren
Kierkegaard (leaving aside his Christian orthodoxy) and, secondarily, on the
"phenomenology" of Edmund Husserl, who published his main work in 1900, to
propose a new systematic view of the nature of man and of his relations with
the external world. Heidegger and Jaspers were very far from being
popularizerstheir forbidding style would have been enough to prevent thatand
they were concerned with fundamental and perennial philosophical problems
(in particular, with rectifying Kant), not, except incidentally, with issues
of the day. Yet, while never becoming household words, their writings were
acknowledged during the Weimar Republic as being in the vanguard of thought
and were regarded, not only among academics who understood them, but also
among the educated or semi-educated public who merely caught their drift, as
meeting a current need.
The central idea was the necessity and the
possibility for the individual, immured though he was within the confines of
his subjective self, to know, to enter into, and to affect the world around
him. Kierkegaard had started with the unique concreteness of subjective
existence and the necessity, by an effort of will, of transcending it into
the world of impersonal, objective values. Husserl, seeking to bridge the
gap by way of epistemology, had sought to counter and to deny Kant's
separation between the individual and the objects of his perception. He
declared it possible to investigate the date of consciousness (phenomena")
directly, dispassionately, and without benefit of generalizing or
constructive theories. One development from this basis, corresponding
roughly to the objective, technological aspect of the Bauhaus, was the work
of Max Scheler in trying to produce, in contrast to Kant's formal ethics, an
entirely new set of moral laws derived from anthropological and historical
study. This enterprise raised the question of the nature and origins of
moral falsification or deception, and Scheler laid the foundations for the
''sociology of knowledge'' which Karl Mannheim subsequently popularized in
the English-speaking world. Rational analysis would enable men to avoid or
escape the deceptions to which their subjectivity exposed them.
Jaspers, however, asserted that men live in a ''universal state of
deception.'' Existentialism, corresponding more to the mystical side of the
Bauhaus, sought to resolve the dichotomy between individual existence and
trans-personal reality by abolishing it, by somehow absorbing the latter
into the former rather after the manner in which Dilthey, earlier, had
equated meaning in history with the total meaning of life. Heidegger, in
particular, tried to make sense of the world by analysis of ''existence,''
of the primordial fact of the living human being; but he never published
more than the first volume of his results. Existentialism as a whole is
redolent of the German tendency, throughout the nineteenth century, to try
to square the circle, to reconcile irreconcilables. In the circumstances of
the Weimar Republic, existentialism offered assurance to the individual that
he mattered by virtue of simply existing, and that, moreover, he could and
should alter his environment simply by virtue of determining to do so. In
this way the doctrine might be taken to suggest that defeat could be
converted into victory. It is surely no accident that existentialism became
the rage of the Left Bank only after France,s moral defeat in World War ll,
Sartre's fundamental exposition of the French version having appeared in
1943. Jaspers himself published, in 1931, a little book, The Present
Spiritual Condition, which was clairvoyant in its diagnosis at the same
time that it was itself a symptom of the condition it described. Like
Spengler, Jaspers believed that he could discern a turning point in world
history: ''Now that history has driven man from one form of existence to
another, from one consciousness of existence to another, he can no doubt
remember this, but he cannot go on in this way any longer. As in the very
beginning, something has happened to man which is expressed in the fact that
he confronts a void, not only objectively but also consciously, and that
now, with his memory of the past, he must make his way anew ex nihilo."