Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy

[Dave Monroe]

Weimar Germany:
Promise and Tragedy

Paper | 2009 | $19.95 / £11.95
Cloth | 2007 | $29.95 / £21.95
448 pp. | 6 x 9 | 8 color illus. 52 halftones.


Weimar Germany still fascinates us, and now this complex and
remarkably creative period and place has the history it deserves. Eric
Weitz's Weimar Germany reveals the Weimar era as a time of strikingly
progressive achievements--and even greater promise. With a rich
thematic narrative and detailed portraits of some of Weimar's greatest
figures, this comprehensive history recaptures the excitement and
drama as it unfolded, viewing Weimar in its own right--and not as a
mere prelude to the Nazi era.

Weimar Germany tells how Germans rose from the defeat of World War I
and the turbulence of revolution to forge democratic institutions and
make Berlin a world capital of avant-garde art. Setting the stage for
this story, Weitz takes the reader on a walking tour of Berlin to see
and feel what life was like there in the 1920s, when modernity and the
modern city--with its bright lights, cinemas, "new women," cabarets,
and sleek department stores--were new. We learn how Germans enjoyed
better working conditions and new social benefits and listened to the
utopian prophets of everything from radical socialism to communal
housing to nudism. Weimar Germany also explores the period's
revolutionary cultural creativity, from the new architecture of Erich
Mendelsohn, Bruno Taut, and Walter Gropius to Hannah Höch's
photomontages and Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's theater. Other
chapters assess the period's turbulent politics and economy, and the
recipes for fulfilling sex lives propounded by new "sexologists." Yet
Weimar Germany also shows how entrenched elites continually challenged
Weimar's achievements and ultimately joined with a new radical Right
led by the Nazis to form a coalition that destroyed the republic.

Thoroughly up-to-date, skillfully written, and strikingly illustrated,
Weimar Germany brings to life as never before an era of creativity
unmatched in the twentieth century-one whose influence and inspiration
we still feel today.

http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8460.html

Introduction [HTML] or [PDF]

http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/i8460.html
http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/i8460.pdf

Google full text of this book:

http://books.google.com/books/princeton?id=9iGYgtykzToC

Podcast interview with
Eric D. Weitz

http://press.princeton.edu/podcasts/weitz.mp3