GER 216. German Civilization
An Online German Culture Course from the Reformation to the Present Day

 

 

 

 

Lesson 10

 

 


Weimar Culture

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The Great Disorder: German War, Revolution, and Inflation 1914-1923     

 

The gargantuan war machine that raged between 1914 and 1918 ground to pulp a generation of young men. The Great War or World War I polarized and devastated European civilization much more than the division and destruction brought on by the Protestant Reformation and the Thirty Years War centuries earlier. The "revaluation of all values" that Friedrich Nietzsche had so passionately called for in the 1880s did indeed come about, though scarcely in the way the ecstatic proponents of "reason" would have wished for. Nietzsche would have been appalled by the catastrophe the world allowed itself to stumble into. In 1914, the conglomerate of fighting forces included Turkey and Russia, Japan and Australia, Africa and the Middle East, the "Triple Alliance" (Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy. Italy later left the Alliance, while Bulgaria and Turkey joined.) and the Allies (France, Russia, Britain, USA). The conflict eventually involved 32 countries, 28 of which supported the Allies. [Insert: War Map: Pink represents the Allies, blue-green indicates the territories of Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and Turkey. Beige shows neutral countries. Red lines mark the front in 1914.] The great eradication of Germany's and Austria's intellectual, cultural and economic future began with their declaration of war against Serbia, and ended in utter defeat four years later. [Insert: Anti-German poster. Destroy This Mad Brute. Enlist. U.S. Army by H.R. Hopps. USA, 1917/18. Lithograph, DHM, Berlin.] The cataclysmic toll of life was equally devastating on the side of the victors in England, France, and Russia. In the third year of the war, Carl Zuckmayer, one of Germany's promising young poets, realized, as he wrote, "that the war was not a thunderbolt descending on mankind but the failure of a world, our world. It was the suicide of a world, the end of a world."  Airplanes, bombs, torpedoes, tanks, machine guns and nerve gas induced mass death on an industrial scale. More than 10 million soldiers died, more than 20 million were wounded. Revolutions and uprisings in Russia, Germany, Austria, Turkey, and other countries, replaced century-old monarchies with Soviet-style or parliamentary republics. The war left Germany with a plethora of economic, social, and political problems. In addition to enduring hyper-inflation and a large national debt, Germans were deeply embittered by the harsh terms of the Versailles Treaty, signed in June 1919, which formally ended the war. Among other things, the treaty called for German disarmament and large reparation payments to the Allies. Unable to meet these payments, Germany's currency collapsed, and inflation spiraled out of control.  In 1922, one American Dollar equaled four billion German Marks!  [Insert: Railroad ticket voucher for $125 or 5,000,000,000,000 Marks. Note: "Billion" in German refers to "trillion" in American terminology.] German businesses and households suffered huge financial losses. In January 1923, French and Belgian forces occupied Germany's main industrial region, the Ruhr, claiming that Germany had defaulted on reparation deliveries. The Republic was off to a bad start. Moreover, the hyper inflation and its devastating economic effects greatly damaged Germany's social and moral culture. It was one reason why so many Germans would acquiesce to the horrors that followed Adolf Hitler's rise to power in 1933.

 

The Weimar Republic 1919-1933

The Weimar Republic is a term used to describe the German republic that lasted from 1919 until 1933. The Republic was established after workers and troops in the German empire revolted in 1918 against the monarchy's refusal to end the war (1914-1918). On November 9, Emperor William II fled the country and a provisional coalition government was formed between the moderate Social Democrats (SPD) and the more radical Independent Social Democrats (USPD), who were hoping for a more fundamental socialist revolution. [Insert: Maria Juchacz was the first women delegate to speak to the new, democratically elected parliament in 1919.] The new National Assembly met in Weimar in February 1919 and wrote a constitution that established Germany as a democratic federal republic and provided for two houses of parliament, the Reichstag and the Reichsrat. Friedrich Ebert was elected president of the new Weimar Republic.

 

The "Versailles Settlement" And The Making Of Modern Europe

The peace treaty after the Great War is usually referred to as the "Versailles Settlement" [the treaty was negotiated in Versailles, Louis XIV's old palace outside Paris) between the victorious Allies and Germany, their strongest defeated opponent. The settlement meant the loss of 13 percent of Germany's territory, 10 percent of its population, and all its colonies, as well as the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires, and the creation of the borders of Western Europe essentially as they are today.  [Insert: 1919 cartoon captioned "Muzzled" about the newly founded League of Nation taming the "Dog of War".] Although it was not part of this peace settlement, southern Ireland also won its autonomy from Great Britain shortly after the war. In South-Eastern Europe, the settlement proved less permanent: Yugoslavia, whose protracted, agonizing breakup into Bosnia, Croatia, Slovenia, and Serbia brought another war to the region at the turn of the 21st century, was a Versailles creation.

 

Socialist Revolutions

World War I spawned several social revolutions across Europe, whose most dramatic outcome was the Russian Revolution of 1917, and the much shorter lived German revolution of 1918. [Insert: Street fighting in Berlin's newspaper district 1918.] Both were the culmination of historical processes whereby the idea of political equality as expressed by the French Revolution of 1789, broadened to include communist ideas of social and economic equalities. In German, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, Ernst Toller, Kurt Eisner, Eugen Levine, and Gustav Landauer stood at the helm of radical working class and revolutionary groups [Spartacists, USPD, and left-wing political parties in Germany]. During the winter of 1918/19, the communist inspired uprisings in Berlin, Munich, and other urban centers quickly escalated into street battles resembling civil war. The revolts were crushed by orders of the SPD government (Social Democrats), police, and right-wing militia called "Free Corps". Rosa Luxemburg, Liebknecht, Eisner, Levine, and Landauer were brutally murdered by police and Free Corps troops. These bloody interventions by militia, which were directed by the ruling Social Democrats, did irreparable damage to working-class unity in Weimar Germany. Worse yet, the infighting among left-wing and liberal parties throughout the 1920s benefited Hitler's rise to power in 1933.

 

 

 

 

Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919).  The Junius Pamphlet, 1916.

 

The War and the Workers. "One thing is certain. The World War is a turning point. It is foolish and mad to imagine that we need only survive the war, like a rabbit waiting out the storm under a bush, and, once it is over, can fall happily back into the old routine. The World War has altered the conditions of our struggle, and, most of all, it has changed us forever. Not that the basic law of capitalist development, the life-and-death war between capital and labor, will experience any amelioration. But now, in the midst of this war, the masks are falling, and the old familiar faces are smirking at us. The race for progress has received a mighty jolt from the eruption of the volcano of imperialism. The violence of the conflicts in the bosom of society, the enormousness of the tasks that tower up before the socialist proletariat - these make everything that has transpired in the history of the workers' movement appear as mere pleasure idylls."
Source: Junius-Broschüre in Rosa Luxemburg, Politische Schriften. Leipzig 1970.

In Germany's political landscape, the socialist activist Rosa Luxemburg was thrice handicapped being Polish, Jewish, and female.  However, Luxemburg became the most eloquent and influential leader of the German socialist movement during and after World War I. She was a staunch defender of Marxist doctrine, and a persuasive advocate for revolutionary action to stop the war and unite the working classes across Europe. Rosa Luxemburg spent much of World War I in jail, where she wrote and then smuggled out the pamphlet (left) published under the name "Junius," perhaps a reference to Lucius Junius Brutus, a republican hero of ancient Rome. After the war, her pamphlet became the guiding manifesto for the Spartacus League and later the Communist Party of Germany. Luxemburg along with Karl Liebknecht led the Spartacist movement until January 1919, when right-wing militias murdered both in Berlin.

 

 

Right-wing Putsch and Terror

 
After World War I, Germans from communists to ultra-conservatives were united in looking forward to their nation's regeneration. They were, however, deeply divided in their political aims, and in casting blame for their nation's crushing defeat. Several paramilitary "Free Corps" and nationalist militia units formed out of remainders of the old army, drawing younger people as well as mercenaries, militarists, and monarchists. They were radically anti-democratic, passionately nationalist, anti-Semitic, and opposed to the Versailles Peace treaty. Many hoarded arms to fight communists, anarchists, social democrats, pacifists, and pro-democracy alliances. In 1920, Free Corps groups attempted a political putsch to overthrow Germany's government. Encountering little police resistance, they occupied Berlin, and proclaimed their leader Wolfgang Kapp the new chancellor (Kapp Putsch). When the army refused to fight back and declared itself "neutral," the Weimar government fled from the capital. The local and state administration in Berlin, however, did not cooperate with the putschists, and the working-class parties proclaimed a general strike throughout Germany. This brought down the Kapp government within a few days. At the same time, however, the army's lack of action dramatically exposed its disregard for the new Republic. It was quick to fight leftist revolutionaries but "neutral" toward conservative radicals. The same bias permeated Weimar's justice system, as the mild punishments of Kapp and his followers revealed. Kapp's failure radicalized other ultra-nationalists, who increasingly resorted to terrorism. The murder of Bavaria's Prime Minister Kurt Eisner in February 1919 had set a bloody precedent. By 1922, terrorists had committed 356 political murders in Germany, including those of Matthias Erzberger, former Minister of Finance, and Germany's Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau. Adolf Hitler's first attempt to seize power came in 1923 in the so-called Munich "Beer Hall Putsch". It failed as well, and he was arrested, and sentenced to 5 years in jail, of which he served 9 months. The trial attracted considerable public attention and Hitler skillfully used the publicity to transform a political defeat into a propaganda victory.

 

Weimar Culture

 

The Weimar Republic, however ailing in economic and political terms, was one of the most fertile grounds for modern arts and sciences in German cultural history. Berlin, in particular, became a thriving center of many new art movements such as Expressionism (1911-1924), Dadaism (1917-1924), and New Sobriety (1924-1932). Berlin's status as Germany's avant-garde culture capital after 1918 resembled that of New York after 1945. Other leading centers of modernist art and culture included Cologne, Frankfurt, Munich, and Weimar with its new Bauhaus School, which revolutionized modern architecture throughout the world.

In hindsight, the period between the two world wars can be characterized as lighthearted, irreverent and optimistic, even giddy at having survived on the one hand, and despairing at a world irrevocably scarred by total war on the other. Modernism became the dominant style of the postwar period. Whereas the early experimental and creative period of Modernism began well before the war, German Modernism of the 1920s was marked by a growing tendency to shape mass culture through " a new spirit of construction and synthesis, guided by clear ideas." (Le Courbusier) The new cultural initiatives focused on public housing, factories, music halls, laboratories, department stores, circuses and cinemas. [Insert: Advertising 1929. "Department Store Clothing: The Road to Success". DHM] Economy, efficiency, and purity (New Sobriety) replaced exaggeration, distortion, and caricature (Expressionism, Dadaism) as unitary principles in the arts.

The sheer intellectual productivity of the Weimar period was enormous. It seemed that the chaos of defeat, revolution, and inflation had loosened old cultural habits and jolted the curiosity of a new ''mass society.'' In this way, the modernist movement suddenly found new audiences. New film companies (UFA) made German cinema one of the most notable in the world. Leading composers of modern, atonal music like Alban Berg, and Arnold Schönberg, and emigres like Igor Stravinsky presented their works to new radio audiences. The Frankfurt Institute for Social Research (with Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Erich Fromm, Walter Benjamin, Karl Mannheim) developed critical cultural theories inspired by a synthesis of Marxism and Freudian psychoanalysis that have proven highly influential in twentieth-century thought. Thomas Mann and Hermann Hesse explored the limits of modernist writing. Bertolt Brecht broke with old theater traditions, while Max Reinhardt and Erwin Piscator staged world famous theater productions. Tilla Durieux revolutionized stage acting. Hans Poelzig designed fascinating expressionist architecture.  [Insert: Hans Poelzig. Auditorium of the Grosses Schauspielhaus Theater in Berlin 1919.]

Much of Weimar culture showed great interest in the United States. The assembly line technique of the American auto industry, the new skyscrapers, American mass culture and advertisement appeared as thye new epitomes of modernity to many Weimar artists. In addition to the impact of American popular culture, Russian modernism exerted a strong influence on Weimar Germany. The revolutionary posters, graphics, and mass architecture of the young Soviet Union seemed representative to many Weimar artists of a new and more egalitarian world. [Insert: Housing project in Berlin. Siemensstadt 1929.]

Many of the modernist developments had their origins in prewar Germany and had claimed center stage in the experimental cultural climate of the new Republic. This was a mixed blessing, however, since broad segments of the German public in Germany still saw these new cultural and intellectual trends as threats to civilization, and offensive to traditional values, decency, and morality. Anti-republicanism and anti-modernism often joined in the minds of conservative journalists, critics, politicians, and church representatives. To the political right, Weimar Culture confirmed the image of an amoral, hedonistic, and indulgent society, mass culture's equivalent to the economy's hyperinflation. The fact that many leading artists like Brecht, Piscator, Grosz, Heartfield (photography), and the Bauhaus School faculty freely associated with the Communist Party or with other forms of socialism branded the new trends as doubly dangerous. [Insert: The real meaning of the Hitler salute. John Heartfield, anti-Nazi photomontage, 1932.]

When the Nazis came to power in 1933 most of the exponents of Weimar Modernism had to emigrate. Hitler declared many of its movements as "degenerate" and "un-German".  The public book burning organized by the Nazis condemned modernist thought, literature, and art by Jews and non-Jews alike. The unique experiment of Weimar Culture, on which much of the advanced arts and sciences had thrived, came to a sudden and tragic end. Many physicists, social scientists, film directors, and writers went into exile in Mexico, Palestine, Sweden, Switzerland, the United States and many other countries.

 

Physics and Philosophy: Albert Einstein and Walter Benjamin

 

 

The Weimar Republic inherited superb universities and science centers from the German Empire. Göttingen and Berlin were the world's most famous centers for physics (Max Planck received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1918), and German was the international research language in the natural sciences. Foremost among Germany's scientists was Albert Einstein (1897-1955), who grew up in Bavaria and lived and taught in Berlin. Strictly speaking, much of Einstein's research predated World War I, but his ideas began to percolate through the culture at large only during the 1920s. His ideas, like those of Darwin, had an incalculable effect on the way we view our world. Einstein's mind-bending theory that time and space are not absolute but relative to the observer was an intellectual bomb. A still greater, and much graver type of discovery would result from his elegantly simple formula equating energy with matter and the speed of light (E=mc2), which later enabled the development of the atomic bomb in 1945. [Insert: Einstein first visited the United States in 1921 to help raise funds for the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.  Image © Brown Brothers, Sterling, PA.]

In one of Einstein's letters, he emphasized that "concern for man himself must always constitute the chief objective of all technological effort -- concern for the big, unsolved problems of how to organize human work and the distribution of commodities in such a manner as to assure that the results of our scientific thinking may be a blessing to mankind, and not a curse."

Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) was one of Weimar Germany's most original and influential thinkers and cultural critics. Benjamin grew up in Berlin around 1900, where he developed a keen eye for the impact of Modernism on urban culture. His activities in the radical section of the German Youth Movement, his association with the Frankfurt School, and his formative reflections on critical sociology, modern literary criticism, socialism and Zionism make Walter Benjamin an indispensable guide to the enchantments and ruins of Weimar culture. Here is an excerpt of Benjamin's "On the Concept of History", written in 1940:

"A Paul Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history.  His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress." 

 

 

 

Architecture: The Bauhaus School

 

 

The cultural vitality and diversity of the Weimar period was best represented by the innovative curriculum of the Bauhaus School of architecture in Weimar. The combination of artistic vision and pedagogy was the work of its founder, Walter Gropius. His teaching emphasized close links between art, architecture, industry, and mass production. His programs called for a new amalgamation of modern arts and crafts, and the necessary unity of modern art, design, and technology.

 

 

 

Epic Theater: Bertolt Brecht

 

Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) was one of Germany's most influential playwrights and theater theoreticians in the 20th century. Also a poet of formidable gifts and considerable output, Brecht first attracted attention in the 1920s with irreverent and provocative plays, including the Threepenny Opera, with music composed by Kurt Weill. Brecht was fled from Nazi-Germany because of his leftist political beliefs and his open opposition to Hitler's regime. He and his family spent 14 years in exile in Scandinavia and the United States. Brecht returned to Europe in 1947, and  moved to East Berlin where he remained until his death. In the 1950s he became an internationally acclaimed theater director through productions of his plays Galileo Galilei and Mother Courage and Her Children by the Berliner Ensemble, a theater company headed by his wife, actor Helene Weigel.

 

 

 

Weimar Film

 

The Weimar Republic is often associated with the metropolis, the roaring twenties, social chang, political turmoil, industrialization, and the beginnings of German cinema. The most enduring of the films of the 1920's are those that came out of the expressionist movement. As an artistic movement, German expressionism antedated WWI. Expressionist cinema produced two landmark horror films in the wake of World War I: The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari (1919), written by Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer and directed by Robert Wiene.   Caligari's distorted sets and camera angels brought to an unrelenting sense of doom and despair to its tale of a murderous sleepwalker controlled by a sinister hypnotist. F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu (1922), an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula, depicted the vampire's supernatural powers through imaginative camera sequences. Elements of horror also distinguished such German silent movies as Paul Wegener's fantasy The Golem (1920), Wiene's thriller Hands Of Orlac (1925), and Fritz Lang's science-fiction classic Metropolis (1926), which many critics still regard as Weimar Germany's most accomplished film. It depicts a futuristic city, where industry controls a dazzling world of skyscraper entertainment. Deep below the streets, however, modern workers are toiling in twelve-hour shifts to keep the elites above living in splendor. Under the leadership of an angelic priestess, the oppressed rise up against their domination by heartless management, soulless machines, and inhumane technologies. Metropolis emphasizes the importance of synthesizing spiritual and material values, and the notion that through choas and destruction a new and better world might come about. The overthrow of old oppressive orders appeared essential for the coming of the "New Man" and the establishment of the "Kingdom of Love". The final movie title reads: "There can be no understanding between the hand and the brain unless the heart acts as mediator."

 

Two Superstars of the Screen

 

Asta Nielsen, 1881-1972, Danish actress, who became one of the first superstars of the silent era. In 1911 she went to Germany, where she founded her own production company and played in more than 70 films, finishing with the sound film Unmögliche Liebe (1932, Impossible Love). She was equally adept at playing  flappers, older women, harlots, proletarians, and women in love. Asta Nielsen's fame rested on her acting skills in films about powerful and tragic love affairs, in which her characters suffered and died or killed in despair, for instance Poor Jenny (1912), and The Joyless Street, which portrayed the social problems of a family in Vienna following World War I. [Insert: Asta Nielsen in Joyless Street, 1925]  Among Nielsen's most notable films after the war included a version of Hamlet (1920), which was not so much a Shakespearean film as it was an exploration of a then-current theory that the real Hamlet had been, in fact, a woman. Nielsen played the title role. She continued to play a wide variety of film roles until the advent of the talkies in the late 1920s.

Marlene Dietrich was born in 1901 in Berlin. Her big break came when director Josef von Sternberg cast her to play Lola-Lola, a glamorous vamp in Germany's first talking movie The Blue Angel (1930). The film shows her as a seductive cabaret singer who first captivates and then degrades a respected, conservative, middle-aged man, who has lost touch with reality. After the 1930s, Dietrich worked primarily in the United States, achieving superstar fame with films like Morocco, Shanghai Express (1932), and Blonde Venus (1932). [Insert: Dietrich in Morocco, 1930] She became an American citizen in 1939, while her films were banned in Germany because she had refused to work for the Nazis and star in German films. Dietrich was awarded the American Medal of Freedom for her war-time performances. Dietrich wrote three volumes of memoirs: Marlene Dietrich's ABC (1961), My Life Story (1979) and Marlene (1987).  She died in 1992.

 

 

 

The Youth Movement

 

The Weimar youth movement originated in the German empire around the turn of the century. The early youth movement represented a wide spectrum of political ideologies and interests, including ecologically oriented groups like the Wandervogel (Roamers), sports and nudist groups like the Freideutsche Jugend (Free German Youth), hiking organizations like Blau-Weiss (German-Jewish Youth), socialist folklore groups like the Arbeiterjugend (Workers' Youth), nationalist or anti-Semitic crusaders like the Germanische Glaubensgemeinschaft (Germanic Faith Coalition), and, later, the Nazi Hitlerjugend (Hitler Youth). Before and after World War I, Germany's youth was seen as society's most vital force, its most dynamic, evolutionary, and progressive catalyst for change away from an old, decaying political system to a new and healthier social body.  Regardless of their political affiliation, young people were seen as malleable enough to advance the tenets of whatever ideologies or Weltanschauung they came to represent, whether liberal, modernist, alternative, nationalist, socialist, or fascist. Having swept away the values of the past in the aftermath of the war, Weimar youth grew up to become the embodiment of a new community of the future. Expressionists envisioned the "new man" as a pacifist with strong humanist ties. Communist youth propagated a new spirit of international "brotherhood" and working class unity. On the political right, youth dreamed of the creation of a new national community, out of which would grow "a new nation, a new form of humanity and a new order of living space." By the mid 1920s, the Weimar youth movement had turned "brown". Right-wing and so-called  "volkish", nationalist, fascist and national socialist organizations recruited far more members than socialist and liberal youth groups. The Nazi's youth movement comprised the Hitlerjugend (Hitler Youth) for boys and the Bund Deutscher Mädel (League of German Maidens) for girls in the movement. The Hitler Youth was set up in 1926, and the League of German Maidens in 1930. By 1934, total membership of these organizations had reached 1.5 million. [Insert above left: Light's prayer, the German Youth movement icon poster by Fidus. Insert above right: Poster for the early youth movement by Fidus (Hugo Höppner). "May Celebration" 1905, portraying the new spirit of youth inspired by notions of Germanic freedoms and adventures to overcome the decadence of modern life.]

Many German girls were attracted to the Bund Deutscher Mädel (BDM) because it provided an escape from tedious home lives under the scrutiny of their parents. Youth organizations gave them opportunities to join their peers on hikes and camping trips, and to partake in group activities. In her autobiography, Margarete Hannsmann, a former BDM member, describes how these organizations allowed girls to do what hitherto only their brothers were allowed to do. Others joined the organization in order "to feel important" and "not excluded from the world of adults". The BDM held particular appeal to girls from middle-class families. These children were traditionally subjected to strong parental discipline. The movement gave them a sense of camaraderie, involvement in their national cause, excitement and independence. Melita Maschmann, a former BDM leader, has described how she wished to escape from her "childish, narrow life" and "to follow a different road from the conservative one prescribed by family tradition". In this respect, these organizations had a modernizing and liberating effect upon many German girls. However, in place of parental influence came state authority and social control. [Insert: Nazi advertising poster "Bund Deutscher Mädel in der Hitler Jugend" for the girls club in the Hitler Youth, 1933.]

 

 

Hitler's Rise to Power

 

A worldwide economic depression reached Germany in 1929 (Black Friday), and cast the Weimar Republic into crisis. In March 1930, Heinrich Brüning became Chancellor, and began an austerity program by cutting government spending. He also secured an agreement in Lausanne, Switzerland, that effectively ended German reparations payments for World War I. But Brüning's deflationary policies were widely unpopular, and he was dismissed from office. Taking advantage of the disorder caused by the economic crisis were the radical parties on both ends of the political spectrum: the German  Communist party, which was dedicated to disrupting the parliamentary republic, and Adolf Hitler's National Socialist German Workers' Party (Nazis), a nationalistic (volkish), anti-capitalist and anti-Semitic party. New Reichstag (parliament) elections were held in September 1930, which made the Nazis the second largest party in Germany (Nazi landslide).  [Insert: German elections 1928-1932. The spectrum includes communists (KPD) and social democrats (SPD), liberals (DDP), Catholics (CENTER), conservatives (DVP, BVP), nationalists (DNVP), and fascists (NSDAP)] This result sent shock waves through the political system and obscured the sizable increase of the Communists, who went from 54 to 77 seats in the Reichstag. As the depression deepend in the early 1930s, the Nazis consolidated their gains by reaching out to supporters in all sectors of society, particularly the youth movement and right-wing coalitions. [Insert: Album cover 1930. "What the SA Man Sings." Nazi Songs.] In the elections of July 1932, the Nazis became the largest party in the Reichstag. President Hindenburg appointed Hitler as German Chancellor on January 30, 1933. Hitler, however, soon abolished parliamentary procedures, dissolved the office of President, and declared himself Führer (leader) of the Third Reich, thus ending the Weimar Republic.

 

 

Assignments for Lesson 10

 

(1) Read the novel Right and Left in the anthology Right and Left and the Legend of the Holy Drinker by Joseph Roth, Michael Hofmann (Translator) / Paperback. I SBN: 0879514566.

 

(2)   Discuss this Lesson on the Discussion Board

 

 

Preview: Reading Assignment for Lesson 11

 

Read text handout from Women of Exile

 

Where do you want to go next?

Ø       Quiz 1 for Lesson 10 [civilization]

Ø       Quiz 2 for Lesson 10 [text]

Ø       Discuss this Lesson on the Discussion Board

Ø       Course Web Trails

 

 

Books and Webpages of Interest

Intellectual and Cultural

                                    Women and the Family

 

 

A. Lixl. October 2001