6/30/2023 0 Comments Weimar moment definitionThey had brought a lorry and were piling it with the publisher's books. This morning, as I was walking down the Bülowstrasse, the Nazis were raiding the house of a small liberal pacifist publisher. Here he stepped briefly out of his passive role, his narration taking on a more sardonic tone. Toward the end of The Berlin Stories, Isherwood brought in troubling acts of violence he witnessed against Jews, homosexuals, Social Democrats and Communists. You may not know it, but you are greeting danger.” Alas, forewarned is not forearmed in this case. “Be careful when you meet a sweet blonde stranger. Marlene Dietrich's Lola does the same in Josef von Sternberg's Blue Angel(1930), although she's good enough to warn her prospective lovers in advance. Pabst give us Louise Brooks as Lulu, a captivating and utterly amoral young woman who swings both ways, driving her lovers mad with frustrated desire. Even the Rome of Suetonius had not known orgies like the Berlin transvestite balls, where hundreds of men in women's clothes and women in men's clothes danced under the benevolent eyes of the police.” Films from the era capture the polysexuality of Berlin's night clubs. “The Germans brought to perversion all their vehemence and love of system. “Berlin transformed itself into the Babel of the world,” he wrote in his autobiography, The World of Yesterday (1942). Some he found wanting for other reasons, for callousness or a lack of generosity toward others, for bad taste in clothes or furnishings.īy way of contrast, the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig was horrified by Weimar Germany. Mind you, he did not judge his characters, at least, not for their sexual behavior. In the stories he published in the mid to late 1930s, which would become the basis for the musical and film Cabaret, Isherwood was circumspect about his motivations, narrating events passively, as an outsider who observes but does not participate in the promiscuity he describes. Before the month was out, he'd gotten involved with a blond German boy, the very type he'd fantasized about meeting. Auden) had promised him that he would find the city liberating and so he did. By the end of the New Republic essay, he was advocating action, passion, and force as an alternative to the cold rationalism, tolerance, and open mindedness he blamed for “liberalism's deep-seated impotence.” In fact, this same accusation had already been leveled at the Weimar Republic by the Nazis, and in remarkably similar terms.Ĭhristopher Isherwood came to Germany in 1929 for one thing only: “Berlin meant Boys,” he confessed in his memoir. He himself had been slow to recognize Hitler's barbarism, and chose to suspend judgement regarding the Soviet experiment for twenty years, but he now condemned liberal habits of mind for degrading America, sapping it of energy and the moral courage required to combat political extremism. Mumford attacked the complacency of American intellectuals who were blind to the “destruction, malice, violence” of the Nazi regime. Today liberals, by their unwillingness to admit the consequences of a victory by Hitler and Stalin, are emotionally on the side of “peace” - when peace, so-called, at this moment means capitulation to the forces that will not merely wipe out liberalism but will overthrow certain precious principles with which one element of liberalism has been indelibly associated: freedom of thought, belief in an objective reason, belief in human dignity. “The isolationism that is preached by our liberals today means fascism tomorrow,” he warned. Just a few days ago, The New Republic posted a reprint of Louis Mumford's essay, “The Corruption of Liberalism,” a call to arms first published in April 1940. The Weimar Republic is everybody's favorite example of liberalism gone wrong. Hadn't there been something youthfully heartless in my enjoyment of the spectacle of Berlin in the early thirties, with its poverty, its political hatred and its despair?
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