Contests over the term politics, over the boundaries that distinguished politics from non-politics, were one of the distinguishing features of the Weimar Republic. Not only did the disciplines of history, philosophy, law, sociology, and pedagogy each define this boundary in different terms, but participants in the debate also distinguished between ideal and real politics, politics at the level of state, and the dissemination of politics through society and citizenry.Footnote 1 The fact that Weimar began with a revolution, the abdication of the Kaiser, and military defeat meant an eruption of politicization in 1918–19, whereby political organs of state and civil society sought in unprecedented fashion to draw Germans into parties and parliaments, associations, and activist societies. “The German people would still consist of ninety percent unpolitical people, if Social Democracy had not become a political school for the people,” Otto Braun claimed in Vorwärts in 1925.Footnote 2 Politics and politicization generated not only political acts—votes, strikes, and vocal demonstrations—but also cultural milieus of Socialists and Communists, Catholics and liberal Democrats, nationalists, and eventually Nazis. In Weimar Germany there was little room for the “unpolitical” citizen of the prewar era, held up as a model in a famous tract of 1918 by Thomas Mann.Footnote 3
In most historical studies of the Weimar Republic, political culture is understood in terms of the day-to-day practices of political institutions and politicians and encompasses actions and decisions at the highest levels of governance as well as those that took place in the streets and neighborhoods, pubs and union halls. In the annals of the social sciences, political culture encompasses a somewhat wider framework of cultural dispositions—codes of conduct, values, assumptions, identifications, and contests that characterize the relationship between citizens and the political system of governance.Footnote 4 Even if German cultural history has flourished in recent years, the pairing of the terms politics and culture in most German history-writing has presumed a dominant role for politics in defining the parameters of the social, economic, and cultural spheres. If culture often features as the realm of visionary imagination, politics usually occupies a far more conventional and predictable place in the narratives of Weimar history. In fact, the two terms often have a dichotomous relationship by which culture represented the republic's promise, while its politics are viewed as a tragic chain of crises, events, and decisions that culminated in its collapse.Footnote 5 Culture and politics also form contrasting pathways through the German twentieth century: the vibrant modernist culture of the Weimar period long outlived 1933 and the exile of its artists, writers, and intellectuals, while the politics of the republic were expunged from the memory of the new postwar republic, even constituting its “counterimage.”Footnote 6
A crucial impulse of recent scholarship in the history of Weimar Germany is the disentangling and rethinking of the relationship between politics and culture. Peter Fritzsche's essays of the mid-1990s figure as forerunners in this undertaking and continue to resonate in the work of the younger scholars featured in this forum. In posing the polemical question, “did Weimar fail?,” Fritzsche highlighted Weimar's unusual melding of political and cultural modernism, arguing that “much more than parliamentary democracy was at stake” in the republic's struggle to survive.Footnote 7 In suggesting that both Weimar politics and culture constituted “landscapes of danger and design,” Fritzsche posited a fluid relationship between cultural experiments and the social initiatives of Left and Right that both took shape in the laboratory of Weimar democracy. Furthermore, Fritzsche approached crisis as a particular kind of Weimar consciousness, noting that the “prevalent feeling of discontinuity and flux” may have spurred on a “reckless politics”—the Gefahrlandschaft—but also fostered cultural and social blueprints—the Planlandschaft—designed to manage the repeated states of emergency. Renovation and crisis, he argued, belonged to the same topography of political culture in Weimar Germany.Footnote 8
Peter Fritzsche's stocktaking of Weimar historiography was part of a gradual turn toward the study of cultural representations, of political languages, symbols, and images in German history to which this forum attests. It is worth noting that the scholars whose work is featured here came of age in the aftermath of the Sonderweg debates and at a time when the lines that had once distinguished social from political and cultural from intellectual history had already blurred.Footnote 9 The shifting interest among historians in analysis of cultural representations was sparked by the “new cultural history,” cultural anthropology, and British cultural studies, as well as the interdisciplinary reception of new historicism and the works of Michel Foucault, and a new engagement with visual culture.Footnote 10 Even as German Gesellschaftsgeschichte continued to flourish, German history has also seen a generational shift away from social and political history toward cultural history during the last ten to fifteen years.Footnote 11 The embrace of the term “political culture” in German history was part of a new preoccupation with the cultural histories of both politics and the social, represented in the flourishing study of national identity and Heimat; of experiences, mentalities, and meanings in the history of war and peace, colonialism and empire; of languages and rhetorics in the history of labor, social reform, and welfare and in the study of gender, sexuality, and scientification of the social. New understandings of politics as a communicative process or space focused attention on political semantics and semiotics and on the mediation of politics through visual, textual, and performative representations.Footnote 12
These broader shifts formed the backdrop for the emergence of a cultural history of Weimar politics—of political parties, elections, institutions of governance, and the practices of civil society—with particular attention to their cultural representations, political languages, sentiments, and political symbols.Footnote 13 Wolfgang Hardtwig marked this transition in 2005 with a special issue of Geschichte und Gesellschaft on the “politische Kulturgeschichte” of the interwar period that featured essays on body politics, popular myths, forms of sociability and consumption, emotions, expectations, and new notions of the subject.Footnote 14 Whether termed a cultural history of politics or a political history of culture, new understandings of the relationship between culture and politics tested the previous limitations of both terms and challenged some of the keywords of historical writing on Weimar Germany, for example, the concept of crisis that has been pivotal in historical interpretations of the republic since the publication of Detlev J. K. Peukert's history of the Weimar period as a “crisis of classical modernity.”Footnote 15 In recasting the relationship between politics and culture, historians have also had much to learn from the disciplines of cultural studies, film, history, art history, and gender studies. In the foreground of the interdisciplinary rethinking of Weimar political culture are the new publics, subjectivities, sentiments, and symbols, the notions of time, space, and aesthetics that emerged during the republic, not only in the form of new citizenships or social movements, new sexualities and notions of reproductive rights, but also in the realms of visual culture and consumption, popular culture, and mass entertainment.Footnote 16
The Political Symbols and Semantics of Democracy
The essays presented here represent the work of a group of younger scholars whose own dissertations and first books have been a vital part of these new scholarly approaches to the political culture of the Weimar Republic. In their explorations of political rhetorics, symbols, myths, and rituals, they attend to the cultural forms—textual, visual, performative—through which the high-stakes contests over Weimar democracy were mediated, suggesting intriguing connections between the politics of aesthetics and the aestheticization of politics. Taken together these essays deliver powerful evidence that counters the long-standing presumption that Weimar was a republic without republicans, a democracy defined by the deficits of its symbolic or sentimental undergirdings. Instead, these essays illuminate the performative and symbolic arenas in which Weimar democracy sought to assert and defend itself, from spectacles and sports festivals to funerals and celebrations of the constitution. That these struggles often succeeded in securing democratic space, upholding its symbols, or mobilizing sentiments in its favor is the untold—or at least underanalyzed—side of Weimar's history that these essays illuminate. Political documents or institutions, such as the Weimar constitution, acquired meaning and encouraged loyalties through the cultural celebrations of Constitution Day, encompassing flags, songs, theater performances, and dance troupes, as the essays by Manuela Achilles and Nadine Rossol illustrate, or through the parades and sports festivals of the Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold, the largest pro-republican civic organization, analyzed by Eric Bryden. Although the republic's founding years were indisputably marked by a crisis of political representation, Rüdiger Graf's article challenges the usual interpretations of crisis as a linear and irreversible process of “downward development” toward Weimar's catastrophic end. Instead, Graf situates the rhetorics of crisis in the experiences of contemporaries who lived through them, noting that crisis most often signaled a moment of decision or action when the future remained undecided and optimistic outcomes were still possible.
These explorations of political symbols and rhetorics raise fundamental questions about the temporal and narrative framing of Weimar history. For one, these essays situate their analysis of symbols and rhetorics in deep synchronic contexts rather than in the familiar “structure of anticipation that inscribes Weimar's end into its beginning.”Footnote 17 Each essay charts change over time—for example, the growing popularity of the Constitution Day celebrations—but does not embed these changes in the causal chain of events that culminates in the republic's collapse. In fact, some German historians dismiss this kind of cultural analysis of politics for this very reason—because the symbols and semantics under investigation here were ultimately unable to legitimate or secure republican governance against its opponents. So as interesting as these struggles over symbols and semantics, myths and emotions might be, their failure to change the course of the republic's apparently inexorable development toward collapse confirms their irrelevance to the founding and ultimate fall of the republic. Of course we could make the same observation about the parties and parliamentary structures of the Weimar Republic, which similarly failed to legitimate or uphold the republic but remain nonetheless the core of the republic's dramatic struggle for survival. Thus one question that emerges from this juxtaposition of essays is whether the collapse of the republic must always be “the pivotal point of its history” regardless of the particular topic at hand.Footnote 18 Turning now to the individual essays in this forum, I would like to highlight what we miss if we write a history of Weimar democracy without its symbolic and sentimental underpinnings.
Experience and Temporality
If there is one deficit in the very expansive historiography on Weimar Germany, it is analysis of lived experience, both everyday practices and most notably the mentalities, consciousness, and emotions of actors and subjects in the drama of the Weimar Republic. These essays make clear that Weimar actors scarcely experienced time in the linear form that characterizes most narrative emplotments of the republic's history. Rather the articles featured here emphasize the contingency and undecidability of the Weimar Republic at many of its turning points, the simultaneous inhabitance of distinct time zones of past (the traumatic past of total war and defeat), present, and a sense of futurity that was both promising and unnerving.Footnote 19 Rüdiger Graf's study probes contemporaries' widely variant uses of the concept of crisis to describe their experiences, noting that historians have simplified and reified crisis as a causal explanation for the collapse of the republic. Although many historians have indeed written Weimar's collapse into its beginnings, Graf's essay makes clear that contemporaries shared neither the temporal framework of inexorable decline nor the negative dispositions that are usually associated with crisis. Graf is interested in who defined crises and in what terms; how crises appeared as related, distinct, or overlapping; and the strategies of action that different diagnoses of crisis implied. The insight that crisis, like democracy and republican national identity, constituted a site of imagination and contest is an important corrective to Weimar historiography. The terms of crisis offer insights into how contemporaries experienced time—as a “Zeitenwende,” as “epochal change between different worlds.” Graf also suggests that living in the future tense was an aspect of Weimar subjectivity that was shared across the political spectrum. In Graf's view, crisis was never an end point but a “time of decision” that held out the prospect of a better future.Footnote 20
As a way to talk about the future, crisis talk more often than not reflected belief in “the malleability of fundamental political, social, and economic conditions” rather than a condemnation to doom and decline.Footnote 21 As Graf demonstrates in his monograph, Die Zukunft der Weimarer Republik, rhetorics of crisis could encompass optimistic and pessimistic expectations, evolutionary and revolutionary notions of change, and a range of temporal and spatial visions about when and where the imagined future could be realized.Footnote 22 For example, both the Communist Party and the right-wing publication, Die Tat, welcomed the prospect of crisis as promising new opportunities “to overcome the existing order.”Footnote 23 Even in the last years of the republic, when the crises of economy, politics, and society coincided to form a “Krisenknäuel,” the concept of crisis lacked the cohesion that historians usually ascribe to it. Indeed, Socialists and Communists, nationalists and liberals all diagnosed the Great Depression as a crisis but offered prognoses for overcoming it in sharply divergent terms.Footnote 24
The essays by Manuela Achilles, Eric Bryden, and Nadine Rossol offer a different kind of temporal reframing of Weimar history by shifting attention to the middle years of the republic, when the project of democracy began to mature and take hold, fostered not least by the mobilizations of languages and images, myths, and symbols in its favor. Instead of tracing the roots of the republic's collapse, these essays capture the process of the republic coming into its own and analyze its efforts, while still a “fledgling republic,” “a nascent regime-in-the-making,” to establish the symbols and semantics of a new democratic culture against all odds and opponents. Far from careening from crisis to crisis toward inevitable collapse, these authors show that the republic was often most assertive when the stakes of its survival were highest. While some historians would view the republic as already doomed in 1922–23, these essays explicate the reinvigoration of the republic in the wake of economic turmoil, political murder, and near civil war, a process that involved both the refiguring of its symbolic self-representation and the mobilization of emotional identifications and affinities with the republic.
The Struggle for Democracy: Spectacles, Symbols, and Public Space
Although the Weimar Republic may have lacked “a founding ritual,” these essays make clear that it did not suffer from a “rationality devoid of symbols” or a dearth of democratic affinities and loyalties.Footnote 25 In these essays, the cultural representations of democracy reach from the highest level of state—the office of the Reichskunstwart, located in the Ministry of the Interior—to the Reichsbanner as an organ of civil society and civil defense, and to the citizens who gathered on the sidewalks and street corners as participants in the popular celebrations of the constitution, in republican parades, theater performances, and sports festivals. Working against the “erasure of the republic's democratic symbolism and practices from the historical record,” Manuela Achilles analyzes the struggle of the republican state for symbolic hegemony and its efforts to bind collective sentiment in favor of democracy.Footnote 26 Focusing on the annual celebrations of Constitution Day, Achilles notes that the “labor of democratic representation” (Achilles) took place at the highest levels of a state that was well aware of “the very real and pertinent realities of social and political disintegration” that it faced.Footnote 27 Performed and symbolized through the Constitution Day celebrations, democracy meant national integration and cultivation of a “legally coded civic mode of national identification” which organizers hoped would “transcend the confines of social-moral milieus and political camps.”Footnote 28 The symbolic and performative politics of the republican state figure here as a version of Realpolitik, consciously implemented by a state that was still capable of writing—and staging—its own script until at least 1929.
Constitution Day was celebrated for the first time in 1921 in a small circle of republican officials, but its annual commemoration gained importance and popularity throughout the 1920s, even if was never declared an official national holiday. Achilles charts the deliberate work of Reichskunstwart Edwin Redslob in fashioning this republican holiday as part of his ambitious cultural—and explicitly political—project of “Formgebung,” that is, the task of outfitting the republic with the very political symbols that historians have long claimed it lacked.Footnote 29 If the goal of Constitution Day was to render the constitution a living document at the heart of civil society and state, a “site of national integration,” this took place in the context of Redslob's systematic refashioning of “the national symbols of sovereignty and authority (flags, coats of arms, border posts, etc.) as well as those of authentication and exchange (coins, bills, postage stamps),” and his envisioned projects in the realms of art and design, literature, music, and film.Footnote 30 Achilles and Rossol agree that by the late 1920s, the republican state had come to recognize the growing importance of the visual mediation of politics. While a torch-lit march of thousands took place in Berlin to honor the constitution in August 1927, the tenth anniversary celebration in August 1929 was far more elaborate, involving more than three hundred artistic events, including sports shows and a mass movement play including thousands of schoolchildren.Footnote 31 Surrounding the founding document of the republic with visual, spectacular performances was one of the last acts of the Weimar Republic, an act that according to Rossol was inherently democratic and aimed to allow citizens a sense of participation in the state.Footnote 32 In Rossol's view, the fact that the Nazis would co-opt and perfect these same aesthetic forms a few years later—with strikingly different ideological aims—does not detract from the formidable achievements of the republican state in transforming the political culture of the republic.
Unlike the spectacles and festivals of state that are analyzed by Achilles and Rossol, Eric Bryden explores the largest pro-republican civic organization, the Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold, founded in 1924 with the explicit goal of defending the republic in the aftermath of the Hitler Putsch. Largely Social Democratic and comprised of more than ninety percent veterans in its early years, the Reichsbanner aimed to lend the republic both popular legitimacy and the practical deployment of a people in arms. Bryden's examination of the Reichsbanner takes issue with the presumption, which abounds in the historiography of the Weimar Republic, that republicans only embraced the icons and symbols of the 1848–49 revolutions because they lacked their own. So, for example, the adoption of the black-red-gold tricolor as an official emblem of state is usually read as a sign of the republican state's weakness and lack of legitimacy.Footnote 33 Bryden's evidence instead points to a state capable of rallying popular, even militant, support against its enemies. The Reichsbanner served both as a civilian militia, willing to fight for the republic, and as a purveyor of popular identifications with the republican nation.
Taking on claims of the nationalist Right that the republic was “un-German,” inspired by “internationalist political thought,” or was a “Volksstaat” without traditions, the performative politics of the Reichsbanner—its parades, rallies, and commemorations—upheld symbols and cultivated myths that aimed to embed the republic in the traditions of German national history.Footnote 34 Bryden's essay highlights the Reichsbanner's efforts to revive the legacy of the 1848 revolution, establishing both revolution and democracy as crucial parts of German historical heritage. In representing itself as the legitimate heir of the fighters of 1848–49, the Reichsbanner rituals flew the tricolor flag, displayed images of the fallen heroes of the revolution, and marked the anniversaries of the revolutionaries' births and deaths. In upholding the iconography of the fallen heroes of the democratic revolutions of 1848–49 the Reichsbanner also sought to counter the nationalist valorization of the front experience, constituting what Bryden terms “a civil war” over the memory of World War I.Footnote 35 Although Bryden does not pursue the connection, the foregrounding of 1848–49 almost certainly sought to displace the still controversial November Revolution, so closely associated with Germany's defeat and the nationalist legend of the “stab in the back.” Also striking in the Reichsbanner's mythologizing of 1848–49 was its acknowledgment of revolutionary violence and the suggested parallel with the readiness of Reichsbanner members to risk their lives to defend the republic.
The parades and commemorative events of the Reichsbanner also play a central role in Nadine Rossol's analysis of the state-organized spectacles that aimed to embody the nation while fostering a participatory republican culture. Republican rituals sought to assign new meanings to public under the conditions of democracy, and Rossol understands the public in explicitly spatial terms. She depicts a republican state capable of offering an answer to “antirepublican reproaches that claimed that the general public did not care about the young democracy.”Footnote 36 Achilles, Rossol, and Bryden each emphasize the inclusive nature of the celebrations and festivals that aimed to uphold the vision of a cohesive rather than fragmented civil society. Drawing upon intriguing photographic and filmic evidence, she documents the presence of engaged viewers and participants in republican spectacles, suggesting a democratization of public space rather than the often presumed disempowerment of spectators.Footnote 37 While the highly disciplined marches of the Reichsbanner were meant to demonstrate both the power of the state and its reliance upon an engaged citizenry, the sports festivals and celebrations of Constitution Day also sought to stage a “national body.” Rossol points to the highly disciplined rituals that situated bodies in space—the style of walking, the clothing of the demonstrators, the route of the parade, the sounds of their steps and slogans—to symbolize the unity and strength of the national community.Footnote 38 She analyzes the mass sports festivals—the workers' Olympics of 1925, held in Frankfurt, and the sports festival of the Berlin schools in 1929, held in Prenzlauer Berg, as democratic spectacles that “strongly influenced the political aesthetics of the time,” with a focus on masses, order, and bodies, in particular “the disciplined worker's body.”Footnote 39 Moreover, the explicitly nonelite character of these festivities was meant to symbolize the participatory politics of democracy that aimed to include ever wider circles of the citizenry in republican political culture.Footnote 40 If in Rossol's view the constitution was visualized in 1929 in order to lend it a mythic character, Achilles views the increasingly sophisticated celebrations of Constitution Day as cultivating a new democratic sentiment, “constitutional patriotism,” a civic rather than state-oriented mode of national identification that sought to fuse 1848 with 1871 by lending national unity a democratic foundation, thus constituting what Achilles intriguingly terms an “invisible fatherland.”Footnote 41
Symbols and Sentiments in the Republic of Reason
Each of the three essays on political symbols has implications, in fact, for the emergent study of the history of emotions in a postwar republic that continued to mourn its war dead and assail the terms of peace, while also forging new emotional affinities with both nation and republic. As such, these essays fulfill Ute Frevert's recent call for a “history of political communication that takes full account of emotional language” and that considers the place of emotions in political mobilizations and demobilizations during and after World War I.Footnote 42 Studying the political culture of the republic from the perspective of the history of emotions reveals that the republican politics of reason were not cast in opposition to emotion per se. Rather they devoted considerable attention to the cultivation of democratic passions, or “the passion of reason” as Manuela Achilles suggests in an unambiguous rejection of the dichotomy between reason and emotion. For Achilles the work of “Formgebung”—the crafting of national symbols, celebrations, and commemorations—was a vital part of republican governance that aimed specifically to cultivate constitutional patriotism as a “sentiment of state” (in the words of Reichskunstwart Edwin Redslob) that was to “fulfill the citizens in their hearts.”Footnote 43 The outpouring of grief and rage following the murder of Walther Rathenau in 1922 marked a turn to a more explicit politics of emotion that lent the symbolic economy of the republic new momentum, allowing a democratic discourse to “congeal and emerge as a force against nationalist truisms about the republic.”Footnote 44 After 1922 the ever more elaborate Constitution Day festivities celebrated not only a set of words on paper, but also those “who had fought and bled” for this document, positioning the murdered republicans in a continuum with the fallen soldiers of World War I.Footnote 45 Rathenau's funeral also offered a different staging of the national body than the rituals Nadine Rossol examines: while successfully fusing the Jewish Democrat with the republican nation, Rathenau's funeral revealed a national body that was vulnerable to violent assault. Thereafter constitutional patriotism had two sides: it remained, as Achilles argues, a legally coded civil mode of national identification, but it also became a sentiment of state that explicitly embraced a politics of emotion, expressed in symbols and the “rhetoric of ‘blood’ and ‘soil’” that fused the living memory of the war dead with the heroes of 1848 and the murdered figureheads of the republic.
In his commentary in this forum, Eric Weitz traces three different narratives of Weimar history—the retrospective account by Weimar émigrés of Weimar as “doomed and degenerate”; the parable of capitalist crisis, told in the GDR; and the “Bonn ist nicht Weimar” mantra of West German politicians and historians in the Federal Republic. He credits these four essays with challenging these familiar narratives from a “cultural angle,” and notes that despite their interesting revelations, this “emphasis on the cultural realm” is limiting. In this phrasing the cultural realm is cast as distinct or separate from politics, political economy, and the “real” material conditions of everyday life in Weimar Germany. Yet one of the achievements of these essays is, in my view, the evidence they offer for the deep implication of culture in politics, for the reliance of politics upon cultural mediation in an era of extraordinary expansion of popular print media, visual culture, film, and advertising. Not only were the stagings of spectacles, the crafting of myths, and the dissemination of symbols explicitly political acts, decided in many cases at the level of a national ministry, but also the republican state understood the proximity of emotions and material life worlds, even during those years when it was unable to amend the material conditions of everyday life in a meaningful or lasting way. Moreover, these essays allow important glimpses into the materiality of culture—the bodies in motion in parades and sports spectacles, the material representations of republican democracy in the fusion of spectators and performers, the public outpouring of grief and the performance of republican solidarity in response to Walther Rathenau's murder, and the social visions and reform initiatives that took shape in response to perceptions of crisis.
These essays correct previous contentions that Weimar was a republic without republicans or a democracy that suffered from a chronic dearth of political symbols and misunderstood the significance of symbols in cultivating collective sentiment on behalf of democracy. The authors offer convincing evidence that the Weimar Republic did not fail because of the weakness or absence of symbols, semantics, or sentiments. They reveal that Weimar democracy was not an exercise in improvisation and accommodation; rather the republic demonstrated a remarkable capacity to stage and script its goals and to fight hard for the affinities and loyalties of its citizens. From these essays emerges a struggle for the republic that was both more vigorous and more imaginative than historians have thus far acknowledged. The very terms of democracy, the material conditions of its founding in the aftermath of defeat, revolution, and the imposition of a humiliating peace, widened and transformed notions of politics and public, including the rapid expansion of the mass media, popular culture, and new notions of labor and leisure, productivity and consumption, gender and sexuality. The transformation of these registers, so vital to our assessments of Weimar's achievements and promise, meant changes in the ways both politics and culture were mediated and experienced, necessitating a new aestheticization of politics and a new and highly conscious politics of aesthetics. An approach to historical formations such as celebrations and spectacles, myths and mentalities that seeks to measure their success or failure in defending democracy can only produce the obvious and familiar recognition that neither the cultural productions of democracy, nor their political institutions were, in the end, able to prevent the catastrophe of 1933.
