“What made Weimar culture so diverse and energetic was the urge across the entire ideological spectrum to overcome the war's terrible legacies, to restore the nation's collective physical and psychological health, and to navigate the rough seas of rapid change,” argues John Alexander Williams in the foreword to this collection of essays by young scholars from American, British, and Israeli universities. “Diverse” and “energetic” are also appropriate adjectives for the ten short pieces that make up the collection, which makes for a fresh and invigorating read. The volume is best approached as a kind of sampler, offering bite-sized chunks of some of the best research on the Weimar period currently being produced in the English-speaking world. It must be acknowledged that those hoping for a sustained and consistent critique of “Weimar Culture” are likely to come away disappointed, but the individual essays will engage anyone with an interest in the period's art, cinema, literature, and lifestyles.

The volume's primary focus is on popular and political culture rather than “High” art, but it begins squarely on canonical territory with Debbie Lewer's study of the “visual iconography of political agitation” in Dadaism and late Expressionism. Given the close involvement of many artists in the revolutionary politics of the period, it is perhaps not surprising that agitators, speakers, and “rabble-rousers” of various hues featured prominently in their work. Lewer uses these works to shed new light on the famously fractious relationship between Dada and Expressionism, but also points to the importance of traditional religious iconography as a source for Expressionist representations of revolution. The next three essays each look at aspects of film in the Weimar era. David Imhoof undertakes a reception history of the classic film The Blue Angel in an attempt to understand the role of cinema in Germans' daily lives at a time when the much debated concept of “mass culture” was becoming a reality for the first time. His case study focuses on the university town of Göttingen, but he points out that “all Germans experienced mass culture locally, in their towns, neighborhoods, and streets” (p. 50). The Israeli scholar Ofer Ashkenazi turns to the less celebrated but no less interesting world of popular adventure films, such as Joe May's Mistress of the World series, which have hitherto been analyzed in terms of their nationalist, imperialist, or racist tendencies. His bold contention is that the films' worldview was in fact liberal and cosmopolitan, propagating “an alternative ideal of community: a transnational community of middle-class urbanites, who would share similar experiences and similar liberal convictions” (p. 93). It is an invigorating piece of revisionism, but it is arguably overshadowed by Corey Ross's study of “Cinema, Radio, and ‘Mass Culture’ in the Weimar Republic,” which challenges an even more deeply entrenched orthodoxy. The notion that cinema and radio were ushering in a new era of cultural standardization was, Ross observes, “one of the few things on which cultural traditionalists and progressives agreed at the time” (p. 24). The Frankfurt School's critique of the “culture industry” would, of course, remain influential for many decades to come. Yet most historians today highlight the fissured and fractured nature of German society in the 1920s, rather than its increasing homogeneity. By carefully examining the size, distribution, and social character of cinema and radio audiences in turn, Ross demonstrates that Weimar's “mass culture” was not as culturally homogenizing as is frequently assumed. He concludes that “what is most striking about the new media-based popular culture in the Weimar Republic is not its unbridled ‘modernity’ . . . but rather the extent to which it was still bounded by older structures of locality and milieu” (p. 42).

In addition to Ashkenazi's aforementioned essay, two further contributions apply a transnational perspective to Weimar culture. Luke Springman looks at three examples of youth literature—a memoir, a travelogue, and a magazine—to highlight the survival of imperialist fantasies in post-1918 Germany, while Tom Neuhaus examines the era's growing preoccupation with eastern spirituality, and in particular the educated elite's fascination for Tibetan Buddhism. The search for alternative ways of life, leading away from the mistakes of the past (such as those that had led to the outbreak of World War I), may have “stemmed from a critique of modern life itself” but, Neuhaus argues, it was nevertheless “an integral part of Weimar modernity” (p. 133). The next two chapters analyze political culture as a site of ideological struggle. Nadine Rossol looks at ways in which the Weimar Republic attempted to promote its democratic values through symbols, monuments, funerals, and festivities, focusing primarily on the role of the Reichkunstwart, Edwin Redslob. As she notes at the start of her essay, republican representation has often been “negatively contrasted to the allegedly more successful Nazi propaganda” (p. 139), yet Redslob's efforts to promote the democratic state's public image were not without impact, as newsreel footage of Gustav Stresemann's funeral testifies. The German Communist Party (KPD) was no less conscious of the importance of symbols and images, as Sara Ann Sewell shows in her contribution on the construction of a masculine ideal within the party. The KPD may have positioned itself as the most pro-feminist political grouping of the Weimar era, but by the early 1930s “the rhetoric and images of men and women united together in revolutionary struggle [had been] supplanted by a linguistic and visual lexicon that emphasized a hypermasculinity” (p. 172).

The final two chapters look at the body and nature respectively. Erik Jensen examines the role of sports in Weimar culture and society, suggesting that “competitive sports actually developed and promoted the individual to a greater extent than any other social movement in the Weimar Republic” (p. 184). Meanwhile, in his own contribution to the volume, the editor reprises his study of the socialist hiking association, the Naturfreunde, which will be familiar to readers of his excellent monograph Turning to Nature in Germany: Hiking, Nudism, and Conservation, 1900–1940 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007). Williams is certainly correct when he observes that Weimar Culture Revisited challenges the “teleological, doom-laden narrative” of many works on the period. What it lacks, however, is a concluding chapter to bring together the book's common themes and to suggest how the “Weimar Culture” paradigm might be usefully revised.