One of the most pressing agendas for scholars of the Weimar Republic in recent years has been to think outside the tropes of catastrophe and rupture that have governed Weimar's history since the beginning, reinjecting contingency into the closed system of Weimar's failure/Nazism's rise. As Kathleen Canning notes in the introduction to a new collection of essays on Weimar, “The high drama of the Republic's struggle to survive means that its collapse in 1933 usually overshadows even its most illustrious social experiments or cultural accomplishments” (p. 1). For contemporaries, moreover, as Canning argues, the trope of crisis and modernity remained intimately related, so that “Weimar subjects . . . remained entangled in the experiences of war, defeat, and revolution long after 1918.”

Weimar Publics/Weimar Subjects: Rethinking the Political Culture of Germany in the 1920s, coedited by Kathleen Canning, Kerstin Barndt, and Kristin McGuire, seeks to explore this intersection, “prob[ing] the political languages and cultural categories of public and subject that changed as the republic contended with the aftermath of war, fought to anchor democracy, mobilized citizens, and demobilized soldiers” (p. 4). The interdisciplinary collection of essays, organized across five sections, deals with the themes of “visual culture and the memory of the war”; “the convening of citizens and the complex sites at which citizenship became meaningful beyond parliaments and parties”; “symbolic contests over public space”; “the emergent dichotomy of mass and individual, fragment and whole”; and “the imaginaries of space and time, national and republic, citizen and immigrant, homeland and borderland, and past and future that changed as Germans absorbed the shocks of war and peace that would refigure its borders, both real and imaginary” (pp. 4–5).

The essays on visuality in section one—Anton Kaes on cinema, Brigid Doherty on Dada, and Elizabeth Otto on photomontage—suggest a parallel “arena of democratization” in which the loss and rupture of the war was reconfigured outside official narratives (p. 7). The experience of the Great War was of central importance. For Kaes, the two million German dead of the Great War “returned” in filmic images of “ghosts, monsters, and comatose creatures,” whereas for Otto, the soldier became, both before and after the war, a central and contested figure in the emerging practice of photomontage so emblematic of Weimar modernity. Sections two and three examine, respectively, new collectivities and “publics” opened up in the wake of the war, and the symbolic politics of democracy in the new republic. Both emphasize either the opening up of new vistas of participatory possibility—for women (in the essays by Kerstin Barndt, Kathleen Canning, and Kristin McGuire), or Jews (in the essay by Sharon Gillerman), or examine how race/ethnicity or gender more generally structured the symbolic (or, in the case of the essay by Martin Geyer on the “Kustiger-Barmat” corruption scandal, spectacular) politics of the republic. The essays by McGuire and Canning posit and explore a “new imaginary of female citizenship” (p. 9) in which campaigns around suffrage, or the populist-pacifist-feminism of a figure such as Helene Stöcker, mapped out new territories of civic engagement at once public and private.

By contrast, Dirk Schumann challenges the long-held belief that the violence of the trenches flowed directly into the streets of the republic, arguing that it was rather a product of attempts to reassert masculinity in the political cauldron of the first postwar years. Manuella Achilles, similarly, questions the (long-entrenched) belief that the republic lacked a rich symbolic repertoire with which to rally citizens to its cause. As these examples suggest, Weimar Publics/Weimar Subjects is explicitly revisionist in conceit. Rejecting a strictly either/or approach to the question of Weimar democracy (that is, one that maps the terrain of popular engagement strictly against the peaks and valleys of liberal democracy's successes and failures), the volume's contributions reveal a variegated picture of the possibilities of civic engagement in Germany's first democracy, one that gives ample weight to the symbolic and the performative aspects of Weimar politics. Showing that, for all the familiar constraints and challenges facing it, Weimar democracy was not so ill-equipped as previously supposed to construct and enact its emancipatory and participatory claims, this volume makes a valuable contribution to the scholarship on the Weimar Republic.