College teachers interested in cultural and intellectual history routinely lament the fact that survey textbooks either fail completely to address those topics or, at best, sequester them in a separate chapter, usually toward the end of the volume. But now we have Eric Weitz's fine overview of Weimar Germany, where the tables are turned: ideas and the arts constitute the bulk of the book. This is a laudable development, though it entails problems of its own, at least given Weitz's choice to focus preponderantly on developments in Berlin as well as the realm of elite culture.

Weitz bookends his second chapter, “Walking the City,” with the statement, “Weimar was Berlin, Berlin Weimar” (pp. 41, 79). While this viewpoint—which characterizes not just that chapter, but the volume as a whole—allows Weitz to treat cultural and social developments in the capital in considerable depth, the resulting neglect of the rest of Germany results in a truncated analysis, especially when it comes to political dynamics. There is no discussion of Ordnungszelle Bayern and Bavaria's fateful role in the early years of the Republic. Only in passing does Weitz write, “All over Germany, and especially in Bavaria, extreme right-wing groups emerged almost in pace with the revolution and the founding of the republic” (p. 97). Nor is there any reference to the activities of radical right-wing groups in, for example, Schleswig-Holstein or Thuringia. Conversely, the positive role played by the Social Democrats of Prussia, who self-consciously constituted the Bollwerk of the Republic, receives only a tangential reference: “In July 1932, [Papen] threw out the elected government of Prussia, a bastion of Weimar democracy” (p. 354). Figures such as Otto Braun and Carl Severing are not mentioned at all. While the political defenders of the Republic remain largely nameless, he places the blame for its death squarely on the shoulders of a few individuals: “Weimar's demise was, in the final accounting, the result of a conspiracy of a small group of powerful men around the president who schemed to place Adolf Hitler in power” (p. 358).

Weitz's abbreviated account of political, as well as social and economic, developments contrasts with his lengthy discussions of Weimar culture—“one of the greatest periods of artistic and intellectual creativity in the twentieth century” (p. 39)—which constitute more than half the book. Weitz discusses individual works at considerable length for a survey volume, and prefers depth of analysis to encyclopedic surveying of the terrain. That is certainly one of the strengths of the volume, though it must be said that the choice of works is both predictable and skewed toward elite culture. The chapter on architecture deals with Bruno Taut, Erich Mendelsohn, and Walter Gropius, while the one on photography and film focuses on Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and August Sander, as well as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Berlin: Symphony of the City, People on Sunday, and—rather surprisingly—Battleship Potemkin. The lineup of films is symptomatic of Weitz's choices: though these works achieved critical acclaim in their day and still feature prominently in film history surveys, only Caligari was a significant commercial success. In other words, Weitz totally neglects truly mass-marketed films. Indeed, even in his chapter entitled “Culture and Mass Society,” Weitz does not deal with mass culture per se, but rather with thinkers and artists who analyzed it, criticized it, or appropriated its elements (Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain, Martin Heidegger's Being and Time, Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's Threepenny Opera, Siegfried Kracauer's essays, and Hannah Höch's photomontages). To be sure, the focus on well-known and canonical works makes the volume especially suitable for use in survey courses, where such texts and images are often assigned; but like the excessive focus on Berlin, it distorts the nature and tenor of German culture during what was indeed a vibrant era, at all levels of the cultural spectrum.

It is also somewhat perplexing that Weitz rarely meshes his account of cultural and intellectual artifacts with political, social, and economic developments; as in more conventional surveys, where culture is banished to a single chapter, these spheres are juxtaposed but not causally or contextually integrated to any significant extent. Moreover, the overarching thesis of the book is surprisingly traditional: namely, that Weimar politics and culture were marked by a dichotomy between a politically democratic, socially progressive and egalitarian, and culturally avant-garde left and a politically authoritarian, socially hierarchical, and culturally conservative right that mutated into the radical right of National Socialism. Certainly, there is still a lot to be said for that characterization, which conforms to the self-understanding of the era. But Weitz does not address newer interpretations, even the (by now not-so-new) analysis of Detlev Peukert, who cast the crisis of Weimar not so much as a conflict between traditionalism and modernity, but as a result of tensions endemic to the project of modernity itself. Seen in that light, National Socialism was not just a radical distillation of “the language of the Right,” as Weitz argues in his last chapter (pp. 334, 341), but it drew on broader modern currents as well.

These comments should not detract from Weitz's achievement. He has written a spirited survey that foregrounds cultural and intellectual developments, and it will find a well-deserved place in many courses on German history and German cultural studies.