Volume 27, Number 17 · November 6, 1980
The Weimar Review
By James Joll
Die Weltbühne Germany)
Facsimile reprint 1918-1933 Athenäum Verlag (Königstein, West, 16 volumes, 27,000 pp., 340 DM (paper)
The Weimar Republic lasted less than fifteen years, yet few periods in recent history have left so potent a legend. 'Weimar culture' has come to symbolize a particular blend of radical art and radical politics. The ideas and tastes of an embattled minority of Weimar radicals and artists are now regarded as typical of a society which rejected their values and finally destroyed them. One recent sign of the extent to which the Weimar Republic has caught the imagination of many people fifty years later has been the remarkable publishing success in Germany of the facsimile reprint of Die Weltbühne, one of the most famous of the German reviews of the 1920s. The history of the political ideas of Die Weltbühne was well told in Istvan Deak's excellent study Weimar Germany's Left-Wing Intellectuals, published in 1968; and Deak's book, with its biographical appendices and its elucidation of the pseudonyms of Weltbühne writers, is an invaluable guide to the reader of the complete series of volumes.
Review, 3656 words
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