Volume 14, Number 9 · May 7, 1970
Weimar and the Intellectuals I
By Carl E. Schorske
Weimar Germany's Left-Wing Intellectuals: A Political History of the Weltbühne and Its Circle
by Istvan Deak
California, 346 pp., $9.75
Kurt Tucholsky and the Ordeal of Germany, 1914-1935
by Harold L. Poor
Scribner's, 285 pp., $7.95
Social Conservatism and the Middle Classes in Germany, 1914-1933
by Herman Lebovics
Princeton, 248 pp., $8.50
Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider
by Peter Gay
Harper & Row, 205 pp., $5.95
Over fifty years have passed since the founding of the Weimar Republic; thirty-five since the Reichstag voted Hitler dictatorial powers and ended the liberal state. Although the German problem itself has receded from the center of the world stage, American interest in Weimar and its fate continues to grow. The nature of that interest has changed over the years. During the Thirties Germany was to Americans the scene of a hideous historical aberration. Having established at last a democratic state after the war, the Germans rejected it in favor of a monstrous dictatorship. Aside from a few Marxists, American political analysts during the Thirties approached the problem of Nazism as surprised and disappointed democrats. Confident of the universal workability of democracy, they asked, 'In what way was Germany so different from the United States that this should have been possible?' Confronting Germany as an alien entity and as an external threat, the American intellectual's task was to explain why Germany was different.
Review, 4541 words
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