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Journalism of Courage
I spent the most formative time of my life, the years 1931-33, as a Gymnasiast and would-be Communist militant, in the dying Weimar Republic. Last autumn I was asked to recall that time in an online German interview under the title 8216;Ich bin ein Reisefuuml;hrer in die Geschichte8217; 8216;I am a travel guide to history8217;. Some weeks later, at the annual dinner of the survivors of the school I went to when I came to Britain, the no longer extant St Marylebone Grammar School, I tried to explain the reactions of a 15-year-old suddenly translated to this country in 1933. 8216;Imagine yourselves,8217; I told my fellow Old Philologians, 8216;as a newspaper correspondent based in Manhattan and transferred by your editor to Omaha, Nebraska. That8217;s how I felt when I came to England after almost two years in the unbelievably exciting, sophisticated, intellectually and politically explosive Berlin of the Weimar Republic. The place was a terrible letdown.8217;
The cover of Eric Weitz8217;s excellent and splendidly illustrated Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy brings back memories. It shows the old Potsdamer Platz long before its transformation into a ruin at the hands of Hitler and into Disneyland architecture in the reunified Germany8230;
But Weimar was more than a German phenomenon. Weitz, whose book is a superb introduction to its world, probably the best available, gets so many things about it right: not least the Berlin-centredness of Weimar culture, as distinct from pre-1914 Germany with its flourishing artistic centres in Munich and Leipzig. Yet he underestimates its role as a crucible for what after 1917 was the major generator of intellectual and artistic innovation: post-revolutionary Central and Eastern Europe8230;
Its few years of 8216;normality8217; rested on the temporary quiescence of a volcano that could have erupted at any time. The great man of the theatre, Max Reinhardt, knew this. 8216;What I love,8217; he said, 8216;is the taste of transience on the tongue 8212; every year might be the last.8217; It gave Weimar culture a unique tang. It sharpened a bitter creativity, a contempt for the present, an intelligence unrestricted by convention, until the sudden and irrevocable death. Moments when one knows history has changed are rare, but this was one of them.
Excerpted from Eric Hobsbawm 8216;Diary8217; from the January issue of the 8216;London Review of Books8217;
