BOOKS
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and the barbarism of the thirties. Walter Laqueur by no means shares these
conceits, even though there are hints here and there in his work that things
might have been a bit better had Weimar intellectuals, instead of being
perennialfrondeurs,
shown a bit more attachment to the Republic. In fact,
such notions vastly overestimate the influence of intellectuals in the world
of public affairs. France did not fall because of Andre Gide's undermining
of the received moral verities of French bourgeois culture, and Weimar's
collapse was hardly due to Brecht or Piscator.
We tend to look at Weimar through distorted lenses when we focus
attention on its left-wing intelligentsia, and fail to notice, as Laqueur re–
minds his readers, that most of the authors who were successful in terms of
the general public did not represent what has come to be seen as the Weimar
Zeitgeist.
The German liberal, and largely Jewish, public read Thomas
Mann and his brother Heinrich, Stefan and Arnold Zweig, Werfel, Wasser–
man, Hofmannsthal and Hesse, and did not come near such popular best–
sellers as Hans Grimm's
Volk ohne Raum,
the war writings of ErnstJuenger,
or the novels of Hans Carossa. The German reading public as a whole never
accepted the cultural predominance of the modernistic culture of Berlin.
The two leading left-wing weeklies of Weimar, the
Weltbuehne
and the
Tage-Bueh,
had a very small circulation . The Weimar intellectuals of the
"homeless left" believed that they were at the hub of post-war German
culture, but they were mistaken. Wrote Kurt Tucholsky, the most brilliant
and most prolific of the
Weltbuehne
collaborators, "Travel across the world
from the North Pole to the South Pole, you will find that everything takes
place among two hundred people." This is how it may well have felt to
many among his co-thinkers, but in retrospect what was meant as an acute
insight sounds merely silly. Only rather late in the game did the intellectual
left and the artistic vanguard realize that in their self-absorption and their
belief that they alone occupied the center of the stage they had woefully
neglected the ugly portents brewing in the wings.
It
is Laqueur's merit that he provides a full panoramic presentation,
sketchy though it often is, of the whole of the culture ofWeimar. He devotes
a full chapter
to
the left-wing intellectuals, but reminds us in the next chap–
ter that right-wing thought continued to have major appeal, and that not all
of its spokesmen from Spengler to Juenger to Moeller van den Brook or
Niekisch were simply proto-Nazi pamphleteers. While he devotes a major
part of the book to the avant-garde, he also speaks of opposing forces, show–
ing that the academy continued
to
harbor the strongest aversion
to
the
"decadent" and "corrupting" influences of the culture of modernism.
Yet it remains that for just fifteen short years Germany was the arena
of an experiment in cultural innovation unique
in
its penetration and daring.
