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tradition seemed pitted against seeming decadence and modernism
during the sixties. It is ironic that the "new" right which came into
power with Reagan and the moral majority repeats similar claims,
directed at the memory of the radical sixties, America's "Weimar"
period .
By the later Nixon-Ford years, the political struggles and
artistic adventures which had given impetus to such warnings from
the American center and the right were at an end. Yet some final
and predictably commercial symptoms of the American romance
with Weimar continued to appear, such as the Broadway musical
and film ,
Cabaret.
Its portrayal of Weimar was a national box-office
success even in a moment of decline in American politics and of
intergenerational strife.
Those elements of our cultural life analogous to Weimar have
vanished . Weimar is passe. The avant-garde in art, music, and
theatre, even in poster art or self-consciously political film and
theatre, is quiet. Brecht has receded into academe, Fritz Lang's films
have lost their student cult, the Bauhaus has become a seemingly
dated though notable artistic movement. Weimar, like radicalism
itself, is absent from the campus culture. Peter Brook has Gurdjieff;
Rennie Davis, the Maharaji; Bob Dylan, Jesus; and Abbie Hoffman
and Jerry Rubin, merely themselves and their high incomes as
celebratory objects.
Our futurist, often optimistic, enthusiasms of the sixties have
lapsed. Even the tame heir to political activism, our vigilance
against political corruption since Watergate, has dissipated into
political withdrawal and ennui in 1982. The styles of modern culture
in the art, dress, and architecture of the sixties have become trans–
muted into varieties of nostalgia for a pre-World War I world.
Consider, for example, the recent odyssey into oblivion of these two
Weimar-like cultural phenomena: popular and rock songs with
critical political lyrics, and the stand-up comedians of social and
political sarcasm, both black and white. With the passing of these
often commercially successful Weimar-like trends, the academic and
broadly based intellectual curiosity in our presumptive Weimar
antecedents has dwindled as well.
Widely held self-conscious historical analogies illuminate in
special ways the "leitmotifs" of any period. The Jacobin claim to
Roman origins in the French Revolution, parodied by Buchner in
Danton's Death,
and nineteenth-century Germany's and eighteenth–
century England's romance with classical antiquity, visible in the
