The Weimar Republic Sourcebook

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Edited by Anton Kaes, Martin Jay and Edward Dimendberg

University of California Press

Due/Published November 1995, pages, paper

ISBN 0520067754

The Weimar Republic Sourcebook represents the most comprehensive documentation of Weimar culture, history, and politics assembled in any language. It invites a wide community of readers to discover the richness and complexity of the turbulent years in Germany before Hitler's rise to power.

Drawing from such primary sources as magazines, newspapers, manifestoes, and official documents (many unknown even to specialists and most never before available in English), this book challenges the traditional boundaries between politics, culture, and social life. Its thirty chapters explore Germany's complex relationship to democracy, ideologies of "reactionary modernism," the rise of the "New Woman," Bauhaus architecture, the impact of mass media, the literary life, the tradition of cabaret and urban entertainment, and the situation of Jews, intellectuals, and workers before and during the emergence of fascism.

While devoting much attention to the Republic's varied artistic and intellectual achievements (the Frankfurt School, political theater, twelve-tone music, cultural criticism, photomontage, and urban planning), the book is unique for its inclusion of many lesser-known materials on popular culture, consumerism, body culture, drugs, criminality, and sexuality; it also contains a timetable of major political events, an extensive bibliography, and capsule biographies. 

"The Weimar Republic Sourcebook is an invaluable resource for understanding one of the most important and resonant eras of the twentieth century. Since the Weimar debate has continued to repeat itself, albeit with less intellectual brilliance, this book is as much about the present as about the past. Here is the Weimar era in all its many-voiced and eloquent complexity: most of these texts, even those by the most famous names of the period, appear for the first time in English. This is an indispensable, enthralling, properly ambitious book."--Susan Sontag