The interwar Weimar Republic holds a special attraction to readers as a cautionary tale, sniffed over for clues about what went wrong. Yet doing so risks missing just how dynamic, fertile, varied and contingent those years from 1918 to 1933 were.
Harald Jähner, a Berlin journalist turned historian, provides a wonderful corrective with this page-turning romp through the upheavals, innovations and anxieties of the age.
Tapping literary luminaries like Kurt Tucholsky, Joseph Roth, Harry Graf Kessler and Siegfried Kracauer, Jähner gives us a vivid sense of how tourists were captivated by simple traffic coursing through Berlin, how modern offices with telephones and typewriters destabilised gender and class relations by pulling young women into the workforce, and how small details like the pitch of a home’s roof became flashpoints in ideological battles that architects thought could decide society’s future.
- Available now from WH Allen (translation Shaun Whiteside)
