History 427: Modern German Intellectual History (McCole)

The Weimar Republic and Its Crises
I. A legacy from Bismarck: the politics of negative integration
II. Birth flaws and fault lines
III. The new radical conservatives
IV. Modernist architecture and design: the Bauhaus

negative integration
Kulturkampf (anti-Catholic policies)
(anti-)Socialist Law
anti-Semitism
Reichsfeinde (“enemies of the Reich”)

Weimar (humanistic culture vs. Potsdam=Prussian militarism)
Frankfurt am Main (national assembly in revolution of 1848)
1918-1923 revolution and counter-revolution; hyper-inflation of 1923
1924-1929 stabilization period
1929-1933 demise and destruction of the republic

Treaty of Versailles
Article 231 (“war guilt clause”) / reparations / stab-in-the-back legend
Vernunftrepublikaner (republicans of the head, not the heart)
presidents: Ebert (SPD), von Hindenburg (Prussian general, war hero)
proportional representation (multiple political parties)
Article 48 (presidential emergency powers)
Weimar coalition (SPD, Catholics, progressive liberals)
Social Democrats / Communists (KPD)
Freikorps (right-wing paramilitary bands)
“ corporatism”: army, industry, and labor (behind the back of parliament)

source:  Fritz K. Ringer, ed., The German Inflation of 1923 (Oxford, 1969),161.

radical conservatives or conservative revolutionaries
1. authority
2. collective particularity (nation, Volk, race)
3. state power
reactionary modernists (Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism)

Bauhaus= “building-house,” house of building
utopianism / functionalism
Walter Gropius
Weimar / Dessau/ Berlin / exile (Harvard and Chicago)
Arts and Crafts Movement (England) / William Morris
Bruno Taut
Schultze-Naumberg / Art and Race / “degenerate art”

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