VERTIGO: The Rise and Fall of Weimar Germany

By Harald Jähner

Written by:
Lewis Whittington
Share This:

The cover of Harald Jähner’s  ‘Vertigo’ has scantily clad dancers silhouettes scaling a ladder under a silvery threshold  – a tableau symbolizing the liberated dynamics of 1920’s Weimar Republic. The first hundred pages of the book describes the harsh realities of Germany in the aftermath of their defeat in WWI. Jähner chronicles the divergent parallel social, cultural, and political tracks that eventually led to the rise of Nazi Germany and WWII.


The initial post WWI years were a time of mass unemployment, a collapsed economy, government instability and a population  navigating a cauldron of sociopolitical problems with more than a little desperation, prime among them grieving over loved ones lost in the war. On top of all these hardships,  the deadly 1918 Spanish flu and infectious tuberculosis were at raging through Europe.
Jähner’s history of the 13 years of the Weimar Republic is rich in detail and covers a lot of historical ground. He deconstructs the social elements that led to the Weimar’s unprecedented era of free expression, sexual freedom, industrial innovation, an artistic renaissance and even a burgeoning nightlife that became a booming industry.


 Meanwhile, liberal minded Germans were, to quote the lyrics of a Broadway musical ‘leaving their troubles outside’ and making life a cabaret. For artists, writers, filmmakers, and performers of all stripes it was a time of free expression and using art as witness to the hardship and political darkness. Painters  Otto Dix and George Grosz were rendering grotesque images of Berlin life.


Novelist Alfred Doblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz dealt with the rise of anti-Semitism. Fritz Lang’s film about child molestation M, and the dystopian classic Metropolis, a futuristic about sex, oppression and indentured labor forces and robotic women. Bertold Brecht was writing philosophical political dramas.   The Bauhaus School was a nexus for the allied arts, and  architectural design that projected a dynamic of simple form, function, and modern aesthetic. German director Fritz Lang made Metropolis a blistering futuristic tale of class war. Bertold Brecht was writing sociopolitical satires and artists reflected the postwar national PTSD with grotesque renderings.


Magnus Hirshfeld established the Institute for Sexual Research and gay Germans were more visible that ever. Enter the dancers and the wild denizens of the German jazz age of the 20s, which Jähner dubs The Charleston Years. Dancehalls, cabarets, and clubs became a booming industry. International superstar Josephine Baker not only conquered Paris with her dances,  but Berlin as well. And the clubs were hiring Black jazz orchestras who created the music in the states and Paris who attracted Berliners, tourists, and investors.


Everyone who was someone or no one was on the scene. Including future Hollywood film director Billy Wilder (Some Like it Hot; Sunset Boulevard; Stalag 17j) but before he directing Hollywood classic he worked as a ‘dance gigolo’ at Berlin’s Eden nightclub. Wilder was so popular he wrote about his adventures for a magazine telling dancehall tales so well in fact that he was hired as a journalist and the rest is movie history.


‘Vertigo’ also chronicles the rise of reactionary opposition engaging disaffected citizens and luring them into the world of fascism that would lead to the demise of Weimar and the ascension of Adolf Hitler.
Germany faced staggering debt restitution and sanctions agreed to in the Versailles Treaty. After WWI, Kaiser Willhelm abdicated the throne and Germany established a constitutional republic, with three equal co-branches of government, with Social Democrat Fredrich Ebert elected as president. As stabilizing as Ebert’s government proved to be in practical governing, he was not broadly liked by the vox populi until his death in the 1925.


Paul von Hindenburg, a field marshal in WWI, was elected President. He was an ineffectual leader,but was embraced as a strong father figure leading the country until his death in 1934. His most consequential act was appointing Adolf he Hitler Chancellor of Germany in 1933, securing his total power.


Meanwhile, as one journalist reported in the early 20s, forces might intensify the class struggle once again, outside forces  ‘Quivering with excitement.”  “The purses of the big landowners and heavy industrialists, left so thin after inflation… now on the way to being filled once more at the expense of the rest of the population.”


Indeed, the fascists were not putting on their dancing shoes, they were busy in back rooms plotting. In fact, many Germans weren’t on board with the liberated philosophy of the Weimar,  And darker political forces were also in play. After Hitler’s attempted coup in 1923 failed, he was convicted of treason, sent to prison for five years, and was jailed for nine months, during which he wrote Mein Kampf. Herr Hitler and his cabal of fascist operatives bided their time and systematically slithered their way into the backrooms of German politics.


Communists and the National Socialist Democratic Party (NSDP) were both vying for the votes of disaffected working classes. Even though the parties were pitted against each other, they both targeted  The Weimar ‘elite’  as dismissive of their collective issues.


Germany was headed for another political derailment in the aftermath of 1929 when the New York Stock Market crashed, and the fallout knocked Germany back on its Republic’s heels. Hardships returned and so did the cultural divides. Most alarming was the rise in antisemitism and marking ‘the other’ as enemies of the state.


 Any of this sound familiar? Unavoidably, the rise of fascist governments a century ago resonates in our current cauldron of geopolitical–oligarchal-propagandist politics. The parallels a yawning cliché, but no less true and bears repeating. Just switch out some of the names of the political thugs Jähner cites in ‘Vertigo’ with  the current line-up of White House cabinet contenders and it is a blunt reminder how history obvious so cravenly repeats itself despite lessons catastrophically learned and so summarily ignored until it’s too too Vertigo late.

The Library of America’s ‘African American Poetry: 250 years of Struggle and Song’ is stunning in its historic and literary...
Edmund White is one of the most prolific and esteemed writers of his generation of post-liberation, gay writers. His novels...
‘Stranger Than Fiction’  is Edwin Frank’s vigorous study of the evolution of the 20th century novel and the novelists who redirected...
Search CultureVulture