The Weimar Republic has lately become one of the most thoroughly scrutinized periods of German history, and the contributors to this volume continue to expose missed facts, add new perspectives, dismantle myths, and dismiss shibboleths of Weimar scholarship. Anthologies of essays, especially proceedings of conferences and symposia such as this, often produce half-baked research in progress or twice-baked arguments from established work. Although this book's reception of Weimar in our unification era does invoke some commonplaces and does not completely elude unevenness, Dancing on the Volcano nevertheless provides numerous fresh insights and remarkable erudition.
Kniesche and Brockmann introduce the essays by tracing the reception of Weimar. That is, they recount how the Weimar Republic served for some, such as the founders of the Federal Republic of Germany, as a negative example of social crisis and tragic descent into National Socialism. Yet, more recently, others such as Jurgen Habermas and Peter Sloterdijk have reconsidered the Weimar Republic to be a turntable in the project of modernity. The editors have organized the book in four parts: part 1, "The Peculiarities of History: Different Views of Weimar," part 2, "American Influences in Weimar," part 3, "Berlin: A Case Study in Weimar Culture," and part 4, "Manipulations of Sexuality in Weimar and the Third Reich."
In the first essay Jochen Vogt emphasizes the initial rejection of Weimar in the early Federal Republic and the subsequent breakthrough of Weimar reception among scholars in Germany since the late 1960s. Vogt notes that, even after that point, the major contributions to Weimar scholarship still came from academics working in the United States (although he should have included Great Britain in this context). In conclusion, Vogt observes that the latest German research and criticism have been more "differentiated, less national, more historicist" than in the past, citing the work of Klaus Theweleit, Sloterdijk, and Detlev Peukert. In the next essay Peter Fritzsche proposes a vision of Weimar as planned chaos, a place where "disorientation could imply redirection" (
Jost Hermand continues the book's historical discussion by questioning the periodization of Weimar, criticizing in particular the ideology of Neue Sachlichkeit. Already in the introduction to Dancing on the Volcano, Kniesche and Brockmann consider the conflicts between Hermand's "post-1968" critique of ideology and newer structuralist and historicist approaches of the 1980s, exemplified, according to the editors, by Fritzsche's analysis (
Hermand's analysis also introduces the admiration for the United States prevalent in Weimar Germany, forming a transition to the three essays devoted to America's influence in Germany after World War I. Mary Nolan discusses German esteem for Henry Ford's and Frederick Taylor's theories of industrial rationalization, known as Fordism and Taylorism. She evaluates how Social Democrats and trade unionists imagined American-style rationalization in Germany quite differently than the way industrialists envisioned it, as well as the failure to reorganize industry during Weimar. In the end, Nolan emphasizes that National Socialism appropriated many of the ideas and policies of rationalism and even that "[e]lements of Americanism were inserted discretely but firmly into Nazi society . . . " (
The myth of Berlin, often coinciding with the myth of Weimar, was, according to Erhard Schutz, "largely a creation of the Weimar literary feuilleton" (
Sexuality marks one of the most dramatic transformations from Wilhelminian to Weimar culture. Departing from, among other things, Peter Sloterdijk's Kritik der zynischen Vernunfi and the essay on Enlightenment and morality in Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialektik der Aufklarung, Stephen Brockmann examines the "sexual cynicism" and underlying misogyny in Weimar culture. In works of literature and film one observes the rationalization of sex at the expense of romantic love, an abdication of sentimentality at times mourned, at times glorified. In the end Nazi propaganda and kitsch allegedly cherished family values, love of home, and nostalgia for wholeness, but at the same time Germany set out on a course of mass destruction, and thus exemplified the ultimate triumph of sexual cynicism.
The one dismal moment in this anthology is "The Demonization of the Homefront: War Neurosis and Weimar Cinema." In the middle of the article, Laurence Rickels suddenly changes the topic from cinema to Nazi military psychotherapy without connecting the two. This is the most muddled scholarly essay I have ever encountered in print, riddled with turgid sentences, cliches, and preposterous wordplays that come across as incredible gaffes. This unfortunate contribution is all the more regrettable because the author's poor writing discredits fascinating topics and good research.
This book frequently emphasizes Weimar in exile, and thus brilliantly concludes with Attina Grossmann's extensive research on German women physicians who had been active in sexual reform during Weimar and who had to begin new lives in America. Women such as Drs. Else Kienle, Hertha Riese, and Kate Frankenthal demonstrated phenomenal resilience in reconstructing lives in the United States, often adapting their expertise to other fields of medicine and psychotherapy and devoting themselves to new social causes, for example those relating to children and minorities.
Dancing on the Volcano is an interdisciplinary collection of informative essays that represent current trends in Weimar research in the United States. The anthology is particularly valuable as a sampling of the greater projects in which the authors are involved, so that the reader gains some idea of the research that these scholars present, or will present, in their individual monographs.
The book contains black and white illustrations and offers a short list of publications for further reading.
By LUKE SPRINGMAN
Bloomsburg University