Thomas W. Kniesche and Stephen Brockmann, eds.Dancing on the Volcano. Essays on the Culture of the Weimar Republic. Studies in German literature, linguistics, and culture. Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1994

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" (41). Rarely has an author so keenly evoked the content of a thesis through its exposition. Fritzsche jumps, shifts, and races among the Weimar artifacts: poets, critics, historians, architects, images, and metaphors. Yet he constructs a perfectly cogent argument that Weimar modernism is to be found not just in its painters and writers but in its "planners, state officials, and even military strategists . . . " (45). Whereas Fritzsche explores overarching perspectives of the popular imagination in Weimar, Klaus-Michael Bogdal questions whether broad historical categories hold meaning for ordinary individual experience. Bogdal investigates in particular how industrial workers born after 1890 were able to participate meaningfully in civic matters during Weimar and thereby gain more power in shaping their own lives. Through oral history Bogdal proposes to correct a distorted image of the working class conveyed by non-working-class intellectuals, stating that the lives of workers were more complex, culturally active, and their self-image more modem and progressive than generally assumed. Bogdal concludes his essay with an interview with his own father, who was a coal miner and journalist for the Communist press in the Ruhr region.

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 (16). Hermand's denunciation of capitalism and the culture industry strongly contrasts with some of the other contributions; rather than celebrate Weimar's cultural modernity, he reminds us of the abuses in modernization: "By yielding everything to market principles of supply and demand, Neue Sachlichkeit did reduce the cultural power of the older educated elites, but replaced it with an aesthetic supermarket governed by a culture of homogeneous mass production" (67).

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 . . . " (84). Despite the glorification of America in some circles, the reception of America in Weimar Germany was decidedly mixed. Beeke Sell Tower analyzes the "ultramodern" and the "ultraprimitive" in graphic representations by artists such as George Grosz, Rudolf Schlichter, and Otto Dix. In particular, artists juxtaposed images of the Wild West, which propagated an atavistic, essentially premodern mode of violence, to the violence of modern warfare, whereas jazz imagery mixed the racial stereotypes of the "primitive" African American with associations of a modern, urban, American tempo and texture. Ultimately, the "interplay of fascination and fear rooted in largely unreflected racial stereotypes and prejudices . . . continue[s] to inform German culture and society today" (95). Next, dealing perhaps with the ultimate American icon, Cornelius Partsch traces through essays and literature the changes in the way Germans perceived jazz during the Weimar Republic. Some welcomed jazz as part of technological innovation, but increasingly, in the minds of conservatives, American music posed a massive threat to Germany, both through racial-sexual myths about African Americans and Jews and through the fear that jazz as a mass commodity would overwhelm German economy and culture. Here the transition from optimism to despair in late Weimar becomes evident, and the following section on Berlin focuses throughout on this image of emerging crisis.

The myth of Berlin, often coinciding with the myth of Weimar, was, according to Erhard Schutz, "largely a creation of the Weimar literary feuilleton" (119). Schutz recounts the main features of the artifact Berlin, such as the showgirls, bicycle races, and movies, as the glittering surface reflecting from the asphalt of reality. Journalists during the 1920s extolled the building craze, and in their writings the landmarks of Berlin, Alexanderplatz, Kurfurstendamm, and the Tiergarten, became spaces of "symbolic negotiation and exchange" (123) with their own meanings in the Berlin imagination. The crisis after 1930 transformed the perception of Berlin's once-lauded heterogeneity and plurality into a threat, with the image of the Tiergarten, the site of permanence and "antimetropolis," occurring more frequently in the feuilleton. Through another popular medium, Sabine Hake examines the spectacle of Berlin in Walter Ruttmann's film Berlin, die Symphonie der GroBstadt and describes the poetics of filmic structure in this example as simulation, not representation, as an antimimetic and self-referential work of high modernism. The film's purpose is primarily to generate visual pleasure in the detached experience of looking. Even though the images simulate rather than represent urban reality, Hake emphasizes that Berlin "offers a view of the modem city that is far more radical in its formal solution to the crisis in representation than melodramatic street films or class-conscious leftist films" (136). The futuristic, utopian visions of architectural planners and dreamers no doubt also fed the glitzy veneer of mythical Berlin. Dietrich Neumann traces the influences and development of the architecture in Fritz Lang's film Metropolis, arguing that the film's final design for the city both embraced monumental, technological, modern excess and created the gigantic, impersonal nightmare projected by conservative fears of progressing modernization.

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.