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com 27 October 2015

WEIMAR’S GOLDEN
YEARS 1924-29
After the putsch
In November 1923 Hitler
attempted to seize power by
staging a putsch in Munich
which was to be followed by a
march on Berlin. The putsch
failed and Hitler was arrested
and tried.

Landsberg Prison
Hitler came to national
attention in 1924 during his
trial. He had previously been a
marginal political figure but he
was allowed by the judges to
The Dawes Plan
dominate the proceedings and In 1923 Germany suffered from the most extreme case of
articulate his ideas. He was hyper inflation ever caused, with everyday items eventually
given a lenient five years in costing trillions of marks. The crisis finally threatened the
prison but only served eight
cohesion of Germany as state and it was only in late 1923
months. While he was
when Chancellor Gustav Stresseman (who became Germany’s
incarcerated at Landsberg
Castle, on the advice of his
foreign minister in a new Social Democrat government)
publisher Max Amman, he negotiated a reduction in the overall repayments bill in the
wrote Mein Kampf, his Dawes Plan. This, and the introduction of a new currency, the
rambling biography and Rentenmark, backed by American loans helped to end the
manifesto. hyper inflation.

Lean Years Good times?

The Nazi Party was in disarray after
the coup and even when Hitler
began to re-organise the party
when he was freed, their fortunes
did not improve. A temporary
return to prosperity and political
stability during the 1920s made it
unnecessary for Germans to look
to extremist parties for solutions to
their problems.
By the mid 1920s the economy had improved to such an
extent that Weimar Germany appeared to be experiencing a
minor economic boom. The crises and instability of the
period 1918-23 seemed a distant memory and Berlin was the
most exciting, bohemian and culturally dynamic capital city in
the world. However, the economic miracle that Germany
experienced was based largely on American loans and little of
the loan money was invested in German industry to make it

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competitive in the long run. Instead, the new loans were

spent on the new consumer luxuries that Germans were
enjoying and propping up the value of the Rentenmark (re-
named the Reichsmark). This meant that the German
economy did not become more stable throughout the period
and instead became vulnerable to economic shocks in the
world economy.

The Culture of Weimar

Bertold Brecht
Film makers, photographers, artists, designers and playwrights
One of the playwrights who was flocked to Berlin from across Europe and German artists who
most universally despised by the had not been able to express new ideas openly under the
Nazis was Bertolt Brecht. He was Kaiser were free to do so under Weimar.
a socialist who satirised
Germany’s middle classes and Artists like George Grosz and Otto Dix created paintings and
‘mittelstand’. sculptures that criticised or satirised German militarism and
the legacy of the First World War (below is the Grosz painting
Brecht was forced to flee
The White General, 1919). Modern art and culture and the
Germany in February1933, weeks
culture of modernism itself was quite alien to many Germans
after the Nazis came to power.
who were not part of the Berlin avante garde. Many looked
Christopher upon painters such as Kandinsky, who had made Berlin his
Isherwood home, with suspicion and contempt. This new form of art and
culture was for many Weimar Germans a change too far. They
Christopher Isherwood was a lived with a new kind of government and a new kind of
British writer who moved to
Berlin in the 1920s. He was gay
and wrote about the dark,
seedier side to the city (his
novels eventually becoming the
musical cabaret). He was never
under threat from the Nazis but
was able to write clearly about
how life had changed in the city
as they came to power.

Fritz Lang
Lang was one of the most
influential film makers of the
20th Century who left Germany
for Hollywood when Hitler
came to power. He had Jewish
heritage and had created anti
Nazi themes in at least one of
his films.], the Testament of Dr
Marbuse.

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nation, but a new kind of culture seemed alien and threatening. Hitler would later be popular with
many ordinary Germans as he claimed to be a defender of traditional German culture against
modernism, which he claimed was influenced by the Jews and communism. Hitler disliked Berlin,
believing it to be a morally corrupted place, full of ‘cosmopolitan’ influences such as modern art and
jazz music (in Hitler’s eyes performed by negroes and written by Jews to corrupt the integrity of the
Aryan race). He also saw the city’s gay and lesbian community, which had new rights of self expression
and freedom under the Weimar constitution, as shameful and immoral.

Hitler believed that the culture that had emerged in Weimar was corrupted and needed to be swept
away. When the Wall Street Crash happened in 1929 it plunged Germany into mass unemployment as
America cancelled all new loans and demanded repayment of existing ones in 90 days. by 1931 the
number of unemployed had reached 6 million.

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