Weimar Cinema at Berlinale 2018

Weimar film fans have something to celebrate in 2018: the Berlin Film Festival Berlinale has just announced a whole section devoted to Weimar cinema next year, from Georg Lamprecht’s gritty proletarian drama Die Unehelichen (1926) to  Friedrich Dalsheim and Gulla Pfeffer’s ethnographic documentary Menschen im Busch (1931):”The Retrospective of the 68th Berlin International Film Festival will focus on the great variety of cinema in the Weimar era. Some one hundred years ago, at the end of World War I and the dawn of the Weimar Republic, one of the most productive and influential phases in German filmmaking began unfolding, a creative era that went on to shape international perception of the country’s film culture, even to the present day. For “Weimar Cinema Revisited”, the festival will present a total of 28 programmes of narrative, documentary, and short films made between 1918 and 1933. … Most of the silent film screenings will be accompanied by music played live by internationally renowned musicians.”

Exhibition on Alfred Flechtheim

Alfred Flechtheim, the art dealer who brought Picasso to Berlin and founded the magazine Querschnitt, was one of the most important figures of Weimar Germany’s cultural scene. 80 years after his death, the Georg Kolbe Museum has put on a show about his life and work, featuring works by the artists he represented:

Exhibition: Berlin 1937

“Give me four years’ time” – with this slogan Hitler promised a total transformation of German society in 1933. The new exhibition Berlin 1937 at the Berliner Stadtmuseum looks at daily life in the German capital after Hitler’s four years and “the National Socialist dictatorship had permeated every aspect of German everyday life”: “What was the city like for its residents as they went from their homes to school or to work, to the church or to the synagogue, to air raid exercises or to dance? What changed under Nazi rule; what stayed the same? What were the consequences for individuals and for societal groups? And: To what degree was it possible to recognise the system’s criminal nature before the war and the Holocaust began?”

Walking in Berlin in 2017

In The Guardian, the journalist Vanessa Thorpe follows in the footsteps of Franz Hessel, author of the 1929 book Walking in Berlin. Quite remarkably, she contends that “the city that comes to life on Hessel’s pages could be straight out of Cabaret, based on Christopher Isherwood’s novel Goodbye to Berlin” – a book published 10 years later. If anything, Isherwood took inspiration from Hessel rather than the other way round.

 

Weimar 2.0 in Berlin?

A slightly different take of the currently popular Weimar comparisons in the Berlin-based expat magazine Exberliner: “Our new issue looks at the impact that Weimar’s gay sexologists, expat authors, cabaret dancers and Dadaist visionaries had on today’s Berlin and asks: How close are we to Weimar 2.0?”

Karl Schenker exhibition

The Museum Ludwig in Cologne is hosting an exhibition of works by Karl Schenker, one of Weimar’s most famous society photographers: “Ev­ery­body who was any­body had their por­trait tak­en in his Ber­lin stu­dio on the fa­mous Kur­fürs­ten­damm.” Many thanks to Dorothy Price for drawing our attention to this fabulous show!

Mobile Phones in Weimar Berlin

Already in 1926, the satirical magazine Simplicissimus had a premonition how Berliners would take to mobile phones. A great example of Weimar science fiction, from the collection of the Staatsbibliothek Berlin.

It’s Weimar Time Again!

Over the past weeks, three new exhibitions have opened on two different continents, almost at the same time, that put Weimar culture back into the spotlight of wider public attention.
In New York, Berlin Metropolis: 1918-1933 at the Neue Galerie “explores the city using a multi-media approach, revealing this complex period through painting, drawing, sculpture, collage, photography, architecture, film, and fashion.” In LA, New Objectivity: Modern German Art in the Weimar Republic, 1919-1933, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art claims to be “the first comprehensive exhibition in the United States to explore the dominant artistic trends of this period.” Meanwhile, in Berlin, Tanz auf dem Vulkan. Das Berlin der Zwanziger Jahre im Spiegel der Künste at the Stadtmuseum Berlin promises to deliver for the first time a “comprehensive overview” of Berlin’s status as the European centre of the avant-garde in Europe during this period.

“Dancing on the Volcano” exhibition

The myth of the “Roaring Twenties” and of 1920s Berlin is rearing its head again. From September, the Stadtmuseum Berlin hosts the exhibition “Dancing on the Volcano. The Berlin of the Twenties as Reflected in the Arts” aiming at showcasing “the mood and social climate in the 1920s, particularly in the pulsating metropolis of Berlin”.

Sadly, there seems to be no historical awareness of the “legend of the Twenties” (in Helmuth Plessner’s words) and its retrospective, nostalgic quality.

Forgotten Workers’ Protests in the Weimar Republic

In the Jahrbuch für Forschungen zur Geschichte der Arbeiterbewegung, Axel Weipert writes about the forgotten demonstration against the workers’ council law on 13 January 1920, when 42 demonstrators died and 100 were wounded in clashes with the police. The passing of the law marked the final defeat of the council movement of the German Revolution.

Philipp Reick compares the Poor People’s Movement in New York and unemployment protests in Berlin in the 1930s.