Rare audio material of Weimar parliamentary debates

Public broadcaster SWR has digitized debates in the Reichstag which had been recorded by the Berliner Rundfunk between 1931 and 1933, from budget debates to discussions about unemployment and Hitler’s speech after the burning of the Reichstag. The material runs 24 hours in total and documents the deteriorating political culture in the German parliament.

SPD newspaper “Vorwärts” online

Vorwärts, the “Zentralorgan der Sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutschlands”, is being digitized. Since April, the years from 1918-1933 are available online. The archive is fully searchable and pages can be downloaded in PDF format.

Anti-Semitism and the Press, 1918-33

The University of Bremen in hosting the very interesting research project German Anti-Semitism and the Press during the Weimar Republic, 1918-1933, which ‘investigates, from a comparative and transnational perspective, the coverage of German anti-Semitism during the Weimar Republic in the international press, taking as examples Great Britain, France, Italy, Austria, and the United States’. The project website features a very comprehensive list of digitized German and international newspapers, which should make it an important post of call for anybody interested in the interwar press.

Journal Review: German History 4/2014

In the December issue of German History, Heidi Tworek writes about the cooperation between German journalists and diplomats to raise Germany’s international profile after WWI: ‘From August 2013, a new, controversial ancillary copyright law (Leistungsschutzrecht) permitted German publishers to charge online news aggregator, such as Google for displaying article snippets. Implementation remains contested, but this is not the first time that new technology has prompted Germans to seek intellectual property rights in news. In August 1927, a German delegation successfully pushed through its compromise resolution on the legal protection of news during a Conference of Press Experts at the League of Nations.

New book on Ullstein publishing house

Ullstein was, without a doubt, one of the most important cultural and political actors in Weimar Germany. As the country’s biggest book publisher and the home of such influential publications as Vossische Zeitung, BZ am Mittag and Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung, the company exerted a major influence on contemporary culture. A staunch proponent of liberal politics and the democratic system, it was viewed by many as one of the pillars of the Weimar Republic. Not surprisingly, it quickly became a target for Nazi attacks and was one of the first Jewish companies to be “Aryanized” after 1933.

Berliner Volkszeitung online

The Berlin State Library has digitized the popular Berliner Volkszeitung. The daily newspaper was published from 1904-1944, for the longest part by the liberal Mosse house. The issues from 1904-1919 are available at the State Library at the moment, with the years of 1920-1933 to follow soon.

New book on the interwar press

The Press and Popular Culture in Interwar Europe – a selection of articles edited by Sarah Newman and Matt Houlbrook, originally published as a special issue of Journalism Studies – shows the interwar years as a ‘formative and vital period in the making of the modern press’:

‘When situated within a comparative European framework it is clear that the transformation of the popular press took shape in parallel and through a process that we might think of as mutually constitutive between the wars; while it is important to remain alive to the importance of the local and the particular in understanding the development of transnational mass cultural forms, in other words, news, information and ideas constantly moved across national boundaries.

New Study on Weimar Dance

Kate Elswit’s new study Watching Weimar Dance puts the focus on the audience, bringing insights from Dance, Theatre, and Performance Studies to Weimar Studies and offering a new view on Weimar culture with a focus on spectatorship: ‘Watching Weimar Dance asks what audiences saw on stages from cabaret and revue to concert dance and experimental theatre in the turbulent moment of the Weimar Republic.
Spectator reports that performers died or became half-machine archive not only the physicality of past performance, but also the ways audiences used the temporary world of the theatre to negotiate pressing social issues, from female visibility within commodity culture to human functioning in an era of increasing technologization.

Weimar Film and Jewish Identity

In reading popular films of the Weimar Republic as candid commentaries on Jewish acculturation, Ofer Ashkenazi’s Weimar Film and Modern Jewish Identity ‘provides an alternative context for a re-evaluation of the infamous “German-Jewish symbiosis” before the rise of Nazism, as well as a new framework for the understanding of the German “national” film in the years leading to Hitler’s regime.’

–> Review (in German)

Weimar’s investigative journalism: Maria Leitner

Maria Leitner was a female investigative journalist working for some of the biggest newspapers and magazines of the Weimar Republic. Her reportages mostly describe the life of women in the new German democracy, from sales assistants to show dancers. In Mädchen mit drei Namen, her work is published as a book for the first time, including a novel about a village girl moving to the big city.