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.

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?”

Journal Review: VfZ, 1/2017

In the January issue of the Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, Dirk Blasius writes about the mutual influences between Carl Schmitt and historian Hans Rothfels during the Weimar Republic: “This article widens the scope in the debates about Hans Rothfels by assessing the significance of reviews within the political and intellectual culture of the Weimar Republic.
Rothfels as a reviewer showed an interest in the publications of Schmitt. The reviews of Rothfels are short essays which exhibit his own position on the Weimar constitutional system. They make clear the distinction between Rothfels and Schmitt.

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.

Sex and the Weimar Republic

In her new study Sex and the Weimar Republic. German Homosexual Emancipation and the Rise of the Nazis, Laurie Marhoefer shows that the famed sexual tolerance of the Weimar era was “only obtained at the expense of a minority who were deemed sexually disordered. In Weimar Germany, the citizen’s right to sexual freedom came with a duty to keep sexuality private, non-commercial, and respectable.

New Book: The Weimar Century

In his study The Weimar Century: German Émigrés and the Ideological Foundations of the Cold War, Udi Greenberg traces the academic and political careers of Weimar émigrés Carl J. Friedrich, Ernst Fraenkel, Waldemar Gurian, Karl Loewenstein and Hans Morgenthau to show ‘that the foundations of Germany’s reconstruction [after WWII] lay in the country’s first democratic experiment, the Weimar Republic.

Research on Weimar on LISA portal

LISA, the online portal of the Gerda Henkel Foundation, offers two very interesting video series about the Weimar Republic. The lecture series Dimensionen der “Machtergreifung” – Von der Weimarer Republik zum NS-Staat features talks by esteemed German experts on the rise of the Nazis in Weimar Germany, including Stefanie Schüler-Spingorum on anti-Semitic violence 1932-34.

The 9-part documentary The New Objectivity in Dresden introduces and presents the research project of the same name, based at the Dresden State Art Collection, from its initial inception to the final exhibition.

Conference: European Democracies after WWI

The conference Nach dem „Großen Krieg“. Vom Triumph zum Desaster der Demokratie 1918/19 – 1939 at the Hannah Arendt Institute in Dresden covered the development of European democracies after WWI– and their rapid disintegration from the end of the 1920s – in a comparative perspective. A conference report has just been published on H-Soz-Kult (in German).

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.

Journal Review: Journal of Contemporary History

In the October issue of the Journal of Contemporary History, Molly Loberg writes about the phenomenon of fortified shops in Weimar Berlin: ‘By 1931, in the context of a general breakdown in public security, the police promoted a fortified shop as the best means for crime prevention. In contrast to ‘invisible’ security measures invented by department stores to deter crime without inhibiting consumption, these measures made explicit a defensive posture of the shop toward the street.’