Eric Weitz' book about Weimar Germany (and Weimar Berlin)

Weimar Germany, a book

University of Minnesota history professor Eric D. Weitz has written a book about Weimar Germany. He sees that era as a time of progressive achievements and he views Weimar in its own right, not just as a prelude to the Third Reich.

Link to professor Weitz' book on Amazon

One of the chapters is devoted to Berlin, the capital of the Weimar Republic.

Here, a excerpt from that chapter :

Weimar was Berlin, Berlin Weimar. With more than four million residents, the capital was by far the largest city in Germany, the second largest in Europe, a megalopolis that charmed and fright-

ened, attracted and repelled Germans and foreigners alike. 

In the 1920s it was one of Germany’s and Europe’s great cultural centers, the home of the Philharmonie, the State Opera, the Comic Opera, scores of theaters, and a cluster of great museums, all located in the center of the city. Berlin was a magnet for artists and poets, the young and ambitious. It had a glittering nightclub scene, including scores of homosexual bars, and a relentless fascination with the body and sex.

Berlin was a great economic machine that churned out electrical goods, textiles, and confectionary products in huge quantities. It was the governmental center, and from the famed Wilhelmstraße, home of the Foreign Office, the Reich Chancellery, where the government sat, and the Reichstag, the parliament building, Germany’s leaders and bureaucrats tried desperately to maintain order, promote prosperity, and revive the nation’s international position. 

It was a city of leisure, with neighborhoods of elegant wealth and amusement parks, a zoo, and numerous lakes accessible by rail or streetcar to virtually all Berliners. Its infamous tenement blocks rivaled the slums of any great city for their darkness, congestion, and poverty. Tens of thousands of Russian émigrés, fleeing from communism, and Poles looking for work and business opportunities contributed to the city’s international feel. 

Berlin’s Jewish community was the largest in Germany, its main synagogue an elegant symbol of piety and prosperity. The Berlin Dom, the Protestant cathedral commissioned by Kaiser Wilhelm II and completed in 1905, had a massive presence, its bombastic, late Renaissance style a testament to the pretensions and arrogance of the Hohenzollern rulers deposed in the revolution of 1918–19.