Berlin in the 1920's

"There was no place like Berlin in the 1920's. The capital of the modern movement in literature and the arts, pioneering in the cinema and theater, in social studies and psychoanalysis, it was the city of "The Threepenny Opera" and "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari," the cradle of the youth movement and the haven of unheard-of sexual freedom. The Mecca of a whole generation of Isherwoods, it has entered history as the center of a new Periclean age.

Only a few were aware of its true importance at the time; most Germans emphatically rejected what Peter Gay calls Weimar culture and what, to all intents and purposes, was the culture of Berlin. "Swallow," "rootless," "destructive," "cultural Bolshevism," "asphaltliteratur," these were the most common epithets used by its critics.

The advocates and the enthusiastic followers of this avant-garde movement came from a small unrepresentative layer of German society; left-wing or liberal, largely Jewish, it was concentrated in Berlin and a few other big cities. It had no popular success at the time; in the list of contemporary best sellers one looks in vain for the famous names of the twenties. Yet internationally these men were the only ones who counted, and in Germany, too, there has been in recent years a spectacular revival of the golden twenties.

After 1933 many of these intellectuals and artists were forced to emigrate; their impact in foreign lands has been considerable. For Weimar-Berlin culture was the heir to a great tradition, intellectually most of the world has been subsisting until recently on what was created by two or three generations in the German cultural sphere, which then included Prague and Vienna as well, and even Budapest."

From a review of Peter Gay’s Weimar Culture, The Outsider as Insider. By Walter Laqueur, in the Books section of New York Times, November 24, 1968.

http://movies2.nytimes.com/books/98/10/25/specials/gay-weimar.html