John Bingham - Weimar Cities: The Challenge of Urban Modernity in Germany, 1919-1933

The Challenge of Urban Modernity
in Germany, 19191933

John Bingham

First published 2008 by Routledge

Published 2016 by Routledge

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ISBN 13: 978-0-415-95744-1 (hbk)

It is a great pleasure at the end of this project to be able to acknowledge the enormous help of those along the way. This book began as a dissertation at York University under the supervision of Michael H. Kater. Although neither its direction nor final shape were always what he anticipated, I am grateful for his early interest and continuing support, as well as his exacting eye in reading the various drafts. Of many others who offered advice, encouragement and criticism, I wish to mention particularly Celia Apple-gate, William D. Irvine, and John Marshall.

My research was initially supported by a doctoral fellowship and, in 2001, an institutional grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada. A Research Development Fund grant from Dalhousie University made possible significant additional work in 1999. The staffs of the Landesarchiv in Berlin, the Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz in Dahlem, the Nordrhein-Westflisches Hauptstaatsarchiv in Dsseldorf, and the Dsseldorf Stadtarchiv were unfailingly patient and helpful. Herr Volker Viergutz at the Landesarchiv was at all times a gracious and knowledgeable guide in my explorations of the vast records of the Deutsche Stdtetag and of other communal associations held there. I am particularly grateful to the Landesarchiv staff for generously allowing me to work through renovations in the summer of 1999. The Interlibrary Loan departments at the libraries of York University, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Dalhousie University were always helpful and patient with my requests for even the most obscure material.

Anthony McElligott and Lawrence Stokes read portions of the manuscript and offered friendly advice at different stages. For generous comradeship, communal endeavor, and kind attention in various measures, I thank Jennifer Jenkins, Sean Kennedy, Kenneth Mour, James Retallack, Thomas Saunders, and Philip Zachernuk. My colleagues in the Department of History at Dalhousie have patiently heard more, read more, and talked more about Weimar cities than they could have possibly foreseen when they welcomed me in 1998.

At Routledge, two anonymous readers provided excellent comments and suggestions that have helped improve the book. Research Editor Max Novick and his assistant, Erica Wetter, were remarkably efficient, kind, and patient with a neophyte author.

The encouragement and support from friends and family have sustained me far beyond what I had any reason or right to expect. Barbara Clow is the best editor I know; her comments were always sensible and suggestions unfailingly constructive. It is no exaggeration to say I would not have finished without her love and continued faith in me. Both she and Harry are constant reminders to me of what it all really means: they feel like home to me.

The crisis of modernity in the Weimar Republic was especially evident in the challenges posed by its cities. Germanys large municipalities in the 1920s were celebrated showplaces of urban power and confidence in technology and progress, exemplars of still resonant associations of the modern metropolis. Competing with each other for prestige, publicity, and resources, they constructed lavish exhibition halls, extended road networks as automobile traffic increased, and built airports for burgeoning air travel; they financed and ran their own electricity, gas- and waterworks, and public transit corporations. Centers of cultural and aesthetic experimentation, they were famous for their musical revues and cabarets, expressionism in the theatre and visual arts, vital artists communities, and modernist literature. Some cities were sites of quasi-socialist housing cooperatives employing new architectural styles. The famous term, Weimar culture, invokes immediately the designs of the Bauhaus and architect Bruno Taut, the theatre of Max Reinhardt and Bertolt Brecht, composer Paul Hindemiths early experiments in tonality, the politically provocative art of Otto Dix, George Grosz, and the Dadaists, the cosmopolitan novels of Alfred Dblin, and a host of others. None of the works of these artists, their dozens of peers, or the artistic milieus that nurtured them, are conceivable outside of the urban environment. Weimar culture was to a great degree modern urban culture.