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The Politics of Symbols, Semantics, and Sentiments in the Weimar Republic

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 December 2010

Kathleen Canning
Kathleen Canning
Affiliation:
University of Michigan
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Extract

Contests over the term politics, over the boundaries that distinguished politics from non-politics, were one of the distinguishing features of the Weimar Republic. Not only did the disciplines of history, philosophy, law, sociology, and pedagogy each define this boundary in different terms, but participants in the debate also distinguished between ideal and real politics, politics at the level of state, and the dissemination of politics through society and citizenry. The fact that Weimar began with a revolution, the abdication of the Kaiser, and military defeat meant an eruption of politicization in 1918–19, whereby political organs of state and civil society sought in unprecedented fashion to draw Germans into parties and parliaments, associations, and activist societies. “The German people would still consist of ninety percent unpolitical people, if Social Democracy had not become a political school for the people,” Otto Braun claimed in Vorwärts in 1925. Politics and politicization generated not only political acts—votes, strikes, and vocal demonstrations—but also cultural milieus of Socialists and Communists, Catholics and liberal Democrats, nationalists, and eventually Nazis. In Weimar Germany there was little room for the “unpolitical” citizen of the prewar era, held up as a model in a famous tract of 1918 by Thomas Mann.

Type
Culture of Politics—Politics of Culture: New Perspectives on the Weimar Republic
Information
Central European History , Volume 43 , Issue 4 , December 2010 , pp. 567 - 580
Copyright
Copyright © Conference Group for Central European History of the American Historical Association 2010

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References

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25 Thomas Mergel, “Propaganda in der Kultur des Schauens. Visuelle Politik in der Weimarer Republik,” in Ordnungen in der Krise, ed. Hardtwig, 533–34.

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37 Ibid., 620.

38 Ibid., 618.

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42 See, for example, the forum on “History of Emotions,” in German History 28, no. 1 (2010): 67–80 (with Alon Confino, Ute Frevert, Uffa Jensen, Lyndal Roper, and Daniela Saxer), here 75. See also “The History of Emotions: An Interview with William Reddy, Barbara Rosenwein, and Peter Stearns,” History and Theory 49 (May 2010): 237–65. See also the description of the research cluster on “History of Emotions,” directed by Ute Frevert at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin: http://www.mpib-berlin.mpg.de/en/forschung/gg/index.htm.

43 Achilles, “With a Passion for Reason,” 668.

44 See Manuela Achilles, “Reforming the Reich: Democratic Symbols and Rituals in the Weimar Republic,” in Weimar Publics/Weimar Subjects, ed. Canning et al., 177. For specific discussion of Rathenau's murder, see Achilles, Manuela, “Nationalist Violence and Republican Identity in Weimar Germany,” in German Literature, History, and the Nation, ed. Midgley, David and Emden, Christian (Oxford and Bern: Peter Lang, 2004)Google Scholar.

45 Achilles, “With a Passion for Reason,” 670; Rossol, “Weltkrieg und Verfassung.”