Karolina Watroba: "Weimar Worlds: A New Cultural History of Interwar Germany"

ABSTRACT:

My current project aims to illuminate the hidden cultural diversity of Weimar Germany. This epoch is conventionally characterized as a period of unprecedented cultural flowering, interrupted in 1933 by the formation of the Nazi government, but subsequently exported around the world by numerous illustrious exiles, including Bertolt Brecht, Thomas Mann, Fritz Lang, George Grosz, and Walter Gropius. Yet Weimar culture was not only exported, but also imported. In the 1920s and 1930s Germans were assimilating international cultural influences, but this process has not yet been sufficiently studied, especially where it involved influences from outside of Europe and USA. Weimar Germany was also a refuge for exiles and a destination for expats from all around the world, especially Asia. I investigate how these newcomers to Germany co-created Weimar culture, by analysing texts, authors, and institutions that were widely known and critically acclaimed in the 1920s and 1930s but have since been largely forgotten: relegated to specialist publications and not included in mainstream academic or popular accounts of the Weimar years. In my talk, I will share a few different ways into my corpus, as well as my current thinking on the structure of the resulting book.