Don’t’ you just love modern times? I mean it’s so easy to just jump into any rabbit hole that lures you in. Be it YouTube or podcasts. For the last few months all roads have led to jumping down the Weimar Republic Kaninchenbau.

It all started innocently enough. I just wanted to watch the movie Cabaret. I’ve never seen it. It won 8 Oscars. But I didn’t really want to pay money to watch an over 50-year-old movie. Especially a musical. Besides why waste two hours of your life on an unknown movie when you can waste ten times more reading the book?

So, the first rabbit hole. The movie is based on a play that is based on a book. I found the book Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood. As luck would have it, I could download the book for free. Yay.

I started reading. Total snoozefest. I’ll save that discussion for a different time.

A few years ago, I read another history about the Weimar Republic. I can’t remember anything about it other than it being very scholarly and way TMI.

So, I did a little climbing around the rabbit hole and found Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider by Peter Gay.

Now we are talking. Short and sweet. It’s really more of a long essay. Under 7 hours as an audiobook, 260 pages in print. Most history tomes are long lugubrious affairs taking 20 to 30 hours.

The audio was free on Audible for some mysterious reason.

This author absolutely sucked me in. He has a wonderful conversational style. It felt like hanging out with a friend reminiscing about fond memories of a long ago trip.

The best part was he was in no hurry to get anywhere. When needed, he would go back to the period before Weimar in order for you to understand where the seeds for this unique political experiment were sewn. But just enough background, then he got on with the very focused topic he was discussing.

In general terms this book is chronological, but it’s also arranged by topics. It was wonderful. He would just sort of meander from topic to topic in a gradually building manner until he skillfully painted a picture of the period, more of a mosaic.

I specifically was looking for some of the artists of the period. But he was kind enough to inform us in the preface that he wouldn’t be going there for the most part.

He did, however, have a fairly lengthy discourse about architecture, specifically the Bauhaus. Which in reality was an art school not exclusively architecture.

This topic was near and dear to my heart. I had the interesting experience of working in an architect’s office for several years. I worked in a non-design capacity, but I was familiar with their design philosophy. They were highly influenced by the Bauhaus.

He mentioned a lot of German writers and poets. Thanks to the magic of the Internet, you’re able to jump down any rabbit hole you like. It was wonderful because he gave names of artists and authors along with their key works. You could jujst Hippity-Hop down the bunny trail and look up some of their work.

That gave me several wonderful Ah-ha moments. “So, that’s where this style came from.”

A criterion that I use for history books is; do I get a feel for the Zeitgeist. In this book he did a fabulous job of conveying just that.

He talked about some of the day-to-day things that would be familiar to a modern reader. He talked about the different newspapers and the plays that were in some of the many theaters in Berlin. I thought he did a very good job of explaining the spirit of excitement and experimentation that was going on.

The reason I initially wanted to watch Cabaret was to try and get a feel for the Zeitgeist of the period.

Well, the Isherwood book and movie are just a little too myopic. They are focused on just the main characters.

But Peter Gay in this wonderful book gradually gives you enough details so that you start to get a feeling for the time. It really comes alive.

The book was first published in 1968. That was a turbulent time in American history. So, I wondered how that would act as a lens for this author. As far as I could tell, I don’t feel that he forced his history to fit the 60’s worldview.

Weimar is a piece of History that everyone loves to use as a metaphor for the current time. Much like the fall of Rome.

The author graciously omitted the political history from the body of the work and included it in a separate appendix.

The Weimar Republic Basically was from 1918 to 1933. This short time period ran the gamut from a war-ravaged country, to total economic collapse, to a semi-functional self-governing society.

If you can just not fixate on that little catastrophe that followed the collapse of Weimar. It’s a fascinating period in time.

In the US we had the roaring twenties. In Germany they had the Weimar Republic.

(Fun Fact: When I went back to reread/skim the previous massive Weimar history that I mentioned, Weimar German: Promise and Tragedy by Eric D. Wietz.  I noticed in the bibliography the first book Wietz mentioned was Gay’s work Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider.)