Modernism And Weimar

Peter Gay’s book breathes elegance, wit, and discernment. His portrayal of the scholarly, literary, and artistic brilliance of the first German republic illuminates much that has been obscure or available only through specialized monographs. The Bauhaus, German Expressionism, the internationally important circles of historians, classical humanists, depth psychologists, and sociologists—all these appear here under the unifying imprint of a master stylist. This book should be read by all who want to sense the color, mood, and flavor of the modernist culture of Weimar Germany.

Unfortunately, in his effort to go beyond the evocation of a life-style and to penetrate the psychological and sociological significance of Weimar’s plunge to disaster, Gay reveals the limitations of the historian as moralist, of the liberal enmeshed in the shibboleths of modernity, of an amateur depth psychologist who is too quick to settle for death wishes and oedipal hostilities as irreduc...