The Weimar Spectacle

“The Bauhaus. That was an idea, more, an ideal. No difference between draftsmen and artists. Everyone together in a new community, we should build the cathedral of the future. I wanted to be a part of it. And something happened that freed us. We did not learn to paint, but learned to see anew, to think anew, and at the same time we learned to know ourselves” - Re SoupaultI’ve been meaning to do an episode about the Bauhaus, which is central to the aesthetics of the Weimar Republic and changed modern design and architecture around the world. I was going to focus on the founders and teachers, but I stumbled upon a wonderful book about the extraordinary lives of women who trained at the Bauhaus. I’ve had trouble finding good, readable histories of women in the Weimar Republic, so starting from their perspectives is a great way to begin discussing the school. This episode is about five amazing women whose lives were changed by the Bauhaus: what it brought them, their struggles and achievements at the school, and their lives afterwards.

Count Harry Kessler is remembered today less for what he did — though he did quite a lot — than for what he wrote. His diaries, kept over six decades, are among the most extraordinary documents of the twentieth century. They record conversations with everyone from Rodin and Rilke to Einstein, Strauss, Cocteau, Hofmannsthal, and Diaghilev. They also record his impressions of the great turning points of modern history: the First World War, the Weimar Republic, the rise of Nazism. In this episode, we’re going to trace the arc of Harry Kessler’s life, with special attention to his Weimar years — when he tried, with extraordinary energy, to build cultural bridges across a divided Europe. I’ll take a look at his privileged origins, his aesthetic vision, his wartime disillusionment, and his relentless advocacy for art as a force for peace and meaning.

Okay, full disclosure, I started this podcast not for any deep political reason, but because I was fascinated by the culture of the Weimar Republic, the music, the arts, the architecture, the personalities. I didn’t start it because I thought that the political parallels between then and now were absolutely clear. But, there’s that thing that happens, where something's in your head and you start seeing it everywhere. Well, I feel like every time I read the news, turn on the radio, listen to a podcast, or talk to a friend over drinks, someone is telling me we are living in days exactly like the end of the Weimar Republic. I’m not sure about that, but I thought it might be worth an episode.  

Today I’m interviewing Daniel Brook, the author of a new book on the pioneering sexual rights activist Magnus Hirschfeld, whose Berlin Institute of Sexual Science was a huge attraction in Weimar Berlin and was eventually destroyed by the Nazis, and whose theories are so contemporary they could be taken directly from modern debates about gender, sexuality, race and freedom.Magnus Hirschfeld (14 May 1868 – 14 May 1935) was a Jewish German physician, sexologist and LGBTQ+ advocate, whose German citizenship was later revoked by the Nazi government. Hirschfeld was educated in philosophy, philology and medicine. An outspoken advocate for sexual minorities, Hirschfeld founded the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee and World League for Sexual Reform. He based his practice in Berlin-Charlottenburg during the Weimar period and carried out "the first advocacy for homosexual and transgender rights".Hirschfeld is regarded as one of the most influential sexologists of the 20th century. He was targeted by early fascists and later the Nazis for being Jewish and gay. He was beaten by völkisch activists in 1920, and in 1933 his Institut für Sexualwissenschaft was looted and had its books burned by Nazis. Hirschfeld was forced into exile in France, where he died in 1935.  

On 30 June 1937, Joseph Goebbels, the Reich Minister for Propaganda and Enlightenment, authorised the Director of the Reich Chamber for Culture, Adolf Ziegler, to select and confiscate paintings and sculptures from public collections for a major exhibition on 'degenerate art'. Ziegler said “What's been gathered together in [this] exhibition constitutes the portrayal of a true witches' sabbath and the most frivolous spiritual-artistic cultural bolshevism and a portrayal of the triumph of subhumanity, of arrogant Jewish insolence and total spiritual senile dementia.”This was the infamous exhibition entitled "Entartete Kunst," or "Degenerate Art," in Munich. The objective was to ridicule and condemn modern art that did not align with the party's ideology. This episode delves into the history, motivations, and lasting impacts of this notorious exhibition and unravels the complex narrative of how art became a battleground for ideological control.

George Grosz was a German artist known especially for his political cartoons and paintings of Berlin life in the 1920s. He was a prominent member of the Berlin Dada and New Objectivity groups during the Weimar Republic. He emigrated to the United States in 1933, and became a naturalized citizen in 1938. John Heartfield was a German visual artist who pioneered the use of art as a political weapon. Some of his most famous photo-montages were anti-Nazi and anti-fascist statements and he was hunted relentlessly by the Gestapo for his art and politics. John Heartfield said: "  There are a lot of things that got me into working with photos. The main thing is that I saw both what was being said and not being said with photos in the newspapers... I found out how you can fool people with photos, really fool them... You can lie and tell the truth by putting the wrong title or wrong captions under them, and that's roughly what was being done." George Grosz said: " It's an old ploy of the bourgeoisie. They keep a standing 'art' to defend their collapsing culture."

“Berlin was in a state of civil war. Hate exploded suddenly, without warning, out of nowhere; at street corners, in restaurants, cinemas, dance halls, swimming-baths; at midnight, after breakfast, in the middle of the afternoon ... From 1929 to 1933, I lived almost continuously in Berlin, with only occasional visits to other parts of Germany and to England. Already, during that time, I had made up my mind that I would one day write about the people I’d met and the experiences I was having. So I kept a detailed diary, which in due course provided raw material for all my Berlin stories." ― Christopher Isherwood, whose books on Berlin provided the basis for the musical Cabaret. I talk to author Brian Fairbanks whose new work-in-progress promises to uncover the extraordinary real characters in behind the musical Cabaret, and "give them agency".  

On Oct 15th, 1923, Berlin resident Betty Scholem wrote to her son: “Conditions have taken a catastrophic turn here. This letter cost 15 million marks to send...and it will be 30 million beginning the day after tomorrow.” She estimated household expenses in the billions as the monthly rate of inflation approached 30,000 percent. In 1913, one US dollar was worth roughly 4 German marks.  By November, 1923 in Germany, ten years later, hyper-inflation had pushed one US dollar to be worth 4,210,500,000,000 German marks. And by then it was quite common to be carrying around a one billion mark banknote. The journey through this hyperinflation changes everything in Germany. It makes beggars and it makes billionaires.  It destroys an entire class of people.  It changes morals and ambitions and sexual morality. It fuels the rise of right wing and left wing revolutionary dreams. It stokes the fears and hatreds and racism that lead to the 2nd World War, and it still effects today’s Europe. Welcome to The Weimar Spectacle, where I explore the brief and extraordinary life of the Weimar Republic. I’m Bremner Fletcher Duthie, singer, actor and theatre maker. I’ve spent years performing songs and theatre and cabaret from the Weimar period, and I’m inspired and maybe more than a little obsessed by that moment in time.  

   “Let us consciously be ‘imaginary architects’! We believe that only a total revolution can guide us in our task.  Our fellow citizens, even our colleagues quite rightly suspect in us the forces of revolution.  Break up and undermine all former principles. Horse Shit! And we the bud in fresh dung.”  So, said Weimar architect Bruno Taut!!             And his contemporary, Walter Gropius replied: “Together let us desire, conceive and create the new structure of the future, which will embrace architecture and sculpture and painting in one unity and which will one day rise towards heaven from the hands of a million workers like the crystal symbol of a new faith”In this episode we’ll be taking a look at the Utopian Architecture of the Weimar Republic, that, despite its utopian yearnings, still managed to navigate the dull needs of city bureaucracies and day to day practicalities of construction to provide new, modern homes for millions of people yearning for a whole new way of living. 

What do you get when you mix a bottle of Laphroaig Whiskey with three charming Weimar raconteurs? A freewheeling conversation that touches on the disturbing, occasionally hopeful, similarities of the Weimar period with our own days, the enduring importance and power of the poetry and plays of Bertolt Brecht, why New Orleans might be a last bastion of Weimar Culture, and on bringing to light some lesser known artists of 1920’s Germany. Over my kitchen table in New Orleans, I was joined by Sarah Brecht, David Symons and Harry Mayronne to discuss their fascination for the Weimar period and Sarah's esteemed Grandfather, Bertolt Brecht.  

Many years ago, I started my musical career singing, or maybe I should say screaming, with a Punk band, then eventually, through some very complicated in-between steps, I ended singing Opera, then on to musical theatre, then swinging it with jazz groups, and nowadays, mostly, I’m singing my own original songs. However through all of that, I've been enchanted, inspired, and more than a little obsessed, by the music of Kurt Julien Weill. I've sung Weill’s music in lovely concert halls and dark saloons, I've sung his music accompanied by rock guitar, punk bands and jazz quartets, and I've never grown tired of his songs. And I believe that is because Kurt Weill was a wild and crazy Kabarett Punk Rocker, and that’s what I intend to prove in this episode. 

On October 29th, 1918, only a few days before the official end of WW1, in Kiel, a naval port on Germany’s northern coast, sailors in the German Imperial Navy staged a mutiny that would spark revolutions across Germany, would lead to the formation of a new state with a constitution recognizing radical new human rights, and ultimately would lead to the rise of the Nazi Party. The Sailors were responding to the unauthorized decision by the Imperial Navy Command to take the entire fleet and engage in one final suicidal battle against the Royal Navy. The German Naval officers believed it was better for the sailors to die gloriously in battle at sea than to accept the upcoming, so called, dishonorable peace settlement and go home alive. The sailors, however, thought differently.www.bremnersings.com

We’re going to leap into some of the fun, crazy and sometimes completely mad of the Weimar days, i.e. the wild sexual revolution that appeared in in Berlin and to a lesser degree across Germany. My big idea for this episode is that in Post-WW1 Germany, people had seen so much death, they searched for life through sex and rejoicing in their bodies. The war had proved a beautiful body could be easily broken or snuffed out and so pleasure was not to be delayed. But sexuality became a brutal battleground in the fight for which ideas and morality would govern a new Germany. 

In this first episode we'll take a quick overview of birth, brief life and death of the Weimar Republic and ask the big, big question: 'Why care about a failed European state that only lasted 14 years and was a hot mess from the start'.