Review

“For some time now, scholars have been expanding the definition of ‘Weimar Culture’ to include much more than Brecht and the Bauhaus. This book offers a lively selection of some of the most innovative, challenging, and rewarding research currently underway in Weimar studies.”—Matthew Jefferies, Professor of German History, Manchester University
“Contradicting the cliché of inevitable doom, this collection takes a fresh look at Weimar’s mass culture by exploring its visual, transnational, political, and recreational practices. The essays present the findings of a generation of ‘new cultural historians’ which emphasizes the potential of the first democratic culture in Germany.”— Konrad H. Jarausch, Lurcy Professor of European Civilization, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
“This highly readable and important collection of essays challenges the teleological and doom-laden narrative that has been the conventional approach to the history of the Weimar Republic more or less since its end in 1933. John Alexander Williams has brought together a team of excellent younger scholars whose individual contributions to the volume cast Weimar culture in an entirely different light . . . No good reading list will be able to do without this highly recommended volume.”—Anthony McElligott, Professor of History, University of Limerick
“This collection challenges interpretations of Weimar culture in ways both complex and fresh. For the range of compelling topics, there is nothing like it.”—Belinda Davis, Professor, The Department of Germanic, Russian, and East European Languages and Literatures, Rutgers University
“This culturally-informed social history liberates the history of Weimar culture from those narratives of pessimism and crisis into which it has been shoehorned by the focus on canonical works of high culture and opens up new vistas that lead the reader in unexpected directions.”—Young-sun Hong, Associate Professor, Department of History, State University of New York at Stony Brook

About the Author

John Alexander Williams is an Associate Professor of modern European history at Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois. He is the author of Turning to Nature in Germany: Hiking, Nudism, and Conservation, 1900-1940 and the editor of Berlin Since the Wall’s End: Shaping Society and      Memory in the German Metropolis since 1989.