Quick questions on Weimar culture and the Nazi Gleichschaltung: VCE Modern History Unit 3

The Weimar Republic produced one of the most experimental cultures of the 20th century. Three reasons. First, the November 1918 revolution removed imperial censorship; the Weimar Constitution (11 August 1919) guaranteed freedom of expression. Second, Berlin became a magnet for talent across Central Europe.

The Weimar Constitution gave women the vote on 19 January 1919 (turnout 82 per cent in the first National Assembly election). Around 36 women sat in the National Assembly. Women entered the professions in greater numbers: by 1930, women made up around one-third of university students.

Weimar cultural modernism flourished in cities and offended much of provincial, conservative Germany. The Catholic Centre Party and the Protestant nationalist right framed urban modernism as decadent, "un-German" and "Jewish." Anti-modernist organisations such as the Combat League for German Culture (founded by Alfred Rosenberg in 1928) prepared the ground for Nazi cultural politics.

"Gleichschaltung" means forced coordination. Between 1933 and 1934, the Nazi regime brought every cultural institution under state control.

Education. Jewish teachers were dismissed under the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service (7 April 1933). The Hitler Youth (founded 1926, compulsory from 1 December 1936) and the League of German Girls (BDM) absorbed children's organised time outside school. Curricula were rewritten to emphasise racial biology, Lebensraum, and the Volk.

Some Weimar continuities survived. The UFA film studio kept producing entertainment films (musicals, comedies) under Nazi management. Radio expanded rapidly: by 1939, around 70 per cent of households owned a "people's receiver" (Volksempfanger), the highest radio penetration in Europe. Mass leisure was organised through Strength Through Joy (Kraft durch Freude, founded 27 November 1933), which sponsored holidays, cruises, theatre tickets and the people's car (Volkswagen).

Peter Gay (Weimar Culture, 1968) frames Weimar culture as "the outsider as insider": creative figures (Jews, Marxists, expatriates) who were marginal under Wilhelmine Germany became central in Weimar and were re-marginalised by the Nazis.

Walter Gropius founded the Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar on 1 April 1919. The school unified fine art, craft, design and architecture under one programme. Moving to Dessau in 1925 under a new Gropius-designed building, the Bauhaus produced functional design (Marcel Breuer's tubular steel furniture, Marianne Brandt's tableware) and trained Mies van der Rohe, who became director in 1930.

Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920) launched expressionist film with distorted sets and ambiguous moral framing. Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927) and M (1931) used the same visual grammar for social critique. F.W.

Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain (1924) and Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) sold internationally. Bertolt Brecht's The Threepenny Opera (1928), with Kurt Weill's music, defined modernist theatre. Alfred Doblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) modelled the city in prose.

Berlin cabaret (the Kabarett der Komiker, the Eldorado) and jazz culture made the city Europe's most permissive nightlife centre. Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute for Sexual Science (founded 6 July 1919) pioneered research on homosexuality and trans identity.

George Grosz, Otto Dix and Max Beckmann produced Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) paintings that depicted urban poverty, prostitution and war wounds. Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky and Lyonel Feininger taught at the Bauhaus and produced major abstract work.

Goebbels was appointed Reich Minister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda on 13 March 1933. The Reich Chamber of Culture (Reichskulturkammer) was founded on 22 September 1933 with seven sub-chambers covering film, radio, the press, theatre, music, the visual arts, and literature. Membership was compulsory; Jews and politically suspect artists were excluded.

On 10 May 1933, German students burned around 25,000 books in 34 university cities. Authors targeted included Thomas Mann, Heinrich Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Erich Maria Remarque, Helen Keller, Walter Benjamin, and Stefan Zweig. Heinrich Heine's earlier line ("Where they burn books, they will in the end also burn people") was widely quoted.

Hollywood-style entertainment films continued under tight scripts. Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will (1935), filmed at the 1934 Nuremberg Rally, and Olympia (1938), filmed at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, defined Nazi propaganda cinema. Veit Harlan's Jud Suss (1940) was an antisemitic blockbuster.