continuity and change in social and cultural life in Germany 1919 to 1939, including Weimar culture (Bauhaus, cabaret, expressionism, cinema, the New Woman) and the Nazi Gleichschaltung of culture, education and the family after 1933

What this dot point is asking

VCAA expects you to set the experimental, pluralist Weimar culture of 1919 to 1932 against the systematic Nazi coordination of culture, education and the family after January 1933, and to weigh both continuity and change. Strong responses pair named cultural products (Bauhaus buildings, named films, named books) with named state policies (Reich Chamber of Culture, book burnings, Degenerate Art exhibition) and cite a historian.

The answer

Weimar culture (1919 to 1932)

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. Third, urban mass society (radio from 1923, cinema, popular press) gave artists a paying audience.

The Bauhaus. 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. The Nazis closed the Bauhaus in Berlin on 11 April 1933.

Expressionist cinema. 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. Murnau's Nosferatu (1922) and Faust (1926) won international audiences. The German film industry (UFA) was the largest in Europe.

Literature and theatre. 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.

Cabaret and nightlife. 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.

Art. 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.

Social change in Weimar

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.

The "New Woman" (Neue Frau) became a cultural figure: bobbed hair, slim flapper dress, urban work, financial independence. Hirschfeld's institute distributed contraception. The Reichstag legalised abortion in cases of medical danger in 1927. Berlin nightlife included visible gay and lesbian bars.

Workers gained the eight-hour day (15 November 1918), unemployment insurance (16 July 1927), and access to public housing. The Bauhaus designed mass housing estates such as the Hufeisensiedlung in Berlin (1925 to 1933).

Why Weimar culture provoked a backlash

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.

The Depression intensified the backlash. Cultural modernism became a target for those who blamed the city, the cosmopolitan elite, and the Weimar settlement for economic collapse. The NSDAP cultivated this resentment directly.

Nazi Gleichschaltung of culture (1933 to 1939)

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

The Reich Chamber of Culture. 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.

The book burnings. 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.

Cinema under the Nazis. 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.

The Degenerate Art exhibition. Opened in Munich on 19 July 1937 in a converted plaster cast gallery, the Degenerate Art exhibition displayed 650 modernist works (Beckmann, Chagall, Dix, Grosz, Kirchner, Klee, Kokoschka, Macke, Mondrian, Nolde, Schwitters) confiscated from German museums. Hung crookedly, juxtaposed with mocking captions and drawings by mental hospital inmates, the show drew over two million visitors. The companion Great German Art Exhibition (opened 18 July 1937) showed approved "Aryan" art.

Music. Mendelssohn (Jewish ancestry) and Mahler (likewise) were dropped from concert programmes. Wagner became the state composer; the Bayreuth Festival was a regime showpiece. Jazz and "Negro music" were attacked but tolerated to varying degrees in private clubs.

Architecture. Albert Speer became Hitler's architect. Bauhaus modernism was replaced with monumental classicism (the Nuremberg parade grounds, the planned Welthauptstadt Germania). Wright-style flat roofs were treated as un-German; pitched roofs returned.

Gleichschaltung of education and the family

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.

Universities. Twelve per cent of professors were dismissed in 1933; up to a third were dismissed in some disciplines. Albert Einstein (in Princeton from 1933), Erwin Schrodinger, Max Born and many other Jewish scientists emigrated.

Family. The Law for the Encouragement of Marriage (1 June 1933) offered marriage loans of 1,000 Reichsmarks to "Aryan" couples on condition the wife left the workforce. Each child reduced the loan by a quarter. The Mother's Cross (Mutterkreuz, 16 December 1938) honoured women with four or more children. The Nuremberg Laws (15 September 1935) banned marriages between Jews and non-Jews.

Continuity within change

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).

Historiography

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.

Peter Fritzsche (Germans into Nazis, 1998) emphasises popular consent to Nazi cultural politics: many Germans welcomed the destruction of Weimar modernism.

Eric Weitz (Weimar Germany, 2007) treats Weimar as a "promise" of democratic mass culture that the Depression and the Nazis cut short.

Ian Kershaw (Hubris, 1998) integrates the cultural Gleichschaltung into the broader consolidation of Nazi power.

Common exam traps

Treating Weimar culture as the whole of Germany. Berlin, Munich and Frankfurt were modernist; rural Bavaria and East Prussia were not. The cultural conflict was geographic as well as ideological.

Calling Nazi culture "anti-modern" without qualification. The Nazis used modern technologies (radio, cinema, mass rallies) while attacking modernist aesthetics. Their politics were modern in method, archaic in image.

Mixing the Degenerate Art exhibition (July 1937) with the book burnings (May 1933). The book burnings targeted literature; the Degenerate Art exhibition targeted visual modernism. Both were Goebbels-led cultural purges, four years apart.

Forgetting the New Woman and the BDM are connected. Weimar's New Woman could vote, work and study. Nazi policy reversed female labour participation and channelled girls through the BDM into motherhood. The reversal was deliberate.

In one sentence

Weimar Germany (1919 to 1932) produced one of the most experimental cultures of the 20th century in the Bauhaus, expressionist cinema, Berlin cabaret, and the New Woman; the Nazi regime systematically dismantled it after January 1933 through the Reich Chamber of Culture (September 1933), the book burnings (10 May 1933), the Degenerate Art exhibition (July 1937), and the coordination of education and the family around motherhood, racial biology and the Volksgemeinschaft.