HIST 215 - From Weimar to Hitler: Modernism and Anti-Modernism in German Culture after the First World War

FDR: HU Humanities Distribution
Credits: 4

Germany adopted an admirably democratic constitution after the First World War, and the Weimar Republic became a center of bold experimentation in literature, the arts, theater, cinema, and scholarship, but it also became a hotbed of radical nationalism and xenophobia. This course analyzes the relationship between art and politics through case studies in the debates provoked by anti-war films and poetry, the Bauhaus international style of architecture, the plays of Bertolt Brecht, expressionist art, and films and paintings to celebrate the advent of the “New Woman.” Why did modernism inspire so much anxiety in Germany in the 1920s? To what extent did cultural experimentation contribute to the popularity of Adolf Hitler? What lessons did Weimar intellectuals in exile learn from the Nazi seizure of power?