Transcription
[Music] welcome to Germany my name's Gavin Plumlee. I'm a cultural historian and the series advisor for the fil ammonia orchestras vimar Berlin bittersweet metropolis. Over the next few months, we'll be guiding you through the exciting and sometimes treacherous era of the vimar Republic, and it all began here in the city of Vemma, exactly a century ago.
[Music] Europe was in tatters. Old political systems were on their knees. Millions had been slaughtered, and Germany was entirely to blame, at least according to the Treaty of Versailles. But despite the pervasive negativity and factionalism of the immediate post-war period, a new German Constitution was conceived by the Social Democrats and agreed in this building, the National Theatre in Vemma. Previously, this city had been home to great writers and cultural figures, including Goethe and Schiller. Vimar was a peaceful cultural center. Instead of arrests, political hub, and coming you to agree the terms for a new republic represented a fresh start, and with this constitution began the most extraordinary period of artistic experimentation Germany had ever seen.
The experience of the First World War really changed Germany completely. Before that, it had all been up, almost ershov triumphant story. A provincial, relatively poor country became strong, became technologically advanced, highly educated, had the most important artists and scientists, and Germany was going places. Germany was going to the top of the world, which, incidentally, its neighbors looked at with great suspicion. And then this brutal scissor of the wall, millions of people killed, many, many more people traumatized, and everybody losing this glorious future they had been going towards, and coming back to a country that was defeated, that was poor, that was almost unguardable, and whose values had almost evaporated overnight.
This shift from an old Imperial world to an urgent Democratic one, as well as the move from agrarian to metropolitan, was not achieved without difficulty. The city was an uncertain place, but it was also a major new focus for the artists of the age. That was certainly the case for cinema, which had a meteoric rise during the Weimar Republic, first with silent films and then with talkies. The art of filmmaking flourished in Germany between the walls, and it had a diverse and often divided society to draw on.
In the aftermath of well, well one, it was a time of revolutionary turmoil and inflationary chaos, so people tended to spend what they have and live in the moment, going in search of new thrills and sensations, of which cinema was a major supplier. Film was the new technological medium for a new machine age. It epitomized urban modernity, the speed and motion of the big city. It was like a dream factory for a new mass audience, including a growing class of urban white-collar workers, many of whom were women.
A shift in stylization occurred around the mid-twenties, which had partly to do with the growing confidence of the German film industry following the success of the so-called expressionist films. They felt they had a strong product, and they also felt more confident some years on from Germany's defeat about the more friendly attitude to Germany and international markets. So they were able to move away from fantastic, gothic, exotic, historical type settings and dare to reflect contemporary German reality.
The shift away from stylization also coincided with the rise of a new style in the visual arts, dubbed new objectivity, which focused on the terrible consequences, socially, of World War one, with artists like Ross and dicks portraying beggars, injured war veterans, prostitutes. In cinema, new objectivity was a kind of largely still studio-bound, socially engaged realism with a progressive flavor. All by MA arts were typifies by this kind of dichotomy between emotional subjectivity and detached objectivity.
Expressionism, flourishing even before the First World War, gave free rein to feeling and often distorted sensations to nightmarish ends. It found a particularly expressive subject in the horror of war, and for some, including artists Kathe Kollwitz, it continued to provide a source of fascination during the 1920s. But no, exactly Kait. New objectivity was a decisive step away from this emotional brink, presenting people and things with a sense of coolness, rationality, and detachment. It was typify dust and foremost by the art of figures such as Christian Chard and Jean Mammon, but it also found potent archetypes in the work of a new art school founded in Vimar in 1919, the same year as the Constitution was adopted.
Well, one of the responses to their cultural collapse that had happened was the Bauhaus. Was the idea that here was this movement that was extremely functional and austere. The Viennese architect Adolf Loos described ornament as crime because he said an ornament is essentially a lie on something. It's there to pretend that comes from a time it doesn't come from, made of materials not made of, etc. It's made to look like something else and like something grander than itself. So let's strip all that away and get back to the bare function. And that idea is resonated very strongly with the artists that came together, or architects, or craftsmen who came together in the Bauhaus, and they wanted to design a world that was sheer, pure, and functional, in which none of the Imperial aesthetics of previous ages was still.
The Bauhaus was formed out of two institutions: Vimar's Grand Ducal Saxon Art School and the city's School of Applied Arts. The founding director of the Bauhaus, as it became known, was Walter Gropius. He wanted to eliminate all classist barriers between artists and craftsmen, instead creating a new kind of practical, that intellectual, cultural, creative figure. And his Bauhaus encompassed many great minds and makers, including painter Vasily Kandinsky, carpenter Marcel Breuer, and architect Mies van der Rohe, as well as textile artist Annie Albers and silversmith Marianne Brandt. Because this wasn't just a school for men, women were also key to the vision of the Bauhaus, just as they were to the Republic at large. After all, German women had been granted the right to vote and the right to be elected on the 12th of November 1918, the day after the Armistice.
But who provided the soundtrack for this period of social, political, and cultural change? It was, of course, the composers at the heart of the Philharmonius series: composers such as Kurt Weill, Paul Hindemith, Hanns Eisler, and Alban Berg. The spirits of all arts, but especially music's changed after the First World War. The sort of post-romantic, late romantic opulence and grandiosity disappeared, and composers were more interested in in smaller ensembles, music that would have a social function. I think it was Hindemith who launched the term "Gebrauchsmusik," utility music, music to be used. There was a lot of humor, life in Berlin and in Germany generally must have been incredibly hard in the twenties with the inflation and all the the problems that people had to resort to humor. At least you could laugh at things. So for the first time since I would say Mozart and Rossini, we're witnessing can fun II, truly funny operas and and truly funny plays. And so the the human expansion expanded quite a bit in those.
Regardless of your vocation as an artist, the Weimar Republic was enthralling, but it was also dangerous, with a violently fluctuating economy, a divided society, and mad political urges from right to left and back again. And that made her great challenges as the 1920s hurtled towards the even more tempestuous decade of the 1930s. Come with me on this tour around Germany and discover what it was like a century ago, as the Weimar Republic gave birth to a thrillingly diverse new culture.
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