7 - Between the wars: traditions, modernisms, and the ‘little people from the suburbs’

Summary

Why? Who is the German philistine that he should be upset by Dadaism? It is the German intellectual who explodes with rage because his formally perfect, schmalz-bread soul has been left to bake in the sun of ridicule …

Raoul Hausmann in Der Dada, 1919

… in the University of Vienna there are thirty policemen continually on duty – we wondered how we should like our own lecture-rooms to be patrolled in this manner … The only time we saw real happiness in public was in the State Opera House where a great crowd had assembled to hear Richard Tauber in Der Evangelimann. That voice lifted them above the things of this life; the audience sat entranced …

A British journalist, writing in September 1936

The cultural richness of the inter-war period – whether the focus is on Europe, Russia, Scandinavia, or America – simultaneously defies and incites linear history. It defies it because of the extent to which it is marked by diversity and contestation. The cultural high ground was so effectively fought over that narrative accounts are bound to be partial, marked by a bias that is itself a historical residue of the period. Linear history is nevertheless incited precisely by the generally assumed underlying directionality marshalling the complexities of cultural life in a Europe ‘between’ catastrophes. One inevitably turns to Weimar Germany to illustrate the point. Its European and even global importance was attested by the many musicians, artists, writers, and scientists who continued to flock there to study, listen, and observe. With hindsight, everything that happened during the Weimar period pointed with such macabre logic towards 1933 and the arrival of the National Socialists that the imposition of an alternative narrative seems almost a moral obligation. That alternative has familiarly construed modernism and the various avant-garde movements as representing a more sympathetic cultural trajectory – both critical and oppositional – above and around the accumulating evils of the period.