Weimar Germany's Left-Wing Intellectuals: A Political History of the Weltbühne and Its Circle
Book Notes #43
The book is a study of the left wing intellectuals of Weimar Germany who wrote for the Weltbühne, a left-wing paper of some significance during the interwar era.
P. 2:
“There were various terms used to designate this band of intellectuals. Some called them “radical democrats,” some “radical humanists,” and others “radical leftists.” Thomas Mann spoke of “the left side of social philosophy,” and Heinrich Mann of “revolutionary democracy.” “Left-wing intellectual” is adopted here because it was the term most familiar to the politically articulate of that period. Linker Intellektuelle in the Weimar days evoked images in the public mind which varied from the lone defender of justice or humanity—Prometheus or Don Quixote?—to the offensive Asphaltliterat, a despicable product of big-city immorality engaged in the subversion of sacred German values. Their enemies also called the left-wing intellectuals Kulturboschewisten. Carl von Ossietzky, an editor of the Weltbühne, showed that the latter term was more elastic. The Kulturbolschewist, he wrote in 1931, was the latest version of the eternal subversive: in the Middle Ages he was called a witch; under Bismarck “he wore royal Hannoverian Junker boots, a worker’s beret, a red shirt, and a black cossack. In his inner pocket he carried the statutes of a freemasonic lodge and a freshly printed copy of the Vossische Zeitung. In the twentieth century, the eternal subversive because a Kulturbolshewist.
“Kulturboschewismus is when Conductor Klemperer takes tempi different from his colleague Furtwängler, when a painter sweeps a color into his sunset not seen in Lower Pomerania; when one favors birth control; when one builds a house with a flat roof; when a Caesarian birth is shown on the screen; when one admires the performance of Charlie Chaplin and the mathematical wizardry of Albert Einstein. This is called cultural Bolshevism and a personal favor rendered to Herr Stalin. It is also the democratic mentality of the brothers Mann, a piece of music by Hindemith or Weill, and is to be identified with the hysterical insistence of a madman for a law giving him permission to marry his own grandmother.
The camp of cultural Bolshevism’s enemies is large, wrote Ossietzky. It includes the “two Jospehs”: Joseph Goebbels and Joseph Wirth, P.N. Cossmann, and the entire bourgeois press. It includes the Social Democrats whose press avoids this term in print but echoes it in spirit. And the Communists? Well, “when one reads what feelings certain Communist papers express towards the writers of the Weltbühne, one often feels like offering the Communists a helping hand and urging them to go ahead: “But children, say it! You too would love to call us cultural Bolshevists! Say it, at last!”
One gets the clear impression that the “cultural Marxism” of our era is a direct descendant of “cultural Bolshevism” and also the fact that the labels “cultural Marxist,” “Woke,” and the older “SJW” terms are akin to the myriad of insufficient terms for these left-wing intellectuals of Germany. We will say, fundamentally, these people are Redditors. They have strong opinions and everything and know nothing about anything. In Weimar, architecture, science, film, and sex, and today…. architecture, science, film and sex. The Redditor cannot possibly be a master of all of these and yet takes believes completely in their right to have their opinions on them implemented.
P. 3:
“The left-wing intellectual could often overcome the isolation traditionally imposed on the free publicist by thinking of himself as a better sort of German who belonged to das andere Deutschland, “the other Germany.” On the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Weltbühne, Kurt Tucholsky, another editor of the journal, wrote: “As long as Die Weltbühne will be Die Weltbühne, we will give it our utmost. And this utmost will serve a good cause . . . that of transforming this Teutschland into a Deutschland, of proving to all that, besides Hitler, Hugenberg, and those fish-eyed academicians of the year 1930, there are also other Germans in Germany.””
We can see that this left-wing minority viewed themselves as the real Germans as opposed to the majority of Germans committed to their traditional nation, much as in America, left-wingers denounce MAGA as not real Americans because they lack certain values promoted by the left. America must become America in the sense that it has not lived up to these values, just as Teutschland had to become Deutschland.
P. 5:
““Die Weltbühne!” wrote Kurt Hiller in his recent reminiscences, “It wasn’t a journal. It was an institution! It wasn’t the journal of the so-called homeless Left alone; it belonged to those who had a home but weren’t quite satisfied. . . . Around 1930, . . . it was considered uncouth not to have read the latest issue of the Weltbühne.” Hiller was one of the journal’s main contributors, but other writers, much less rhapsodic about Die Weltbühne, had no hesitation either in giving it its due: “The majority of its [Die Weltbühne’s] readers were recruited from among coffeehouse intellectuals (Literaten), bohemian types, students, agnostics, sceptics,” writes Hermann Behr, a liberal critic of the left-wing intellectuals, “yet thanks to the sharp and masterly style of its articles, it came to be regarded as the best-written journal in Germany and its influence extended far beyond the circle of its main readers.””
In other words, Die Weltbühne (The World Stage) was Reddit and its readers were Redditors.
The author chose to write about this paper specifically as opposed to another paper like Das Tage-Buch, Die Zukunft, or Die Fackel, because “if Die Weltbühne and not Das Tage-Buch was chosen here for examination, it is because Das Tage-Buch was less radical and, as years went by, became increasingly friendly to the failing republic, whereas Die Weltbühne stepped up its attacks.” Some writers for Die Weltbühne wrote for some of these other papers too, anyway. They have been considered “homeless” in not having any particular political party that represented them. Once again, modern leftists view themselves this way, even thought their utopian ideas are actually implemented by leftists parties; they are simply too ignorant to comprehend this.
P. 18:
“Communists and Social Democrats were right in asserting that the writers of the Weltbühne were bourgeois who had no contact with the masses: even those among them who belonged to the Communist Party seldom addressed the workers directly. Moreover, some of them showed distinctly upper-middle class inclinations.”
In keeping with the Redditor analogy, we can see almost literal fedora-tipping behavior in the description: “as Kurt Hiller described his encounter in 1919 with Carl von Ossietzky: “Ossietzky visited me. I recall it well. He came wearing a frockcoat and gave me frightfully stiff bows.”
After summarizing their well-to-do middle class and well-educated backgrounds, the author writes:
P. 21:
“Clearly, little of what has been said until now explains why these writers were in opposition. They did not share in the miseries of the workers and salaried employees, nor in the fears and frustrations of the upper classes. They had, as it must seem, no personal grounds for opposing a state and a society that allowed them freedom of expression and economic comfort. Nor did they share in the general Weltschmerz or “cultural despair” of the conservative intellectuals. They were philosophical and social optimists whose hopes often survived the National Socialist oppression. Was their opposition then an act of will due to compassion and to premonition? This is undoubtably true to some degree. They were genuine humanitarians, horrified by social injustice and the suffering of the poor; they were also prophets who foresaw the coming triumph of nihilism. But there were other considerations: their historical heritage as unattached, free German intellectuals, and the Jewish background of most of these writers.”