Weimar Berlin’s cultural modernism grew from its extreme class and political contradictions.

Evidence

Berlin between 1918 and 1933 was the city where all the contradictions of the century were visible in the most dramatic form. Capital of a republic founded on military defeat and which foundered amidst the Great Depression, centre of at once the most advanced industrial capitalism in Europe and of a landed aristocracy formed by the traditions of Prussian Absolutism, a city polarized by social tensions, shaken by the anger of rebellious workers, pauperized petty bourgeois and unemployed lumpenproletarians, the batdeground of Communists, Social Demo­ crats, Monarchists and the ultimately victorious Nazis, Berlin was also a key Modernist centre. — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 246

Categorization

• XREF: Provides the materialist base for Jameson’s ‘cognitive mapping’ claim about modernism — useful touchstone in the reader’s Marxist critique of Jameson.