Weimar Berlin concentrated the century’s contradictions in one city
Evidence
If fin-de-siècle Vienna was the city where the twentieth century was invented, then 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
- SHARE: The structural parallel — ‘Vienna invented the twentieth century, Berlin displayed its contradictions’ — is a sharp formulation worth sending to anyone interested in interwar cultural history.
- corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 246
- XREF: connects to: Sartre’s Nobel refusal was other-directed while Heidegger’s Berlin refusal was retreat — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 877
Broader Connections
- Sartre’s Nobel refusal was other-directed while Heidegger’s Berlin refusal was retreat
#exemplifies(0.75) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 877