Wrapping My Head Around the Weimar Republic
When I started looking at the possibility of writing about Sigrid Schultz last April, what I knew about the Weimar Republic could be summed up in Peter Gay’s assertion in his classic Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider* that the Weimar spirit is embodied in “Gropius’ buildings, Kandinsky’s abstractions, Grosz’s cartoons, and Marlene Dietrich’s legs.” **
To the extent that we think about the Weimar Republic at all, many of us see it through the lens of the Lost Generation. (Think Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories, which morphed into the musical Cabaret.) And in fact, Weimar Berlin was the darker counterpart of interwar Paris. It is the city of Expressionist art, Dada-ism, modernism, The Three Penny Opera, political satire, subversive cabaret, and sexual freedoms. With the (well-earned) reputation of being the most licentious city in Europe, Berlin drew an international community of artists, political dissidents, journalists, and intellectuals, not to mention stray members of the Lost Generation engaged in what a later generation would term “finding themselves. ”
But that is only one side of the story. And maybe not the most important one. It didn’t take me long to learn that the Weimar Republic in general and Weimar Berlin in particular were defined by more than sex, drugs, and cabaret. Born in revolution, it was a period of enormous social and political creativity. It was also a period marked by growing economic crisis, recurring political crises (internal and external), constant political intrigue, occasional political assassinations, attempted coups, labor unrest, and regular street violence between supporters of different political view points.
The Weimar republic only lasted from 1919 through 1933. It is easy to overlook it as pause between the two world wars. But the more I read about it, the more important it seems. I’ll keep you posted.
*I’m not going to review this one beyond saying that it is well worth reading if you want to know more about modernism and Weimar and you aren’t bothered by the application of Freudian theory to an entire culture. If you are looking for a broader picture, as I was (and am), I strongly recommend Eric D. Weitz’ Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy, which combines economic, political and social history in complex and thought-provoking ways. As you can see, another book stuffed full of sticky tabs, always a good measure of how useful I find a particular volume to be:
**I suspect that Marlene Dietrich’s songs are going to be the sound track for this book.
The Enemy of All Mankind
Several years ago, I read Steven Johnson’s The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic—And How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World. I never reviewed it here on the Margins, though a large sticky note on the inside cover listing a number of thought-provoking questions suggests that I intended to.*
As far as I was concerned, it was kick-in-the-head brilliant. So when Johnson’s most recent book, Enemy of All Mankind: A True Story of Piracy, Power and History’s First Global Manhunt, appeared on a list for review for Shelf Awareness for Readers, I raised my hand and said “Pick me! Pick me!”
I’ve got to say that while Enemy of All Mankind is an excellent book, it did not blow me away the way The Ghost Map did. In all fairness to Johnson, that may be because I know a fair amount about a number of topics he deals with. Someone less familiar with the Sea People,** the Mughal empire, the Indian Ocean trade, and the British East India Company might well enjoy the same sense of jaw-dropping revelation that I felt reading The Ghost Map.
Nonetheless, Enemy of All Mankind*** is well-worth the read. Johnson makes a compelling case that a single (admittedly brutal) attack on an Indian treasure ship by seventeenth century British pirate Henry Every played a critical role in shaping the global economy.
The story at the heart of the book could be the basis for a thriller: Henry Every leads a mutiny on a British trading ship. Once captured, he and his fellow mutineers turn pirate and sail to the Gulf of Aden where Indian ships carrying Muslim pilgrims to and from the hajj to Mecca present fat targets. The pirates attack and seize a rich ship (which may or may not have had a Mughal princess as a passenger) and subsequently become the objects of a global manhunt. And though his crew is captured and hung, Every is never found.
As he did in The Ghost Map, Johnson uses his core story as a springboard for discussing bigger issues. He outlines the history of piracy, beginning in ancient Egypt, and explains why pirates caught the public imagination in seventeenth century Britain. **** He traces the rise of the Mughal Empire in India, succession struggles within the Mughal dynasty, the lives of women in the Mughal court, and the economics of the hajj pilgrimage. He explains the economic base of the British East India Company, it’s shaky position in seventeenth century India, and the changing treatment of pirates in the British court system. Finally, Johnson pulls all his threads together in a rigged courtroom scene in which not only Every’s crews but Britain’s international reputation were on trial.
Johnson ends Enemy of All Mankind ends with an open-ended discussion of what might have happened to Every. A satisfying conclusion to a story with as many questions as answers.
*Not now, however. I’ve read enough about epidemics in recent weeks and my guess is that you have, too. Maybe I’ll circle back to it in happier times.
**A topic that has been on my future blog post list for several years. Perhaps its day has come.
***A legal term that referred to pirates because their crimes typically occurred outside the jurisdiction of any given state. Since then it has been applied to other types of criminals, including slave traders, professional assassins and war criminals.
**** Hint: The new invention of the popular press created a mass audience and then need to amuse it. In the absence of other nationally known figures, pirates were the pop stars of the period.
The guts of this review previously appeared in Shelf Awareness for Readers
Roosevelt, Lindbergh, American Isolationism, and a Book Review
I must admit, I bagged Friday’s blog post. I simply wasn’t sure what I could write that was meaningful and/or appropriate in our current troubles. My inbox over the last week has been filled with carefully crafted statements of alliance or calls to action. Many of them are a nervous, well intentioned attempt to enter the difficult conversations in which many of us are now involved. The best of them are rooted in personal experience, offer a list of suggested actions, or look at a very specific angle of systemic racism. I don’t have anything meaningful to add to the conversation.(1)
But I am currently involved in a deep research dive on Germany in the 1920s and 1930s, the isolationist movement in the United States during the same period, and the challenges journalists faced in reporting both stories (and later reporting on World War II). It was uncomfortable reading even before the murder of George Floyd changed our collective conversation in tragic, powerful and important ways. It is more than uncomfortable now. At a minimum, I am reminded of the high cost of remaining silent.
I’ve decided that the best thing I can do with this blog is what I planned to do all along: share the books I’m reading and stories from the past, being a little more conscious of how current events echo stories from the past.
Take a deep breath, I’m going in.
Several years ago I read Lynne Olson’s Last Hope Island with delight. Great storytelling. Impeccable research. Repeated moments of “I didn’t know that!!” When I learned that she wrote an earlier book on America’s struggles between isolationism and intervention in the years leading up to World War II I was thrilled. Those Angry Days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America’s Fight Over World War II, 1939-1941 more than lived up to my expectations. (Note the liberal use of color-coded sticky tabs > 
)
Olson explores how the issues of interventionism and isolationism split American society in the years before Pearl Harbor made those debates largely irrelevant. She centers the story on the larger than life figures who embodied the two positions: President Franklin Roosevelt and Charles Lindbergh. Neither man comes out looking good. Roosevelt often froze at the wheel: giving rousing speeches to the American public and then failing to take action for political reasons. Lindbergh, whom one journalist described as a “hypersensitive man who was insensitive to others,” translated his personal likes and dislikes into political positions,(2) with apparently little or no understanding of the larger context, and then used his celebrity status to push those positions. (In a spirit of full disclosure, the more I learn about Lindbergh, the less appealing I find him . Feel free to adjust for my distaste.)
But the story is more than a Clash of Titans. Olson takes us through the conflict in step-by-step detail, looking at grassroots activism as well as the actions of those in power. She introduces the reader to individual members of Congress who took positions on both sides of the conflict, bringing them to life in unexpected ways.(3) She looks at high-ranking officers in the American military who were anti-intervention and who actively worked to undermine Roosevelt’s pro-British policies. She outlines the workings of a covert British operation which created false news, dug up dirt on isolationist Congressmen, and helped form the OSS, precursor to the CIA. (Sound familiar? I refer you to my review of Agents of Influence.) She describes the formation and actions of isolationist groups like the America First Committee and the American Mothers Neutrality League and their interventionist counterparts, the White Committee (officially the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies) and the Century Group.
The one thing that is absolutely clear is that it was a dirty fight on all sides.
And yet, I came out with undiluted admiration for one player in the game.(4) Wendell Wilkie scuttled his own presidential campaign by supporting the passage of a contested conscription bill at the very moment that he accepted the Republication nomination to run against Roosevelt in 1940. When party members censored his action, he answered that he was “an American first, and a Republican afterward.” A hero by any standard as far as I’m concerned. And one we should all take as a model, regardless of our political persuasions.
1) Anyone who has been reading this blog for a while should have a clear sense that I am passionate about the need for diversity in our historical narrative. That passion is rooted in a deep belief in the importance of fighting for diversity, equality and inclusion. I doubt if it comes as any surprise that I am against police brutality and racism. And I am saddened by the fact that it is necessary for all of us to take a clear position because silence is complicity.
2) As do we all to some extent.
3) For example, the two ranking Republicans on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, William Borah of Idaho and Hiram Johnson of California, who led the isolationist faction in Congress were both born shortly after the Civil War and couldn’t quite grasp the fact that the invention of warplanes and submarines meant that the United States was vulnerable to attack in a way that it had not been in their childhoods. Quite frankly, this made my jaw drop and led to several paragraphs of excited scribbling.
4) Two if you count Elizabeth Murrow, Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s mother. She only appears as a bit player, but she definitely caught my imagination.