Author(s): | Widdig, Bernd |
---|---|
Reviewer(s): | Voth, Hans-Joachim |
Published by EH.NET (December 2002)
Bernd Widdig, Culture and Inflation in Weimar Germany. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2001. xvi + 277 pp. $45 (hardback), ISBN:
0-520-22290-3.
Reviewed for EH.NET by Hans-Joachim Voth, Department of Economics, Universitat
Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona.
Is there anything new left to say about Germany’s great inflation between 1919
and 1923? After Gerald D. Feldman’s opus magnum and Carl-Ludwig Holtfrerich’s
masterly study, economic historians can be forgiven for being skeptical. We
have learned much about the political factors that drove the process and its
economic consequences, the role of expectations, of foreign policy and of
domestic turmoil. This book will be a challenging read for economic and social
historians — cultural history, as this reviewer quickly realized, is a rather
foreign territory. Yet the almost habitual disconnect between economic and
cultural history is not beneficial to either discipline, as Peter Temin
reminded us in his presidential address at the 1996 EHA, entitled “Is It Kosher
to Talk about Culture?” He underlined the paramount importance of how the
various categories with which we analyze economic phenomena first come into
existence — in the parlance of cultural analysis, how they are ‘framed.’
Widdig uses Weimar Germany’s inflationary years as a starting point to reflect
about the way in which money’s role shifted, and the extent to which these
changes were reflected in cartoons, images, novels and films. To read a book
from a different and — in some ways — alien field such as this one requires
patience and a certain degree of tolerance towards the idiosyncrasies that most
scholarly disciplines have. For economic historians, it can be valuable because
it highlights a whole range of economically relevant phenomena that are often
neglected; whether one agrees with the individual readings of images, films and
novels is a different matter.
Weimar was Germany’s belated and ultimately ill-fated attempt at becoming a
democracy — fourteen brief years between the Empire’s ignominious end and
Hitler’s rise to power. Of these, nine were dominated by major economic
upheavals. Germany engineered one of the most breathtaking inflations in
recorded history between 1919 and 1923. After 1929, the dramatic collapse of
the economy, leading to six million unemployed at the trough of the Depression,
probably undermined the Republic fatally. On the other hand, Weimar is widely
remembered as a hotbed of cultural modernity — the films of Fritz Lang, Oscar
Schlemmer’s Triadic Ballet, Bauhaus architecture, Max Reinhardt’s and Bert
Brecht’s theatre and the breakthrough of expressionism as an art form, to name
but a few examples, all flourished amidst the putsches and revolts, at a time
of foreign invasion, currency depreciation and spiraling prices when
governments changed with Italian frequency.
Bernd Widdig’s study focuses on the period when extreme chaos and creativity
existed side-by-side — the years of the Great Inflation between 1919 and 1923.
This is not an economic history of culture during the hyperinflation. Rather,
it is a balancing act between two central themes: What can we learn about the
inflation’s impact on everyday lives by analyzing the writings, cartoons, and
films? And how did the inflation shape and change cultural production during
the period? This reader is not a cultural historian, and has to confess that he
harbored substantial skepticism about the exercise. Traditional historians will
worry about a volume that does not contain the fruits of many archival visits,
and is instead based on published cartoons, pictures and widely available
films. The first section, entitled “History and Experience,” sets the stage for
the more detailed analysis in the second part. Somewhat unusually for a
cultural historian, Widdig takes the economic history of the period seriously,
and is clear on the most important debates about the inflation’s causes. He
emphasizes three aspects of the inflation — the changing perceptions of money,
paradigmatic characters of the inflationary period, and a third section
entitled “accounts” (which analyzes the plight of intellectuals and the role of
women).
This reader found the author’s reading of key figures, such as Dr. Mabuse in
Fritz Lang’s classic film, valuable. For Widdig, people partly reacted to the
inflation’s trauma by looking for emblematic characters that could help them
with making sense of the increasingly destructive maelstrom. Gerald D. Feldman,
in his definitive history of the German inflation, called 1922 the ‘Year of Dr.
Mabuse.’ The film depicts the evil machinations of a criminal with superhuman
powers of psychological manipulation, who engineers wild gyrations on the stock
market, forges bank notes, cheats at cards, and ruins the lives of various
attractive German Fr?uleins. The main newspaper of the social democratic
party — the non-revolutionary wing of Germany’s labor movement — immediately
recognized the film’s value as capturing the spirit of the times, the
racketeering and prostitution, the lawlessness and profiteering. The film
itself opens with scenes from the inflationary period, of revolutionary unrest
and black-market dealings, only to ask, literally on one of the text screens
that silent movies used so effectively — who is behind all this? The answer,
Widdig argues, is implicitly that only a superhuman manipulator can have been
responsible. At the same time, Dr. Mabuse pulls off most of his stunning crimes
by a combination of wit and will. In a close reading of the film’s multiple
layers of meaning, Widdig argues that some of the film’s appeal — which
screened to large audiences when it opened — may have come from the innovative
use of the “subjective camera,” with the viewer seeing the world through
Mabuse’s eyes. Thus, the film’s villain-hero helped contemporaries reduce their
sense of helplessness in a world that was increasingly falling apart. This is
in line with the analysis of Sigfried Kracauer, who, in his classic book
From Caligari to Hitler, argued that Dr. Mabuse reflected a
growing inclination towards authoritarian solutions.
Widdig approaches his subject armed with the theoretical tools of his trade.
The changing value of different forms of artistic production, and the way in
which culture legitimized or undermined social differences is, for example,
analyzed through the work of Pierre Bourdieu. Simmel’s essay on money, Freud’s
writings on the uncanny and the subconscious, and of course McLuhan are all
employed to examine the impact of the inflation. This mostly works, though the
guiding lights don’t always shed light in the direction that Widdig needs for
his narrative. The way in which endless reproduction — as a possibility or in
actual fact — undermines the true ‘value’ of art is interpreted using a famous
essay by Walter Benjamin to frame the issue. He argued that mechanical
reproduction robbed art of its aura — yet for Benjamin, this was an entirely
wholesome process, a change for the better, which ultimately combines with
socialist visions of social progress. It is odd to illustrate the devaluation
of art through the same kind of reproduction that kept the printing presses
running through the reading of a text that mainly celebrates the positive
effects of this ‘inflationary’ process.
The somewhat awkward use of Benjamin’s text highlights a more substantial
issue. Widdig argues that inflation condensed and heightened the experience of
modernity itself. Yet much of the narrative focuses on its destructive aspects,
undermining social relationships and trust in institutions, wreaking havoc on
universities and writers, driving women into prostitution. The analysis then
emphasizes how all these negative aspects are mirrored in the various forms of
cultural production, from autobiographies to cartoons, films and novels. Yet
the very wealth and originality of this production, at a time of substantial
turmoil, is never directly confronted. In The Third Man, the black
marketeer Harry Lime, played by Orson Welles, contrasts the cultural creativity
of Renaissance Italy amidst chaos with the unimaginative tranquility of
Switzerland:
“In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and
bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the
Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love — they had 500 years of
democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”
Instead of Renaissance Italy, he might just as well have mentioned the Weimar
Republic. Despite all the trauma and disorientation that characterized 1919-23
and the lamentable plight of ‘intellectual workers,’ this reader wondered if
there isn’t some reason to think that the inflation served as a catalyst for
cultural creativity — an interpretation that could be called the Third Man’s
theory of artistic inspiration? Especially when it comes to the discussion of
high versus low culture, of Goethe reading groups and piano lessons versus the
mass-culture of magazines, movies and jazz music, Widdig’s analysis is almost
exclusively in terms of decline and fall. To be fair, he finds an impressive
array of literary and other sources that attest to the fact that this is
exactly the way in which many contemporary members of Germany’s
Bildungsb?rgertum (that part of the bourgeoisie that defined itself by
its level of education and cultural sophistication) experienced it.
Nonetheless, the explosion of artistic creativity and many of the despised and
derided forms of ‘low’ culture — Brecht’s theatre productions, many films of
the period, the early Bauhaus designs for pre-fabricated production — are the
most enduring achievements of the period. Tearing down the boundaries between
established art forms was just beginning to be good for artists’ business —
Braque and Picasso had incorporated bits of newsprint into paintings a mere ten
years before. Shocking the audience with the unexpected, unaesthetic or
revolting had not yet acquired any of the superficiality that nowadays
irritates many about, say, the work Damien Herst. It took economic historians a
long time to fully acknowledge the beneficial effects of the inflation,
especially during the years 1919-22. In the end, most agree that it facilitated
rebuilding of the infrastructure, low unemployment and the integration of
returning soldiers. Rapid growth and full employment were also in evidence in
the cultural sphere, while Widdig almost appears to take the vibrancy of Weimar
culture during the years 1919-23 for granted.
The epilogue traces the inflation’s impact on Germans’ collective psyche. Most
of this is balanced and interesting. Yet I couldn’t help feeling that Widdig
trusts popular interpretations too readily when it comes to hyperinflation’s
long-run impact on economic behavior. The German love affair with the saving
account, and their (until recently) disinterest in shares are interpreted as
the direct outcome of the traumatic years of million-mark eggs and wheelbarrows
full of cash. Every reading of the economic literature implies that the exact
opposite would have been the only economically sensible response — those who
saved in assets guaranteed in nominal terms lost almost everything, while those
who purchased productive assets (Sachwerte) did relatively well.
Germany’s distaste for equity is a paradox, given the experience of two great
inflations in the last century, and not its logical result.
The book is not entirely free from the jargon of cultural history and some of
the oddities that make so many of the writings in a similar vein hard to read.
Learning that “the grand narratives of modernity employ the dichotomy of gender
as a powerful rhetorical strategy to mark basic structures of difference such
as … authenticity and alienation, … desire and rationality” made this
reviewer feel like the hero in Musil’s Young T?rless, who, when reading
Immanuel Kant, has the sensation of his head being slowly squeezed in a
gigantic mechanical apparatus. Luckily, Widdig largely avoids traps like this,
which render many an interesting text in cultural history unreadable in no
time. Also, for those who think that all cultural history has to have political
correctness written all over it, there are some nuggets — but again, they are
relatively minor. Some readers might be amused by the author’s tale about how
he, as a young boy, found some pictures of young naked African women in his
grandparents’ attic — only to note that this “initiated an early sense of
wonder about the relationship of race, gender, and national identity.” This
reviewer must confess that, in similar circumstances, the “relationship between
race, gender, and national identity” would not necessarily have been the first
thing on his mind.
Economic and cultural history often don’t make the easiest of bedfellows, and
this book has attracted some severe criticism by Harold James (Journal of
Economic History, March 2002). Indeed, there is cultural-history jargon, as
well as some problems in interpreting the details of economic history. Yet it
would be a shame if this obscured the book’s good sides. First of all, it
emphasizes important interactions between culture and economic behavior. In the
eyes of economic historians, it may not rise to the challenge formulated in
Peter Temin’s presidential address, but it makes some valuable points. Widdig’s
analysis of how the different functions of money changed and were undermined to
a varying extent is useful in this regard, even if the conclusions are not made
explicit in the language of economic history. The inflation did much to destroy
what Robert Putnam calls social capital — the extent to which people
implicitly trust each other, and are able to rely on a stable set of economic
parameters in their everyday decisions and planning. Money is crucial for this,
Widdig argues, as it connects past and present economic activity with the
future. Pensioners impoverished by the inflation, war invalids subsisting on
meager pensions, and real estate owners suffering from the freeze on rents
experienced the state’s interventions (such as the principle of “Mark=Mark,”
which allowed debtors to repay creditors with worthless paper money) as random
acts of economic destruction. Second, the book contains interesting
interpretations of well-known films and books from the period, which have not
been analyzed jointly from this perspective. Finally, it reminds us of one of
the great similarities between economic and cultural history — the explicit
use of theory. While theory is often anathema to traditional political and
diplomatic historians, both economic historians and cultural historians often
search for an explicit theoretical framework with which to analyze historical
evidence. The theorizing may not be to our taste, but it takes a similar
dislike of pure empiricism as a starting point.
References:
Gerald D. Feldman, The Great Disorder: Politics, Economics, and Society in
the German Inflation, 1914-1924 (New York, 1993).
Carl-Ludwig Holtfrerich, The German Inflation, 1914-1923: Causes and Effects
in International Perspective (translated by Theo Balderston), Berlin, 1986.
Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the
German Film, Princeton, 1947.
Peter Temin, “Is It Kosher to Talk about Culture?” Journal of Economic
History, Vol. 57, no. 2, June 1997, pp. 267-87.
Hans-Joachim Voth is Associate Professor of Economics at Universitat Pompeu
Fabra, Barcelona, and a Research Fellow at the Centre for History and
Economics, King’s College, Cambridge. His latest publications include “The
Longest Years: New Estimates of Labor Input in Britain, 1760-1830″ (Journal
of Economic History, 2001); “Destined for Deprivation: Human Capital
Formation and Intergenerational Poverty in Nineteenth-Century England” (joint
with Sara Horrell and Jane Humphries, Explorations in Economic History,
2001); and “With a Bang, not a Whimper: Pricking Germany’s Stockmarket Bubble
in 1927 and the Slide into Depression” (Journal of Economic History,
2003, forthcoming).
Subject(s): | Social and Cultural History, including Race, Ethnicity and Gender |
---|---|
Geographic Area(s): | Europe |
Time Period(s): | 20th Century: Pre WWII |