The Afterlives of Weimar Berlin: Twenty-First-Century Literature, Media, and Visual Culture

Explores the recent proliferation of cultural representations of Weimar Berlin in the German-speaking world, probing the connections between historical and contemporary texts, their contexts, and their creators.

More than a century after its founding, there can be little doubt that Weimar is back. The recent proliferation of references to and portrayals of the Weimar Republic – Germany’s first democracy, born out of the aftermath of the First World War and characterized by economic and political crisis – is not surprising given our crisis-filled present. That said, the Weimar era has been a consistent focus of scholarly work in both the German-speaking and the Anglo-American academic worlds since the 1970s, and yet depictions of this period in German literature and visual culture were few and far between until the beginning of the 21st century. This book traces this renewed fascination with Weimar – specifically its capital, Berlin – in contemporary German-language culture, providing both wide-angle and close-up views. While discussions of the time period in mainstream media and historiography tend to focus on Weimar as a warning against the dangers of economic and political instability, the novels and visual works produced by contemporary German writers and filmmakers in the last 15 years revive and reshape the cultural legacy of Weimar Berlin. The Afterlives of Weimar Berlin explores the creative interplay between contemporary and historical texts, their contexts, and their creators, tracing a cultural legacy that has the work of German Jews and women as its foundation.