Weimar culture, by Peter Gay

Peter Gay (1923 – 2015) 

was an American historian, educator and author. Born as Peter Joachim Fröhlich in Berlin, he was educated at the Goethe-Gymnasium in Berlin. He fled Nazi-Germany and came to the United States in 1941. He then changed his name from Fröhlich (German for "happy") to Gay. He wrote, among other things, about the history of psychoanalysis.

Elisabeth Roudinesco, in Le Monde:

With a jovial temper and open-mindedness, Peter Gay expressed in his autobiography about the life he had led in Berlin, between 1933 and 1938, within an atheistic and assimilated Jewish family. At first, his father continued his trading activities without perceiving the extent of the dangers threatening his family. An exceptional child, an excellent pupil, young Peter engaged in scholarly studies while feeling more German than Jewish. But when he was kicked out of school and his father lost his business, he began to understand that he was not an ordinary German. Nazism revealed to him that he was first Jewish before being German. He would never forget it, even though he will refuse any return to Judaism, preferring to call himself Jewish in the sense of Jewishness: a Jew without a god.

The following is an excerpt of the introduction to his seminal book “Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider”, 1968

“The Weimar Republic has had a short, tormented and fascinating life. Its date of birth is November 9, 1918, when the Germanic empire collapsed after four years of war, and the emperor William II was about to flee into exile in Holland; its date of death is January 30, 1933, when the president Paul von Hindenburg, no longer at the height of his mental powers, named Adolf Hitler, charismatic party leader of the National Socialists, to the office of chancellor of the country. As documents the brief history of the republic added at the end of this text, it was an age of almost continuous political changes, of courageous attempts to attain stability constantly weakened by alternating economic vicissitudes- especially recessions - and sabotaged on the right by antidemocratic forces, on the left by communists loyal to Moscow orders.  At the same time, the Weimar Republic was an age almost suffocated by that exuberant cultural flowering that attracted the attention of the whole world to dance, architecture, cinema, fiction, theater, art and music produced in Germany.
The republic provided a very rich multiplicity of cultural stimuli, almost disproportionate to its short life, only fourteen years.”