Contemporary Literary Criticism | Gay, Peter - Corinna Adam (review date 6 June 1969)

Corinna Adam (review date 6 June 1969)

SOURCE: Adam, Corinna. “Poor Weimar.” New Statesman 77, no. 1995 (6 June 1969): 807.

[In the following review of Weimar Culture, Adam provides a brief summary of Gay's history of the Weimar Republic.]

Poor Weimar: a beautiful city condemned because of one constituent assembly; a whip, now, to crack at deviant MPs or indecisive social democrats; a synonym, forever, for public violence and private despair; a word for failure.

The assembly was held there partly for security reasons. Berlin being too dangerous. But that was not all. Somehow, the Republic's founders hoped, the spirit of Goethe would preside. ‘Good’ Germany, the ‘other’ Germany, would be reborn. The Germans never tire of this dialectic, or of diagnosing schizophrenia in themselves. Many, then as now, saw the remedy in massive doses of Kultur (so much stronger than mere civilisation) symbolically...

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