The Context: Germany in the 1920s
- national humiliation at having lost World War I
- loss of 25 million square miles of territory
- war reparations to France, Britain, and other Allied Powers
- 26% of the value of German exports were demanded
- severe devaluation of German currency because the country had borrowed to fund World War I
- inflation, food scarcity, joblessness throughout the 1920s, long before 1929 with the worldwide economic collapse
Germany lacked experience with democracy, having had a monarchy and an authoritarian government since 1871 when Bismark officially created a unified Germany (formerly Germany was a loose assemblage of kingdoms, again, ruled by kings and dukes).
The Weimar Republic (1919-1933) was a cacophony of special interest groups, unions, and political parties, as Germany ventured for the first time into democracy.
Both pride in and fear of technology: World War I had led to great advances in technology, with the assembly line as the main industrial driver. Cultural commentators warned of the increasing atomisation of individuals (people became cogs in the wheel of industry) and thus many felt and feared the loss of meaning in life. The philosopher Karl Jaspers warned in Man in the Modern Age (1931) that "[there is an] increasing technicisation of daily life" (59); "It is as if the man thus . . . reduced to the level of a thing, had lost the essence of humanity . . he is still nothing more than the function of his daily task" (51); "Driven from pillar to post, then perhaps out-of-work for a lengthy period with nothing more than bare subsistence, they no longer have a definite place or status in the whole" (50).
Oswald Spengler, in Man and Technics (1932), likewise attributed many of the ills of the age to technology and predicted a return to nature: "The mechanization of the world has entered on a phase of highly dangerous over-tension" (93) . . . "a weariness is spreading . . . Men are returning to forms of life simpler and nearer to Nature; they are spending their time in sport instead of technical experiments" (97).
Some predicted the coming of a catastrophe in Germany: Already in 1918, the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung noticed that many of his German patients were troubled by disturbing dreams and destructive psychic states. For Jung, these individual manifestations of distress were indications of a great social pathology or mania that was taking over Germany.
Rise of German nationalism and the Hitler youth (1922-45): espousing values of "Blut und Ehre" (blood and honor). However, it is important to point out that not everyone was in solidarity with German nationalism and the NSDAP, as evidenced in this clip from "Cabaret." Pay particular attention to the older man's response to the song, which the camera focuses on twice.
