The Weimar Republic: When Germany Was a Beacon of European Culture

BarcelonaMonsters are always lurking, and they take advantage of every opportunity to reappear. It's inevitable to think about today's world during your visit to the new temporary exhibition at the CaixaForum in Barcelona. Uncertain Times. Germany Between the Wars, running from this Wednesday until July 20. It is a transversal look at the legacy of the Weimar Republic (1919-1933) with around 90 works of art and a series of films, musical pieces and objects by artists, photographers, filmmakers and musicians such as Wassily Kandinsky, Fritz Lang, Robert Wiene, Marianne Breslau Münter, Igor Stravinsky, August Sander and several creatives from the Bauhaus.

"The main idea behind this period is that it is a change of era: it goes from the world that the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig called the world of yesterday, which was a world of security, stability, certainties and reason, in the world that will emerge after the Second World War, which is a world of uncertainty and instability," says the architect and philosopher Pau Pedragosa, the curator of the exhibition along with Professor Txuss Martín. Furthermore, both are the authors of the world up to our days - explains Pedragosa -. The change of era occurred in all disciplines. All areas of culture suffered what was then called a crisis of foundations, which today we would say is a redefinition. And this occurred as much in economics and science as in philosophy and art."

The Weimar Republic was, as can be seen from the chronological organization of the tour, the fruit of Germany's desire to rebuild after its defeat in the First World War, recovering "the principles of the Enlightenment, the enlightened ideals of democracy, equality, and freedom." "Weimar was one of the most advanced democracies of its time: for the first time in Europe, there was universal suffrage and recognition, before the law, of the rights of men and women. It was thanks to these principles that there was enormous creativity, which has been compared to Periclean Athens and the Renaissance," he explains. Unfortunately, Hitler's rise to power and the subsequent barbarity of the Holocaust and World War II put an end to all this creativity. Therefore, as a reminder of the danger that the monsters could reappear at any moment, the last work on the tour is a copy of Francisco de Goya's engraving that includes the motto The sleep of reason produces monsters.

One of the curators' working hypotheses is that there weren't two world wars, but one "in two parts." "The two wars together form the Thirty Years' War of the 20th century, and the idea is that two world wars were necessary to definitively bury the world of yesterday. Or not, because today we are in a very similar time of change," explains Pedragosa.

From a bourgeois salon to concentration camps

The tour begins with the recreation of a bourgeois salon from the late 19th century inspired by Thomas Mann's novel The Buddenbrooks, but soon you enter a dark corridor reminiscent of a First World War trench, where the shocking figures left behind are projected: 10 million dead, 20 million wounded, and 70 million mobilized. Further on, several sculptures by artists such as Käthe Kollwitz evoke the changes that have taken place in the body and modern body culture, and the tour continues with reflections on art in the service of power (the film The triumph of the will, by Leni Riefenstahl, in contrast to the works of Bertold Brecht), and the contrast between the individual, represented by photographs by August Sander, and another individual who wants to dissolve into the mass, represented by the sleepwalker played by Conrad Veidt in the film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligario (1919), by Robert Wiene.

Later, images of sexually liberated working women represent the golden 1920s, until the New York Stock Exchange crash ruined them in 1929. And in the field of the visual arts, we can see how different movements coexisted, such as Dadaism and the County. The final section of the exhibition recalls some of the most terrifying moments of the 20th century: when the Nazi authorities already controlled art and a group of students and university professors gathered in Berlin burned books. It will be the prelude to the Second World War and the ravages of the Holocaust, evoked by Paul Celan's poem Death escape, a souvenir of his time at the Auschwitz concentration camp.