Nostalgia and Revision: The Vogue of Weimar Culture

The year was 1922 and the speaker was not a New York hardhat but Heinrich Mann (brother of the Thomas who was to become the oracle of Weimar Culture). From this source, the complaint sounds surprising; for Heinrich Mann had been a satirist, the sharpest critic of Teutonic authoritarianism, and a butt of patriotic recrimination. His Olympian brother had called him a Zivilisationsliterat (phony intellectual). His film The Blue Angel was to launch Marlene Dietrich on her career...