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Since our own century entered its "twenties," complete with its own political and civilizational crises, the Weimar Republic's enduring popularity has acquired a new urgency. This is reflected in the wave of new publications about the period that have appeared in recent years. However, most of these books focus on Weimar's political crisis and, surprisingly, "Weimar culture" has been neglected until now. With the publication of Experiment Weimar by Sabina Becker, the culture of the Weimar era receives the attention it deserves. The book is a remarkable achievement by one of the foremost experts on the topic; it processes the vast amount of secondary literature that has been produced over the last fifty years while giving enough space to contemporary voices to keep it from becoming an all-too-dry, purely scholarly pursuit. The resulting synthesis is more than a guide to the different facets of Weimar-era culture: it is both a conceptual analysis, asking what made Weimar culture unique and different from other periods, and an apology that argues for Weimar's central place in the development of modern culture in general.
Following the major historiographical trend of the past decades, Becker argues for an open-ended approach to the period, rejecting the historical image of an all-enveloping crisis that inevitably led to Weimar Germany's descent into dictatorship. Only if we move away from the crisis narrative, she argues, can we appreciate the period's cultural innovation and Weimar's central position...