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Abstract
This dissertation explores the symbolics of an emergent democratic culture that faced enormous internal and external challenges, not the least of which was Germany's military defeat in WWI. Permeated by a deep-seated sense of openness and experimentation, the Republic's founding in November 1918 fueled a plethora of contradictory political desires, as well as a passionate striving for cohesion, stability and order. While Bolsheviks and right-wing nationalists projected radical fantasies of social organization, pro-republican forces engaged in a labor of symbolic representation to support a highly inclusive democratic society based on the rule of law. My dissertation takes up this ideological middle ground that staunchly rejected the political extremes.
Relating political symbols and rituals to the process of state formation, I examine the relationship between political culture and the affective dimensions of political life, as well as the tensions between ethnic and civic definitions of national identity. Key moments include the uneasy conjunction of monarchic and democratic identifications under the Kaiserreich, the symbolic politics of the Weimar national assembly, and the refashioning of German symbols of state under the Republic. The assassination of the Jewish foreign minister, Walther Rathenau, in June 1922 presents the most dramatic moment in this project of symbolic reform, for it impelled Weimar republicans to show their colors. At the same time, it emerged that the champions of the new democratic order quite literally had not yet produced a sufficient number of republican flags. Subsequent efforts, to make the republican nation "real" coalesced in the annual Constitution Day celebrations on August 11. Often disparaged as a frosty and compulsory affair, this historically specific ("warm") variety of German constitutional patriotism is essential to understanding the dynamics of pro-republican identification in Weimar Germany.
To excavate this innovative civic mode of German nationalism, I have applied the methods of literary and historical analysis to a wide variety of administrative, journalistic, and literary sources. Taking a self-consciously interdisciplinary approach allows this dissertation to investigate the material conditions that supported the Weimar political imagination, while highlighting the concrete interplay between the symbolics of power and authority that designate the modern nation.