Few even today understand how devastating it was and how it fundamentally changed Europe.

Or the world for that matter, as it set Russia on the path to become communist and the US on the path to becoming a world power. It also proved the death knell of the old imperial powers abroad. After WWI it wasn’t a matter of if their empires would end, but when. I regret that it has been so forgotten — there’s still a lot to learn from that era and its fallout.

WWI was ignored pretty much as soon as it ended. People just wanted to forget it ever happened. Few even today understand how devastating it was and how it fundamentally changed Europe. Much is made how it set up WWII but little is said about how it nearly wiped out the Monarchs of every major nation and how it sparked revolutions across the world. All while the world suffered from one of the worst epidemics of flu that killed more than the war itself. Death was less an abstract idea in that age than it was a close friend. Crazy time period later drowned in the roaring 20′s until everyone woke up with a mean hangover in the great depression.

World War I and its fallout have been ignored in a lot of popular history (compare to the attention paid to WWII). This is unfortunate, as both the Russian Civil War and the Freikorps, just to name two oft-ignored parts of the era, ended up having a huge impact. I think for a lot of soldiers (including in the US), the war never ended, the battle lines just changed. Naturally, everyone went mad after, they just had different ways of doing it.

It’s more than the romanticism cynics like to dismiss it as or even just those of a modern age trying to recapture the old…it was such a great melding of art, politics, and possibilities

Indeed. I think it’s particularly fascinating example of extremes. The Weimar babies were such a lively and irreverent group, basically embracing the obscenity and squalor of post WWI Germany, and elevating it. Meanwhile the Nazi aesthetic marched to the opposite end of the spectrum with their bombastic reinterpretations of Greco-Roman ideals.

People always like something the powers that be hate. With the Nazi’s though you have a interesting battle in that the core of the SA probably could have found a home in that culture if not for the abysmal treatment of so many WW I vets…something the US government was equally poor at that resulted in a near attempted coup and a whole slew of growth in organized crime syndicates.

I’d made a mention of it in the excellent Karlheinz Stockhausen entry you made. It was in response to his infamous 9/11 comment…seems like that documentary has chameleon like skin for fitting many a topic…

“There’s still a freshness and an urgency to the stuff that keeps generation after generation coming back”

It’s more than the romanticism cynics like to dismiss it as or even just those of a modern age trying to recapture the old…it was such a great melding of art, politics, and possibilities…a bit of hope and naiveté and an open field for all to play. Nearly all of it revolving around nightlife…really only the 60′s had anything close to that.

In a more on-topic observation, I wonder to what extent Weimar culture finding such an enduring foothold in the underground is precisely owing to Hitler and the Nazis treating elements of it with a revulsion so overblown, it was almost Brechtian in its melodrama. PR stunts like the Entartete Kunst exhibition surely helped secure a lasting interest in and appetite for a set of cultural mores which would quite probably have faded naturally in time, like most others seem to in the cyclical, ever-shifting loop of tastes and trends. However, tell somebody they can’t do something because it’s naughty, and…well…

In a sense, the party’s short-term solutions were incredibly naive if they honestly believed they were laying down cultural foundations for a long-term Third Reich future. They were laying foundations, but not quite as they would’ve hoped, heh.

Ampers, have you heard of The Architecture of Doom by any chance? I know I brought it up somewhere on CH a while back…. can’t remember the context, though. Anyway, it’s one of the more profound and unsettling explanation attempts for the Nazi world view I’ve ever heard. Check it out, if you haven’t.