The Weimar Imaginary
A lecture at the Weimar 2020 Symposium 2021.05.13.
Abstract
The “imaginary” has become an important feature of many disciplines. Originating with Lacan and Castoriadis, the imaginary became especially important for cultural studies through the work of Benedict Anderson. Imagined Communities was Anderson’s attempt to explain nationalism’s origins and effects in ways that political theory, be it Marxist or liberal, had failed to do. The “national imaginary” became a durable method of summarizing the various interactions that create national ideologies and memory; “imaginary” by itself has become a handy piece of shorthand for capturing the complexity that attends the collective construction of certain kinds of ideas (for example, “cultural imaginary”).
In this presentation I extend the concept of the imaginary to a discussion of Weimar’s place in our contemporary popular imagination. The argument is that a “Weimar imaginary” now exists which relies on specific cornerstone ideas about the Weimar Republic to construct a popular and widely accepted notion of what Weimar was about. One hundred years on, Weimar has come to mean something; it occupies an immediately recognizable shared central space of signification. Two narratives particularly capable of synthesizing and popularizing a common conception of Weimar will help us comprehend how this works.
Jason Lutes’ long-running and recently concluded graphic novel series Berlin has gained widespread attention as a masterpiece of the form, yet little scholarly attention has been paid to the role its content plays in forming a popular imaginary of the period. The Netflix series Babylon Berlin, created by Tom Tykwer, Achim von Borries and Hendrik Handloetgen, and based on the novels of Volker Kutscher, matches Lutes’ success in slaking the public’s thirst for Weimar neo-noir.
In both narratives, Berlin is the centre around which Weimar revolves, drawing protagonists away from conventional Germany. A city of excess and everything modern, characterized by struggles over politics, morality, art, and crime, Berlin becomes the physical manifestation of the 1920s zeitgeist, thereby incorporating and expressing the Weimar imaginary. Such centralizing imaginings of Weimar culture risk creating homogenizing clichés that will ossify our understanding of the period and its intellectual and cultural variety.
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