Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider

The work (which used interviews, recollections, letters and autobiographies as its primary sources)[1] is one of the best-known introductions to Weimar culture in the English language.[2][3][4]

In it, Gay describes many leading German social and political activists,[5] scholars, and artists of the period as the former cultural outsiders of Imperial Germany, who flourished once the censorship of the Imperial era was removed following the First World War,[6][7] and had now become part of a new cultural elite. This included the Expressionists (and later the counter-Expressionist New Objectivity artists[4]), Dadaists, satirists, atonal musicians, and modernists.[8]

He believed that Germany had its own unique developmental path (similar to the Sonderweg thesis),[6] pioneered by a small, liberal-to-left-wing sample of largely Jewish elites, based in big cities like Berlin.[9] As a result, Gay says that Weimar Germany became a centre of artistic expression, opera, theatre, political cabaret, journalism, cinema and publishing.[10] In keeping with other scholars of his period (many of whom Gay was close with), Gay describes the collapse of the Republic as a result of moral relativism, decadance and excess leading to the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, and combines this with Freudian psychoanalysis.[11]

Although influential, Weimar Culture has been criticised for its focus on high culture and societal elites, and neglect of popular culture in Germany at the time.[8][9]

• The Enlightenment: An Interpretation
• Freud: A Life for Our Time

• Gay, Peter (1968). Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider. New York: Harper & Row.