Weimar culture

Weimar Republic refers to the years (1919-1933) in German history. Politically and economically, the nation struggled with the harsh terms and reparations imposed by the Treaty of Versailles (1918) that ended World War I, and endured punishing levels of inflation. 1920s Berlin was at the hectic center of the Weimar Culture.

Notable Cultural Figures of the Weimar Era

Art

• Ernst Barlach – sculptor
• Max Beckmann – painter, printmaker
• Otto Dix – painter
• Max Ernst – painter
• Conrad Felixmueller – painter
• George Grosz – painter
• John Heartfield – photomontage artist
• Erich Heckel – painter
• Käthe Kollwitz – printmaker, sculptor, artist
• Wassily Kandinsky – painter
• Ernst Ludwig Kirchner – painter
• Paul Klee – painter
• Gerhard Marcks – sculptor, woodcuts, lithographer, ceramics
• Otto Mueller – painter
• Gabriele Munter – painter
• Emil Nolde – painter
• Max Pechstein – painter
• Karl Schmidt-Rottluff – painter
• Kurt Schwitters – painter

Architecture

• Peter Behrens – architect
• Walter Gropius – architect, founder of the Bauhaus
• Hugo Häring – architect
• Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky – the first female architect in Austria and designer of the Frankfurt kitchen
• Ernst May – architect
• Erich Mendelsohn – architect
• Adolf Meyer – architect
• Hans Poelzig – architect
• Bruno Taut – architect and city planner
• Mies van der Rohe – architect

Literature

• Bertolt Brecht – playwright (The Threepenny Opera)
• Alfred Döblin ‐ novelist (Berlin Alexanderplatz)
• Hermann Hesse – novelist (Siddartha)
• Christopher Isherwood – novelist
• Ernst Jünger
• Heinrich Mann – novelist (Der Untertan)
• Klaus Mann
• Thomas Mann – novelist (Death in Venice, Buddenbrooks, The Magic Mountain)
• Erich Mühsam – poet, playwright, anarchist
• Erich Maria Remarque – novelist (All Quiet on the Western Front)
• Anna Seghers – novelist
• Kurt Tucholsky – satirist

Music

• Alban Berg – composer (Wozzeck)
• Paul Hindemith – composer, violist (Mathis der Maler)
• Otto Klemperer – conductor and composer
• Arnold Schoenberg – composer (Transfigured Night)
• Anton Webern – composer
• Kurt Weill – composer (The Threepenny Opera)

Theater and Film

• Marlene Dietrich – actress
• Arnold Fanck – director, producer and editor of Mountain films
• Greta Garbo – actress
• Brigitte Helm – actress
• Erika Mann – theatre producer, playwright, journalist, cabaret and film actress.
• Leni Riefenstahl – controversial dancer, actress, and film director (directed many technically acclaimed films including several infamous NAZI propoganda films)
• Max Reinhardt – theatre producer
• Fritz Lang – filmmaker Metropolis (1927)
• Ernst Lubitsch – film director
• Erwin Piscator – theatre and film producer
• Hans Richter – filmmaker, actor, writer
• Leontine Sagan – actress and filmmaker Mädchen in Uniform (1931)
• Josef von Sternberg – filmmaker The Salvation Hunters (1925), The Blue Angel (1930)

Intellectuals

• Theodor W. Adorno
• Walter Benjamin – critical theorist
• Albert Einstein – physicist
• Erich Fromm – psychologist and philosopher
• Sigmund Freud – psychoanalyst
• Max Horkheimer – critical theorist
• Carl Jung – psychoanalyst
• Siegfried Kracauer
• Franz Oppenheimer – sociologist and political economist
• Max Weber – political theorist