CaixaForum Barcelona revives the cultural flowering of the Weimar Republic
- Weimar Republic: a renewing proposal based on reason, democracy and equality
- Welcome to ‘The World of Yesterday’
- A new Germany: the Weimar Republic
- An uncertain present, the echoes of the Weimar Republic today
The director of CaixaForum Barcelona, Mireia Domingo, and the architect and philosopher Pau Pedragosa, one of the curators of the exhibition, presented the exhibition ‘Uncertain Times. Germany between the wars’, a transversal vision of the effervescent interwar period centred on the period from 1918 to 1933. The exhibition recreates the broad universe of the Weimar Republic, a fundamental chapter in European and world history that has transcended as a benchmark for change.
The exhibition stands out for its multifaceted perspective and the plurality of museographic languages with which it appeals to the senses of visitors to transport them to the universe of the Weimar Republic. It does this through scenography, music, audiovisual language and participation, as well as displaying nearly 90 original pieces from the period, including paintings, graphic works, audiovisual works and music.
For this production, the collaboration of the Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum, the National Museum of Decorative Arts and the Institut Valencià d'Art Modern has been sought, who have loaned unique works of German interwar art, as well as German institutions such as the StadtsMuseum Berlin, the Käthe-Kollwitz Museum in Cologne and the Georg Kolbe Museum in Berlin.
With the Weimar Republic, Germany became the epicentre of the avant-garde, experimentation and change, and set a cultural milestone in fields such as literature, film, art, theatre, architecture and design through numerous artists, including Fritz Lang, Jeanne Mammen, Georg Kolbe, Marianne Breslauer, Gabriele Münter, Lyonel Feininger, George Grosz and August Sander, as well as the Bauhaus School, which had teachers such as Paul Klee, Marianne Brandt and Vasili Kandinski, among others.
With this thematic tour, visitors will embark on a journey in three stages that will take them from the world of yesterday to a new Germany, the Weimar Republic, and to our uncertain present.
The first major area takes the audience back to the times before the First World War in a bourgeois salon inspired by the novel Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann. The second explores the internal tensions and challenges to the old certainties that occurred during the Weimar Republic: the representation of the human body, the individual and the phenomenon of the masses; the golden twenties and the economic crises; new gender roles; the union of art and technology at the Bauhaus; musical innovation and diversity in those years; uncertainty as a principle of science; the discrediting of reason in philosophy, and the end of the democratic dream. The last area proposes a reflection, a century later, on the uncertainties of that period and the way in which they reverberate into our world today.
Weimar Republic: a renewing proposal based on reason, democracy and equality
After the political and ideological earthquake that was the Great War and the fall of the four great empires - Austro-Hungarian, German, Ottoman and Russian - the Weimar Republic (1919-1933) emerged as a reformist proposal based on reason, democracy and equality that for the first time allowed women's suffrage.
Despite its short duration (14 years) and the subsequent rise of Hitler's National Socialist Party, the enormous creativity of the interwar period left a deep mark as a benchmark for change towards a new era. The exhibition proposes, with different layers of depth, to understand this period with its contradictions, its virtues and its defects in order to understand ourselves better and also to build the world of tomorrow.
The exhibition delves into the following themes:
- The Weimar Republic, a transition between the old world of certainties and an uncertain time that also continues to characterise our present.
- The Weimar Republic as a historical reference point for an explosion of artistic creativity, thought and social progress.
- The uncertainties and new possibilities that redefine all fields of knowledge, from art to science.
- Weimar as a time when the enlightened ideals of freedom, democracy and equality were to be realised, but in which they coexisted in tension with authoritarianism, discipline and the return to order.
- The potential and the fragility of democracy.
- A moment of rupture with modernity and the beginning of postmodernity.
Welcome to ‘The World of Yesterday’
At the beginning of the exhibition, visitors will enter a scenographic recreation of a bourgeois salon from the end of the 19th century, representing the stable and predictable world that ended with the outbreak of the First World War.
This environment immerses itself in the reality and values of the European upper bourgeoisie, as well as in the collapse of the old imperial order. In terms of sound, the cheerful and traditional waltz ‘The Blue Danube’ (1867), by Johann Strauss, symbolises the harmony of old Europe, while Igor Stravinsky's ‘The Rite of Spring’ (1913), one of the founding works of the 20th-century musical avant-garde, represents the drive for artistic rupture with that order and is at the same time an anticipation of the real rupture within Europe that the Great War would be.
Visitors then move through a scenographic space of transition between The World of Yesterday and the Weimar Republic. It is a narrow, labyrinthine corridor, inspired by a First World War trench, with a dark and disturbing atmosphere and sound effects. Large figures relating to the First World War are projected on the walls.
A new Germany: the Weimar Republic
The second area, the centre of the exhibition, begins by offering visitors the context of the founding of the Weimar Republic in the city of Goethe and Friedrich Schiller as a symbol of the will to build a new humanist and enlightened Germany.
Images, documents and texts arranged chronologically allow visitors to take a journey through the most relevant political events in the history of the Republic, from the November Revolution of 1918 to Hitler's rise to power in 1933.
This central space of the exhibition is divided into the following sub-areas:
Bodies in question
In Weimar, broken and mutilated bodies after the war coexist with others that aim to represent new ideals of beauty and strength, and also with the abstract and mechanical body that looks to the future. In the exhibition, these representations are shown through various sculptures by artists such as Käthe Kollwitz, Georg Kolbe, Marg Moll and Renée Sintenis, as well as a documentary on the culture of sport and health.
The individual and the masses
The phenomenon of mass movements as a political subject, which first appeared during the Weimar period, calls into question the autonomous individual who thinks for themselves. Visitors are greeted by a selection of photographs of individuals by August Sander, and are then surrounded by masses through film clips such as the futuristic classic Metropolis by Fritz Lang (1927) or the Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will by Leni Riefenstahl (1935). Photography and film were key to expressing the tensions of the time. In fact, avant-garde art also became politicised and was used as another weapon in the conflict that engulfed the whole of society. In this turbulent political context, many artists took an open stance and saw the practice of art as another tool in the struggle. The majority of avant-garde artists mobilised in defence of the revolutionary or democratic left with works of social and political criticism and modern forms of representation of social utopias. Works by John Heartfield are shown in this section.
Golden years and dark times
Weimar was also the scene of strong differences and economic crises. Within the space of a few years, the country suffered post-war shortages and hyperinflation, and the Crash of ‘29, with a brief period of stability in between. The Weimar Republic began with the traumatic crisis of unprecedented hyperinflation from 1919 to 1923, which gave rise to revolts, social conflicts, looting, suicides and a stark contrast between poverty and opulence. In 1923 the collapse came, but the will of the Republic Government for stability and social justice, as well as a reform of the economic system, allowed for a recovery of the social and political equilibrium. Thus began the so-called ‘golden twenties’, from 1924 to 1929, a time of tolerance, experimentation and creativity, especially in the big cities.
The documentary ‘Berlin: Symphony of a Great City’ by Walter Ruttmann shows different events on the same day in Berlin in 1927, its frenetic movement and vitality, but also the social differences that coexist in it. It is an example of the new objectivity of cinema, a movement that emphasises the realism of everyday life as opposed to expressionism. In this area, the painting by George Grosz entitled ‘Strassenszene Kurfürstendamm’ (Street Scene), on loan from the Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum, is a new addition to CaixaForum Barcelona.
New gender roles
This sub-theme reflects the questioning of traditional gender roles through new conceptions and representations. The emancipated ‘Neue Frau’ (‘new woman’) broke with the conventional lifestyle and shaped the image of an independent, strong, androgynous woman who was socially and politically active. The new social context also gave visibility to groups that shared new gender expressions and identities, such as the community formed around Magnus Hirschfeld's Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexual Research). This is shown in the exhibition by paintings and photographs by Jeanne Mammen, August Sander and Marianne Breslauer and the case of gender reassignment by the Danish artist Lili Elbe.
Art and technique
In the Weimar Republic new pictorial styles coexisted such as expressionism, dada, constructivism and new objectivity. In this space you can see, for example, pieces by artists such as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Gabriele Münter; Johannes Itten; Rudolf Schlichter Vassili Kandinski, Oskar Schlemmer, Lyonel Feininger, El Lissitzky and Sándor Bortnyik; Raoul Hausmann and Kurt Schwitters. All of them are contemporaries of the Bauhaus School, one of the institutions that best represents the Weimar spirit. The Bauhaus, in its three distinct stages, Weimar, Dessau and Berlin, broke down the barrier between art and technology. The Bauhaus is explained by emphasising its pedagogical innovation, which united theory and practice in a democratising sense and was formalised in the workshop spaces. Industrial design pieces by Marcel Breuer, Marianne Brandt, Mies van der Rohe and Erich Dieckmann are on display.
Soundscape
In this space, visitors will find an experiential place dedicated to listening to the diverse music of Weimar, which represents a coexistence of very different styles and the rupture caused by atonality in the musical language. You will be able to hear pieces by Arnold Schöenberg, Richard Wagner, Kurt Weill, Kabarett Berlin, The Original Dixieland Jazz Band and Spoliansky.
Uncertainty as a principle (science)
During the interwar years, the foundations of the deterministic science of Einstein's theory of relativity, which relies on the ability to reach objective truths and to reveal the behaviour of nature and the world with precision through physics and mathematics, were shaken. This position is questioned by quantum physics, which attributes a probabilistic nature to reality and includes uncertainty as a scientific principle. The consequences of this change are profound and affect not only the world of science, but also other fields of knowledge. To explain this theoretical rupture, the three scientific models - Newtonian physics, Einstein's relativistic physics and quantum physics - are compared with three-dimensional models.
The crisis of reason (philosophy)
In parallel to the debate on the perception of reality in the field of physics, two philosophical paradigms also clash, as dramatised in the 1929 Davos debate between Cassirer and Heidegger: the first defends the humanist project of emancipation and moral progress, heir to the enlightened reason of Kant's philosophy, which is discredited and placed under suspicion by existentialist philosophy, represented by Martin Heidegger.
The areas dedicated to science and philosophy have been conceived as interactive spaces with didactic devices to make complex theories more accessible.
The end of the democratic dream
In May 1933, a few months after Hitler's rise to the post of Chancellor of the Republic, National Socialist groups in Berlin burned books considered anti-German. This episode represents the symbolic end of the democratic project and the beginning of the barbarism of totalitarianism that would lead Germany, Europe and the world into World War II and the Holocaust.
In this space you can watch a documentary about the book burning led by Goëbbles and Goya's engraving, from the series of the whims, ‘The sleep of reason produces monsters’, a work from another historical and geographical context, but which serves to interpret a moment of radical rupture: from democracy to terror.
An uncertain present, the echoes of the Weimar Republic today
Many of the tensions and ideas that emerged during the Weimar Republic still resonate in our world today. In the first space and through a video, contemporary public figures, such as the philosopher Begoña Román; the international reporter Patricia Simón; the sociologist Miquel Missé; the writer and poet Sara Torres; the curator of Sónar+D, Antònia Folguera, and the physicist and founder of Quantum Fracture, José Luis Crespo, offer their vision of the opportunities and the unease of today's world.
In a second and final space, those who come to visit the exhibition will have the opportunity to participate and give their opinion in a game of specific questions from different disciplines about our uncertain times. Through the visualisation of the answers, the tour ends with dynamic and changing content that will reflect the variety of opinions of the public.