The Forsaken Past

Baudelaire, in a fit of penetrating insight into modern art, once said: 'La inodernite, c'est le transitoire, le fugitif, le contingent... Much the same can be said about life in the Weimar Republic, whether it was that of the destitute factoryworker in the suburbs of Berlin, or the nearly bankrupt Junker on his estate in East Prussia. War and revolution had brought concern about the uncertainties of modern life, which hitherto had largely been the preserve of malcontent artists and intellectuals, into full view for the less culturally conscious shopkeeper, farmer and sales clerk. Although the lives of such people had never been easy before 1914, they had not been fundamentally insecure either. What was once merely laborious became, after the war, increasingly bewildering, uncertain, or as Baudelaire would have it, contingent. Under Bismarck, it was primarily the workers and a few intellectuals who were against the social order; in the Weimar Republic, the farmers, Junkers, shopkeepers, noble army officers and civil servants joined the ranks of the socially alienated. It was the Weimar Republic's misfortune that its detractors from the right deceived their enemies, and to a certain extent even themselves, into believing that they were standing athwart all the changes of the modern world. From the vantage point of 1930, with political parties on the left and right calling for radical solutions to the economic crisis, it was very difficult indeed to determine who

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• Fascism and Modernization

  Open Access•Henry Ashby Turner•World Politics•1972

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