Introduction

Who has been relegated to the waiting room of Weimar history? While the trope of waiting has long been associated with Weimar culture — indeed, since as far back as Siegfried Kracauer's programmatic essay, ‘Die Wartenden’ (1922) — the term has gained further resonance in the field of postcolonial studies. As Dipesh Chakrabarty argues in Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (2000), modern European historical consciousness assumed varying degrees of civilisation and development across the globe, with forerunners and latecomers. This ‘stagist’ theory of history ascribed a temporality of ‘not yet’ to non-Western societies, justifying Europe's denial of self-government to the colonised. For Chakrabarty, European historical thought advanced a logic of ‘first in Europe and then elsewhere’, consigning the Global South to an imaginary ‘waiting room of history’.1 This special issue takes its inspiration from Chakrabarty's call to provincialise Europe, in the sense of historicising Europe's universalising discourse of political modernity to uncover its colonial underpinnings. Contributors rethink Weimar Germany from and for the margins, challenging dominant narratives through subaltern histories — or questioning the very relationship between centre and periphery. The articles gathered in this issue offer original reconsiderations of Weimar culture through engagement with Black and postcolonial thought, bringing even the most familiar of Weimar classics into new focus. Thus, Adrienne Merritt and Meindert Peters analyse F. W. Murnau's Nosferatu (1922) and Vicki Baum's Menschen im Hotel (1929), respectively, revealing the colonial infrastructures and imaginaries that persisted after the disestablishment of the German ‘Kolonialreich’ in 1919. However, this issue also employs the idea of provincialising in a second, more literal sense, focusing on cultural life outside of the metropolis. For Weimar culture has often been seen as a quintessentially urban phenomenon, epitomised by the new metropolis of Berlin and an ambivalent fascination with the ‘Großstadt’ in works like Walther Ruttmann's Berlin — Die Sinfonie der Großstadt (1927), Otto Dix's Großstadt (1927/28), and Alfred Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929). As our contributors demonstrate, provincialising Weimar culture also means broadening the purview beyond Berlin to consider cultural phenomena in other municipalities and regions of the German Republic: from the Sarrasani Circus in Dresden (Sabine Hanke) to the cinema culture of the occupied Rhineland (Frank Kessler and Sabine Lenk). These two understandings of provincialising are not separate or supplementary, but rather dialectically intertwined. The articles in this issue show how transnational phenomena, such as migration, trade networks and global politics, permeated cultural life throughout the Weimar Republic, and how performers from a wide range of cultural-linguistic backgrounds negotiated and shaped these processes. Anjeana K. Hans and Philipp Stiasny examine how the foreign-born actors Pola Negri and Franziska Gaal became major stars of Weimar film, which gains new inflections in turn as an ‘accented cinema’.2 With this combined approach, this issue builds on recent scholarship that situates the Weimar era and its cultural production in a global context, including oft-neglected colonial histories.3 It also answers frequently reiterated calls to transcend the longstanding focus on Weimar-era Berlin, particularly Frank Biess's appeal for further research on ‘the presence of the global outside Berlin and in rural areas’.4 The contributions to this issue place the two approaches in critical, fruitful dialogue, furthering our understanding of the history of the Weimar Republic and, more generally, of Germany in the world. Not least, in provincialising Weimar culture, this issue offers historiographical reflections on the concept of ‘Weimar culture’ itself alongside the trope of ‘waiting’. In his final, posthumously published book, History: The Last Things Before the Last (1969), Kracauer observed the emerging scholarship on Weimar culture and characterised the historical era not as a bounded, uniform entity with a distinct zeitgeist, but as ‘a kind of meeting place for chance encounters — something like the waiting room of a railway station’.5 While prefiguring Chakrabarty's image of the ‘waiting room of history’, Kracauer also tacitly recalled the figure of the ‘anteroom’ or ‘intermediary area’ in his own writings — a rejection of absolute, universal truths and top-down, systematising modes of theorising — as well as his aforementioned essay, ‘Die Wartenden’, which had posited a messianically tinged idea of waiting as an alternative to both principled scepticism and a short-circuited leap of faith into the religious sphere.6 Bringing the historiography of Weimar culture — represented by Kracauer and others — into conversation with postcolonial thought, this issue attends to those who have long been relegated to the waiting room of Weimar history. In the remainder of this introduction, we provide a critical overview of existing research and examine the implications of provincialising Weimar culture along three axes: global and postcolonial perspectives on the Weimar Republic; the role of the German provinces in the interwar period; and the construction and canonisation of Weimar culture in subsequent historiography. The afterword by Uta Poiger further situates the contributions to this issue in relation to recent scholarship and considers how Weimar culture has been remediated through digital exhibits by the Deutsches Historisches Museum and the Haus der Weimarer Republik. Several scholars have drawn attention to Germany's continued imperial ambitions beyond the formal end of empire in 1919.7 Yet, in recent years, ‘Weimar colonialism’ has received increased attention in its own right, both as an era of persistent transnational ties to former colonies and remarkably resilient imperialist ambitions and as a crucial (though not uncontested) transition phase to Nazi colonial and racial policy.8 Two collections in particular have anchored the scholarly debate. The first, Florian Krobb and Elaine Martin's Weimar Colonialism (2014), considers not just the ongoing links to former colonial territories, but also those realms that were part of the ‘global, colonial imaginary’ — that is, North and South America, Eastern Europe and the Middle East — reminding us that Weimar politics and culture were carried across borders and evolved alongside, and within, persistent imperial frameworks.9 The second volume, Christoph Cornelißen and Dirk van Laak's Weimar und die Welt (2020), adopts an even broader view of Weimar culture, taking account of cinema, cosmopolitan and travel literature, music and other media. Following a large-scale globalisation of scholarship on the First World War, the authors claim, ‘ist jetzt eigentlich auch die Weimarer Republik an der Reihe, entprovinzialisiert zu werden’.10 We now speak more confidently about entanglements between Weimar and the world, or the global dimensions of a domestic Weimar culture. However, as long as we engage little with non-Western perspectives — and the ‘subaltern pasts’ of Weimar, in Chakrabarty's words — we are arguably internationalising rather than provincialising, perpetuating the ‘first in Europe and then elsewhere’ structure that he seeks to critique.11 It still leaves South Asians, Africans and other ‘subaltern’ subjects in his proverbial ‘waiting room of history’, never quite belonging to Weimar culture, but also never quite outside it either.12 This is more than a question of semantics; it is also a question of methodology. Increased focus on the powerful allure of Weimar's postimperial fantasies, much like the ‘glitter and doom’ model of Weimar culture in general, threatens to occlude the harsh realities of migrant, racial and ethnic minorities struggling to find their place in Weimar society.13 But Weimar culture was really made by both, and our scholarship needs to take account of this. What is Weimar culture when viewed through this lens? It is certainly on the one hand a dreamworld in which the political and entrepreneurial elite danced the night away at colonial-themed balls. Such ‘tropical nights under palm trees’ would often feature a fictional voyage to the former colonies, where would-be settlers, tourists and investors could sample culinary delights served by waiters in blackface to the tune of ‘German jazz’. These events occurred within the safe space of venues such as the Zoologischer Garten in Berlin but also in smaller regional towns such as Ebingen in Württemberg or Stettin (now Szczecin, Poland).14 This was a world in which young Germans dreamt of following in the footsteps of their literary hero Cornelius Friebott, who sets out from the provincial confines of Jürgenshagen to find his ‘living space’ in German Southwest Africa in Hans Grimm's Volk ohne Raum (1926). It was a world for playing empire, for nurturing imperial fantasies that would soon find more concrete expression in a vast bureaucracy for an empire that never was.15 Viewed through this lens, Weimar culture is a joyous celebration of a lost paradise. But, on the other hand, it is also a culture haunted by a more threatening spectre of colonial legacies. This (post-)colonial unease is perhaps nowhere more apparent than in cultural productions around the Rhineland Controversy following the First World War. Known at the time as the ‘Schwarze Schmach am Rhein’, this campaign opposed the use of colonial occupation troops on European soil and thus sought to discredit French forces more generally. The controversy elicited a wealth of propaganda material and cultural reworkings in posters, literature and films. Portraying the circa 20,000 to 40,000 French colonial troops scattered across big cities and more provincial towns (e.g. Worms) as barbaric, brutal rapists, the German-led campaign drew international attention.16 As Tobias Nagl claims, the ‘Schwarze Schmach’ rhetoric was a ‘Pornografisierung der Politik’ that made its way into visual and material culture.17 And this racialised political pornography was widely disseminated: far from the postimperial centre, in the provincial town of Doorn in the Netherlands, the exiled Kaiser Wilhelm II added a commemorative coin by Karl Goetz grotesquely caricaturing Black French soldiers to his collection of colonial-themed curiosities. Elsewhere in the Netherlands, Surinamese activists joined forces with like-minded campaigners in Germany to oppose this racist propaganda.18 Broadening our purview, then, also leads us to consider instances of resistance to the racialised cultural regimes of Weimar Germany. In this vein, scholars have read Hannah Höch's photomontages post-imperially, as disruptions of visual racisms perpetuated by the media, or considered the impressions of daily life in Weimar Berlin through the eyes of the pioneers of the Harlem Renaissance.19 We might further provincialise our understanding of Weimar culture by studying the transnational network of anti-colonial activists that was anchored in various locations across Germany in the interwar period.20 This perspective also brings into focus the biographies of Black Germans such as Louis Brody, Mohamed Husen and Kwassi Bruce, whose life stories have only begun to be excavated, as well as the experiences of other people of colour who resisted cultural (mis-)representations, stereotyping and racist campaigns.21 This special issue pushes the important groundwork laid by previous scholarship a step further by, for one, acknowledging the violence that was as much constitutive of Weimar culture as the exhilarating hubbub of the Sinfonie der Großstadt. This violence reappears as a spectre in Adrienne Merritt's analysis of F. W. Murnau's 1922 film Nosferatu. Merritt's novel reading of this Weimar classic connects fears surrounding the loss of colonial holdings and the Rhineland occupation to reverberations from the transatlantic history of slavery. Through the lens of Black theory — particularly the work of Saidiya Hartman and Christina Sharpe — Merritt urges us to think about the afterlives of ‘property’, or human cargo. This issue also devotes serious attention to the historical viewpoints of people of colour and acknowledges the important role they played in the creation of Weimar culture. Sabine Hanke's contribution shows us not only how the Sarrasani Circus built on a continued tradition of ethnographic shows and imperial fantasies in the interwar period, but also how Lakota performers challenged their poor treatment by circus directors and, by extension, resisted the lingering German imperial gaze. At the same time, this issue reveals the perhaps surprisingly quotidian nature of the imperial. In his analysis of Vicki Baum's Menschen im Hotel, Meindert Peters alerts us to the fact that the ostensibly provincial worldview of its main character, the ‘little man’ Otto is in fact in global and colonial encounters a that with people who speak between and and thus While the between the and works of Weimar culture also us of the longstanding role of the provinces in the German In to and Germany never had one cultural centre, to its as a and its For a long time, German culture in regional Europe, like and the of Berlin, this not after the of the — an of Weimar culture was one — in the town of Weimar is an of that cultural of the German of this regional cultural was by the by the which in place or were even after the people a provincial life in the Weimar Republic: in the of the German in rural far from Germany's has that ‘Weimar was that the provincial town in was far more of Weimar Germany's political and cultural than Berlin In this we to the role of Weimar's regions in the development of the modern culture. from that Berlin in ‘waiting room of history’, German provinces had regional and were into global and cultural this Weimar was a and that from of the as well as from the in Weimar and the of as far from Berlin as in was of such of as van der and and the of and In and like and important novel — the part of his — is in and the in like a distinct take on which has an of the modern that and the existing regional However, was more to the of Weimar culture than a contribution to a more or international of of modern German culture had a distinct regional in and For and culture, most often built on and Germany's was also in a modern that a and globalisation of culture. As has rather than German culture, was in fact often to cultural through of and Germany's regional cultural also shaped Weimar cinema, with productions such as Die or to a rather than a was also a for such an urban in in had its not in but in the a cinema in As Karl has of the most urban Germany's regional to that and through as it could not be In this Weimar culture, long for cultural regional rather than The of these also a made by in Berlin itself in a — a provincial place rather than the interwar metropolis it is often were in Weimar literature and thought, which often the relation between urban and provincial of the most of the — from und die and to Hans — was and — on provincial with life in Berlin, an perspective on the metropolis. the (e.g. on rural but also had a urban major German one the relationship between Berlin and the provinces as as who in and the Weimar In in der Berlin in his to a at the of Berlin, his the work of and others not to an rejection of but a to of and regional had about modern such as film or to their who often these works as — both in urban and in the provinces the image of a provincial nature and people by modernity in of these and more scholarship on the by in the has of and (e.g. and in the and has in new film and as well as his use of than works of Weimar culture thus with modern life from a provincial or regional of the contributions to this special issue the role of the provinces in Weimar culture. on an figure the modern metropolis from Menschen im Meindert Peters the that much of the literature of the Weimar For the Weimar the between and Anjeana K. Hans and Philipp Stiasny that the Weimar film was at provincial and and and Frank Kessler and Sabine in on the film culture of the where place under occupation at the — a fact that is often from of German cinema of the Weimar Sabine Hanke's contribution on the Sarrasani which was in Dresden but around the of the Europe and South America, situates the German provincial within a broader transnational of empire and culture. other contributors to this these authors show how the history of Weimar culture from the and our understanding of uncover the of and transnational perspectives and that of these are in a history of the culture of the to the ‘waiting room of Weimar taking of including the construction of Weimar culture and its in our own have seen a of to the Weimar Republic, as have political with interwar Germany — from the by global to the of and have the and of such as well as their to both and and and the of ongoing about the ‘Weimar it reminding that historical were to the very of Germany's The sought to from the by the of German in the of and der an in Weimar die der der Weimar, der der und Such a of German politics and culture was following the of Weimar the to in German often the to German cultural This as the of a Weimar would as the of writings by and and along with an for German in And of the Weimar era were just as crucial for the construction of a in and East which would often use the Weimar Republic as a of (e.g. Weimar, and would separate Germany's from its political in Die der Weimarer Republik and Frank that the idea of Weimar culture as a of was an of the era to of German history from the long of the and was part of a of engagement with the culture of the Weimar Republic on both of the the Weimar often served as a as and cultural works (e.g. the which in drew between interwar Germany and the its own of and political — including emerging scholarship viewed the Weimar as a to it on the of the period, whose cultural and was only by the era of and these was Weimar The as the events of the Weimar Republic as a where such as and became in the cultural and the Weimar to a model of observed the of the along with the from the of the to of the had in the life of the whose history he to The that in our was that he had far was to had the way he that in his account that was a of and the would into a more or of and and the And since experiences had then were to through the of the and he to this at the relationship between the he was about to and the which it was to the of on the of Kracauer thus a on the of and for the and historical that they In an Kracauer the between the of a and the of and between the of a and the of its While on the construction of Weimar culture, Kracauer's also broader of new inflections to his figure of ‘waiting’. the of and Kracauer's an on the part of the — that is, a ‘waiting for the to Kracauer the of a of time and the historical not as a of but like the waiting room of a railway Kracauer the image of the waiting room to of at with the of time, Chakrabarty would that in fact to a logic of ‘first in Europe and then In this European historical thought a colonial of political development and relegated the Global South to a ‘waiting room of For Chakrabarty, the thus how this thought — which is now and which us — be from and for the in that ‘the are as and as the with the work of Chakrabarty and the contributions to this issue in Weimar historiography. the of Weimar as a — in Kracauer's as a — both Sabine and Adrienne Merritt Weimar culture in of the of German particularly imperialist and ethnographic the afterlives of and the of With to to Anjeana K. Hans and Philipp Stiasny Kracauer's between Weimar cinema and ‘the German and Frank Kessler and Sabine consider how the very term ‘Weimar gained and became with a of for a broader and more international perspective on German cinema culture that beyond film production to and Uta Poiger how Weimar culture has been remediated in recent through digital of the and Rhineland and of presence in Germany. other contributors to this these authors on the and of Weimar culture by attention to its to the waiting room of Weimar they that the culture of interwar Germany well beyond Berlin, with and that into our own This special issue from the Weimar Global and on at from to with from the

Civilization · Colonialism · German · Modernity · Narrative · Politics · Subaltern · Temporality · The Imaginary · Weimar Republic · German Colonialism and Identity Studies · German Literature and Culture Studies · Literature and Cultural Memory