Afterword

Provincialising Weimar culture — and thinking about Weimar and Now/Today — are important, intertwined agendas. Nicholas Baer, Jochen Hung and Britta Schilling have invited the authors of this special issue to think about cultural artefacts in interwar Germany while engaging with two meanings of ‘provincialising’. One is following Dipesh Chakrabarty's critique of European and Western historical thought and practice that has so often consigned the Global South to an imaginary ‘waiting room of history’. The other is to take seriously regionalism and the relationship between the provinces of Germany and the cultural centre and capital of Berlin. The editors also urge us to contemplate the political instrumentalisation of Weimar culture, especially in light of the recent trend of using interwar Germany as an explanatory tool for our current period of socioeconomic crisis and right-wing, authoritarian-populist politics across the globe. For example, they warn us against a narrow canon that has been used to see some forms of Weimar culture as explicitly supporting the establishment of a liberal democracy, in a reinterpretation of Bauhaus-influenced design that has happened in West Germany since the 1950s. The editors further ask us to complicate interpretations of Weimar culture, ranging from those of Siegfried Kracauer to Peter Gay, that have focused on a fairly narrow range of actors or artefacts to draw links between Weimar culture and thought and the support or acquiescence that the Nazis were able to procure among so many ethnic Germans after 1933.1 In this afterword, I put the contributions of this special issue in conversation with other recent scholarship on interwar Germany — scholarship that has highlighted the transnational frameworks shaping culture and aesthetics, as well as selves and others. I pay particular attention to culture as a site of changing and contested racial formations. I sketch how studies in this special issue, and other studies of the past twenty or so years, have brought in persons who are not of German descent, or who are seen as not belonging to the nation, in order to tell new stories about interwar Germany. Such stories bring to the centre of attention German and international ‘imperial imaginations’ and colonial realities, as well as the ways in which people and artefacts such as music moved internationally in the interwar years. In this context, I also discuss two instances of digital representation by German historical museums, one related to the presence of troops from French colonies in the Ruhr and Rhineland occupations in the digital exhibits on culture assembled/curated by the German Historical Museum Berlin, and one on African American dancer Josephine Baker's presence in Berlin in the digital exhibits on culture presented by the Haus der Weimarer Republik in Weimar. Twenty years ago, Tina Campt, in her groundbreaking study of oral histories with Black Germans who lived under National Socialism, insisted on the importance of discourses on racial purity for understanding German and European formations of nationalism. She also insisted on what she called the ‘thorough emplacement’ of people of African descent in Germany, especially in a context where the number of those whom others might see as Black, or Afro-German, was so low that it was not possible to be part of Black communities.2 In this afterword, I would like to combine the call for ‘thorough emplacement’ with a critique of what I have called ‘vernacular ethnology’. Based on quick, general comparison, vernacular ethnology asserts the uniformity of cultures along with the ability to know and compare them. In its appearance in genres designed for speedy consumption, such as advertisements or illustrated magazines, vernacular ethnology is a particular version of what W. J. T. Mitchell has called ‘secondary beliefs’: ‘beliefs about the beliefs of other people’, which he described as ‘constitutive of [...] systems of racial or collective prejudice’.3 The goals pursued with this strategy change from context to context. I am interested here in the everydayness of modes of racialisation, how they manifest in forms of cultural representation, how they also shape individual lives. ‘Thorough emplacement’, in other words, is a way to counter vernacular ethnology and to respond to the call to provincialise Weimar culture. In this special issue, Frank Kessler and Sabine Lenk's article on cinema-watching ‘in the periphery’ draws our attention to the sometimes neglected fact that governance, including the governance of culture, was not under full control by German-run institutions for much of the Weimar period in Western Germany. Kessler and Lenk show how the Allied presence/occupation from 1919 to 1930 along the Rhine, and from 1923 to 1925 in the Ruhr area, complicated the business of running cinemas and raised questions about the loyalties of cinema owners. The occupations also shaped the selection of films that different audiences — Germans of different ages or Allied, especially French and Belgian, military personnel — could see. Apparently, some German audience members resented movies with bilingual intertitles, perhaps because they were reminders of the occupation, perhaps because the intertitles had to stay on the screen longer and slowed the movies. Kessler and Lenk also describe the complex history of Allied censorship with a focus on two examples. The highly racist German production Die schwarze Schmach (1921), which told lies about an alleged pattern of rape and pimping of German women at the hands of Black French soldiers among the occupying forces, was banned by the Allied censorship commission and by the Berlin Agency in charge of film censorship for all of Germany in 1921. As the latter agency concluded, the film depicted falsehoods and, while intended to rally an American (white) audience against the Allied occupation, it endangered German relations with France.4 Another German production, Fredericus Rex, was shown in Belgian cinemas in a version that directly hailed Belgian troops marching towards the Rhineland. One version for German audiences passed the Allied censors in 1922, while another one was banned in the occupation zone in April 1925. Kessler and Lenk agree with Siegfried Kracauer's assessment from his 1947 book From Caligari to Hitler that the film was ‘pure propaganda for the restoration of the monarchy’5 and attribute the change in the film's fate to a longer cut augmented for that propagandistic purpose. Kessler and Lenk go beyond a narrow canon of Weimar cinema that has often drawn on Kracauer, and they shed light on the complexities of access to movies in the Weimar years, especially in the context of Allied occupation. Kessler and Lenk's analysis augments other studies of the last twenty years that have put some emphasis on the role of the French and Allied occupation in shaping cultural history as well as the racial formations in Germany. Jonathan Wipplinger, for example, has shown that ‘the development of German jazz culture was, from the beginning, both involved in a broad network of European-American jazz criticism and, more importantly, decidedly influenced by the conflict and contact along the Rhine’, which included the presence of Black men drawn from African colonies among the French occupation troops, and also the international movement of Black and white musicians of different nationalities playing music understood as jazz from the early 1920s onwards.6 To be sure, such complexity is not easy to represent in broad overviews of culture in the digital exhibits of German history museums. Nonetheless, an exhibit that relates to the presence of troops from the French colonies on the website about Weimar culture of the German Historical Museum Berlin suffers from a disturbing lack of contextualisation. A practice shooting ‘Target with a Caricature on the Ruhr Area's Occupation, 1923 to 1925’ is left without any explanatory text in the English version of the exhibit. The caricature itself depicts an ape-like, hairy monstrous male, clothed only with a red kepi (hat) of the French military, who is standing on two legs over an industrial landscape divided by a river (the Ruhr) and squashing in his hands small figures with long hair. The German caption contains this explanation: ‘Brutalität und Willkür der Besatzer waren Hauptmotive der deutschen Propaganda. Die Bildsprache unterschied sich kaum von der antideutschen Propaganda der Entente zwischen 1914 und 1918.’7 This caption avoids explaining the overt and everyday anti-Black racism of this image. In addition, the assertion that the visual language was an international language avoids the term ‘racism’; the website also provides no sources for its claim. Openly racist depictions of enemies, including associations with ethnic or racial groups deemed at once inferior and menacing, were certainly a particularly demeaning form of vernacular ethnology and a staple of propaganda during the First World War. Like the censored propaganda film Die schwarze Schmach, the target with the German caricature was probably intended to remind viewers of false stories of widespread rape of German women at the hands of French occupation soldiers from the colonies. The occupation, and relations between German women and soldiers from West and North African French colonies, generated lots of anxieties and the first sizeable group of German-born people of African descent. These children (their numbers are estimated in the hundreds) would be labelled ‘Rheinlandbastarde’ by German contemporaries. Many of them suffered sterilisation at the hands of the Nazi regime. Given the extensive scholarship that has traced German discourses and practice around what was considered miscegenation before 1918 and after, the lack of contextualisation for an image of everyday racism presented by the major museum for German history is distressing.8 One wonders what museum and digital exhibits could be generated through attention to the complexities of the occupation presented by Kessler and Lenk or Wipplinger. In his multilayered analysis of Weimar as The Jazz Republic, Wipplinger uses one complex genre, jazz, to track cultural production and reception in Germany in truly transnational frameworks. He brings impresarios, critics, performers and audiences into his detailed history and also shows how jazz helped inform other artistic genres, including paintings and novels seeking to represent modernity in Weimar Germany. For our purposes, I want to briefly sketch how Wipplinger deploys memoirs to elucidate experiences of jazz by German audience members and African American musicians. It was the first time I saw coloured musicians and heard the music. I was flabbergasted [...] — It was something brand new, but it registered with me right away [...] I couldn't really put my fingers on it, but it was the beat, you know. It was the beat. That beat [...] — it got into my bones.9 Lion would leave Germany via Chile for the United States and later found the Blue Note Records label in New York, a label famous for its jazz recordings. Presenting Wooding's own recollections of his band's first show in Berlin, Wipplinger further traces both difficulty and joy in the cross-cultural encounters that jazz musicians fostered. Their piece ‘By the Waters of Minnetonka’ met initially with complete silence, but soon the audience erupted into wild screaming. It took Wooding and his musicians a few minutes to realise that these were screams of approval.10 Wipplinger tracks carefully the impresarios (many of them of the American Russian-Jewish diaspora) that made possible the much-advertised appearance of bandleader Sam Wooding and the musicians and dancers who performed as ‘Chocolate Kiddies’ in Berlin and many other German and European cities from 1925 to 1930. The label ‘Chocolate Kiddies’ certainly served up references to people of African descent as childlike and humorous, but both Wooding and members of the German audience and public also told different stories, ones that took the skill and innovation of Wooding and his orchestra seriously. In an ironic reversal of European colonial history in the Americas, Wooding would come to call himself the ‘Christopher Columbus of jazz’ who had ‘brought big band jazz to a new world’; in Wooding's formulation, the new world was Weimar Germany and 1920s Europe.11 One might therefore think of Wipplinger's account of aural shock of German audiences and African American performers as ‘thorough emplacement’.12 The African American who has received most attention for her brief presence in Weimar Germany, both in the second half of the 1920s and in the decades since the Second World War, is probably Josephine Baker. Thus, it is not surprising that the Haus der Weimarer Republik displays a photo of Baker dating from the 1920s in its digital exhibit on Berlin as a metropolis (‘Berlin im Rausch: Hauptstadt des in the und The photo by with Baker directly at the a that her one and long is by the following 1925 in Berlin Josephine im in one for the of digital to more of contextualisation for the visual shock and that Baker no generated in in the 1920s and to In the context of the of Baker's in and Germany by Baker's into the of two German museums, the and the Berlin related Baker exhibits in and The digital of these exhibits — ranging from an for to full digital of text and along with for Berlin — a more understanding of Baker as who and racist in the United racism in and with and who from the used her for about Baker as an in her own exhibits also of Baker in artistic genres from the 1920s to the Baker is in many ways a these exhibits for with the complexities of on and racial in Baker's during the of European The Berlin in Baker's along with brief of Baker by a range of cultural It an emphasis on of her in Berlin and on she in 1920s Germany. In other words, see to Baker's and in and to on contested of and In the many all over the world pay attention to the historical of artistic production and representation and the historical with artistic of the One that major German historical would draw on such in to Weimar culture, for to thinking on how cultural artefacts and individual and audiences have been in modes of In other words, historical be able to ‘thorough our on culture during the Weimar years, are often well served by across the of 1918 and As Sabine of performers in the during the Weimar years on a longer history of shows and world that helped of with depictions of these shows and world as well as the intertwined of helped to the cultures and governance of the to the ‘waiting room of history’. As culture be understood a longer historical of and She also shows that the of the with the German of as and Germany the of American cultural which with the American from the and have been a staple of German and as well as movies and well into the German with performers in the interwar years, for by that show them in in of on the site of the or at of the the of by a of in to what for and the performers who the during the Weimar years were able to and to what they were able to a audience with critique of and in the is to the complex of and in which American performers in Germany over decades of with the from at to on her in Germany as well as in in the National in the United which the of Black and a band of into of the in These also the by including Black and his at the of who in an after and a in her from performers to the to such as of and low pay after in Germany, made it to to the United of the performers made to a that to the and of some of the One might think of the relations that the for performers as a form of more the of most African American musicians and performers in Weimar Germany, it and have traced how the and of many from and other African colonies often they had more difficulty and white German many of whom and were also in and that in the and in the big cities of and Berlin, often to audience for were well especially on the and film Britta Schilling has shown how the of in Weimar of colonies and German in after Germany was of its colonies and labelled a particularly as part of its in the First World In the special issue, uses the of Berlin im and to remind us that the from to metropolis was a in the metropolis of the interwar period as He also that and other authors of big the often to the big of the from the a in which one of a from the provinces (the a encounters a Black who This in is since this one encounters that a German from the provinces have with people and that Berlin and Germany to a much world of encounters with and — and that all over Germany since the was in the As on the access to the world that and the cinema in the also that of the metropolis not be what they are but not as as he der der in der der in a as that the Black not or and in fact that the Black might be in that the is not at this because he low in from the the in and about of that as up with low As by the is to his part of a by he is a that the German to the of the First World War, a German where he was in his and he made it to Germany after in colonial in the by a and by he two years in The that at in the is a ‘thorough emplacement’ is not possible in or in in this and other in the remind one in of and of was much of Weimar culture and with the of a globe. Such well into the provinces of Germany, at via forms of such as illustrated photo novels like im and or the and via of as many of these in this on and other some of them also and playing with could be part of of racial and This special issue an emphasis on the provinces in Germany, and it also that Weimar thinking about how culture to of and modes of racialisation, here of a by in from to Germany, that is an of a monstrous from European into Germany, which is the focus of W. German production of In her by Black such as of a and as well as the of such to anti-Black and anxieties in the of As and put it in Weimar cinema not only the German film lots of people from Germany and in but many movies and in the on international actors also and or ethnic on a of Weimar and a of the Weimar and elucidate the that an have in these first an international by playing for a in the 1918 German production on the is an of For the context, has that including and of of as and The is for interwar Germany, on both of the ethnology was often at in of including in the ways that the and the European in her role as As and the and away and are a of and her of the language and also In to the many that like with her German in and of in the in that one as vernacular To one example, the German as im der vernacular ethnology alleged ethnic and by an of up the language of that politics and cultural across political for decades with and other racist would not be able to to in Nazi Germany and would the in after two years in from to who had first to the United States in 1922, would a in Nazi Germany in the production of in a film that would be in the United States with a different as in in Nazi Germany, would to the United States in In recent years, the has perhaps the most to bring questions related to artistic and the of of and of Weimar and Nazi cinema and and of in to a broad international audience in his historical The about the W. his and in Weimar and Nazi Germany and in years ago, the this was a culture of — particularly of what it to in saw the cultural production of the Weimar years as by joy and as well as by and — and the Weimar years as years where much of the including and often a This special issue to the involved in that and in the that on the by it also us to elucidate what see as from our especially around the histories of and of vernacular of about is one of such about about the who in interwar or about the of for or one is of how many transnational shaped Weimar culture. One is also that for most the years of Weimar were part of much longer lives. on references to and racism in the digital Weimar culture exhibits of two major German historical museums, one that the multilayered analysis of this special issue and other recent scholarship as Wipplinger's Weimar along with recent in historical contextualisation with new artistic have an on historical museums. As the from the Weimar and those who had have passed to Weimar culture most not see it as by the of Germany or by in by the in 1918 or its in both among also to Weimar culture see it as and are to and cultural complex to political and As Hung and others have the to in forms was itself and not generated by with its for racial the National not all forms of Weimar cultural modernity and to Weimar culture in scholarship and in for and As this special issue to provincialise Weimar support the to the and in all to ‘thorough emplacement’, and to tell stories of — and the artefacts and they and in the past — that for and

Acquiescence · Nazi Germany · Nazism · Politics · Reinterpretation · Weimar Republic · European history and politics · German Colonialism and Identity Studies · German History and Society