The Weimar Spectacle

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Bremner Fletcher Duthie

14 episodes

6 days ago

“The Bauhaus. That was an idea, more, an ideal. No difference between draftsmen and artists. Everyone together in a new community, we should build the cathedral of the future. I wanted to be a part of it. And something happened that freed us. We did not learn to paint, but learned to see anew, to think anew, and at the same time we learned to know ourselves” - Re Soupault I’ve been meaning to do an episode about the Bauhaus, which is central to the aesthetics of the Weimar Republic and change...

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Episodes (14/14)

The Weimar Spectacle

Bauhaus Women: Weimar's revolutionary female artists and how the avant-garde Bauhaus School changed their lives forever

2 weeks ago

39 minutes

The Weimar Spectacle

'The Red Count': the extraordinary life of Count Harry Kessler, the socialist nobleman who believed art would save the world

Count Harry Kessler is remembered today less for what he did — though he did quite a lot — than for what he wrote. His diaries, kept over six decades, are among the most extraordinary documents of the twentieth century. They record conversations with everyone from Rodin and Rilke to Einstein, Strauss, Cocteau, Hofmannsthal, and Diaghilev. They also record his impressions of the great turning points of modern history: the First World War, the Weimar Republic, the rise of Nazism. In this ...

3 weeks ago

39 minutes

The Weimar Spectacle

Are we living in the final days of the Weimar Republic, watching Democracy collapse and Fascism return??

Okay, full disclosure, I started this podcast not for any deep political reason, but because I was fascinated by the culture of the Weimar Republic, the music, the arts, the architecture, the personalities. I didn’t start it because I thought that the political parallels between then and now were absolutely clear. But, there’s that thing that happens, where something's in your head and you start seeing everywhere. Well, I feel like every time I read the news, turn on the radio, listen to a po...

1 month ago

24 minutes

The Weimar Spectacle

'The Einstein Of Sex': Magnus Hirschfeld, the man who discovered sex

Today I’m interviewing Daniel Brook, the author of a new book on the pioneering sexual rights activist Magnus Hirschfeld, whose Berlin Institute of Sexual Science was a huge attraction in Weimar Berlin and was eventually destroyed by the Nazis, and whose theories are so contemporary they could be taken directly from modern debates about gender, sexuality, race and freedom. Magnus Hirschfeld (14 May 1868 – 14 May 1935) was a Jewish German physician, sexologist and LGBTQ+ advocate, whose German...

5 months ago

1 hour 21 minutes

The Weimar Spectacle

Degenerate Art, Hitler's culture war and the greatest modern art show ever

On 30 June 1937, Joseph Goebbels, the Reich Minister for Propaganda and Enlightenment, authorised the Director of the Reich Chamber for Culture, Adolf Ziegler, to select and confiscate paintings and sculptures from public collections for a major exhibition on 'degenerate art'. Ziegler said “What's been gathered together in [this] exhibition constitutes the portrayal of a true witches' sabbath and the most frivolous spiritual-artistic cultural bolshevism and a portrayal of the triumph of subhu...

7 months ago

32 minutes

The Weimar Spectacle

George Grosz + John Heartfield: avant-garde, anti-fascist artists

George Grosz was a German artist known especially for his political cartoons and paintings of Berlin life in the 1920s. He was a prominent member of the Berlin Dada and New Objectivity groups during the Weimar Republic. He emigrated to the United States in 1933, and became a naturalized citizen in 1938. John Heartfield was a German visual artist who pioneered the use of art as a political weapon. Some of his most famous photo-montages were anti-Nazi and anti-fascist statements and he was hunt...

7 months ago

36 minutes

The Weimar Spectacle

Will the real Sally Bowles please stand up? Cabaret, the musical, the real lives behind it

“Berlin was in a state of civil war. Hate exploded suddenly, without warning, out of nowhere; at street corners, in restaurants, cinemas, dance halls, swimming-baths; at midnight, after breakfast, in the middle of the afternoon ... From 1929 to 1933, I lived almost continuously in Berlin, with only occasional visits to other parts of Germany and to England. Already, during that time, I had made up my mind that I would one day write about the people I’d met and the experiences I was having. So...

9 months ago

1 hour 8 minutes

The Weimar Spectacle

The economic crisis that changed the world: Hyperinflation's catastrophe

On Oct 15th, 1923, Berlin resident Betty Scholem wrote to her son: “Conditions have taken a catastrophic turn here. This letter cost 15 million marks to send...and it will be 30 million beginning the day after tomorrow.” She estimated household expenses in the billions as the monthly rate of inflation approached 30,000 percent. In 1913, one US dollar was worth roughly 4 German marks. By November, 1923 in Germany, ten years later, hyper-inflation had pushed one US dollar to be wor...

11 months ago

1 hour 10 minutes

The Weimar Spectacle

Building the Dream, The Utopian Realism of Weimar Architecture

Questions? Suggestions? Send a text. “Let us consciously be ‘imaginary architects’! We believe that only a total revolution can guide us in our task. Our fellow citizens, even our colleagues quite rightly suspect in us the forces of revolution. Break up and undermine all former principles. Horse Shit! And we the bud in fresh dung.” So, said Weimar architect Bruno Taut!! And his contemporary, Walter Gropius replied...

1 year ago

34 minutes

The Weimar Spectacle

Brecht Banter: whiskey-fueled chat on Brecht, Weimar and New Orleans

What do you get when you mix a bottle of Laphroaig Whiskey with three charming Weimar raconteurs? A freewheeling conversation that touches on the disturbing, occasionally hopeful, similarities of the Weimar period with our own days, the enduring importance and power of the poetry and plays of Bertolt Brecht, why New Orleans might be a last bastion of Weimar Culture, and on bringing to light some lesser known artists of 1920’s Germany. Over my kitchen table in New Orleans, I was joined by Sara...

1 year ago

1 hour 12 minutes

The Weimar Spectacle

Kurt Weill invents a new musical language for the Weimar stage

Many years ago, I started my musical career singing, or maybe I should say screaming, with a Punk band, then eventually, through some very complicated in-between steps, I ended singing Opera, then on to musical theatre, then swinging it with jazz groups, and nowadays, mostly, I’m singing my own original songs. However through all of that, I've been enchanted, inspired, and more than a little obsessed, by the music of Kurt Julien Weill. I've sung Weill’s music in lovely concert halls and dark ...

1 year ago

36 minutes

The Weimar Spectacle

All Change Is Revolutionary: the Radical Roots of the Weimar Republic

Questions? Suggestions? Send a text. On October 29th, 1918, only a few days before the official end of WW1, in Kiel, a naval port on Germany’s northern coast, sailors in the German Imperial Navy staged a mutiny that would spark revolutions across Germany, would lead to the formation of a new state with a constitution recognizing radical new human rights, and ultimately would lead to the rise of the Nazi Party. The Sailors were responding to the unauthorized decision by the Imperial Navy Com...

1 year ago

23 minutes

The Weimar Spectacle

Weimar In The Bedroom: Revolutionary Sexuality

Questions? Suggestions? Send a text. We’re going to leap into some of the fun, crazy and sometimes completely mad of the Weimar days, i.e. the wild sexual revolution that appeared in in Berlin and to a lesser degree across Germany. My big idea for this episode is that in Post-WW1 Germany, people had seen so much death, they searched for life through sex and rejoicing in their bodies. The war had proved a beautiful body could be easily broken or snuffed out and so pleasure was not to be dela...

1 year ago

31 minutes

The Weimar Spectacle

Why Give A Damn About The Weimar Republic?

Questions? Suggestions? Send a text. In this first episode we'll take a quick overview of birth, brief life and death of the Weimar Republic and ask the big, big question: 'Why care about a failed European state that only lasted 14 years and was a hot mess from the start'.

1 year ago

12 minutes