It was deeply moral, but streetwise, irreverent, and often darkly funny. This art looked at the world with unblinking sobriety. Though the styles of these artists differed, their work belongs to a shared attitude, a worldview, and an art movement known as the Neue Sachlichkeit, or New Objectivity. The visual artists Käthe Kollwitz, George Grosz, Otto Dix, John Heartfield, Felix Nussbaum, and their contemporaries attacked the culture and the business of war, the exploitation of workers, the greed of the privileged, and the ignorance and complicity of the German people. Murnau’s use of location shooting and imaginative photography in Nosferatu created a mood of palpable menace that has not lost its edge today. Caligari’s expressionist, low-budget sets made of painted canvas and wood conveyed a world of madness. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) epitomized Weimar-era foreboding. In film, Robert Weine’s The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920), and W.H. Despite this atmosphere of gross financial inequity, post-war trauma, and previously unimagined freedoms, the arts flourished. Hyperinflation rendered the personal savings of ordinary Germans worthless, while former war profiteers resumed their conspicuously privileged lives. Women gained the right to vote and many immediately won seats in parliament.īut the senseless tragedy of the lost war left a climate of grief and dread, and the punishing Treaty of Versailles gutted the country’s economy. The new constitution gave German citizens unprecedented liberties-freedom of speech and privacy were guaranteed and censorship in any form was prohibited. The Kaiser was quickly deposed and a new German republic was declared.Ī German National Assembly convened in the city of Weimar and unveiled a democratic government in August of 1919. The German people were sick of the war and the years of official lies promising imminent victory. ![]() The sailors revolted and within days the rebellion had spread from the Kiel naval base to cities throughout the country. ![]() In the final days before Germany’s 1918 surrender to the Allies at the end of the First World War, the German Admiralty ordered its fleet to launch a suicidal “honor battle” against the British.
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