The Weimar Republic has received more attention in popular culture and academic research than almost any other phase in German history. But despite the plethora of books, films, exhibitions, and articles on the period, its prevailing image remains, in the Anglo-American world especially, surprisingly simplistic. It is often viewed as an era of accelerated socio-cultural progress on the one hand and extreme politico-economic unrest on the other.

This dichotomy has been central to almost every major treatment of the Weimar Republic since its implosion in 1933. Christopher Isherwood’s 1939 novel Goodbye to Berlin, with its flighty flappers, fey gents and Nazi thugs, set the tone, its subsequent adaptations for musical theatre and film cementing the place this stock cast held in the popular imagination over the following decades. Many historians too consider a politico-cultural divergence as ‘typical’ of (Kolb, 1988), even ‘integral’ to (Peukert, 1992), the Weimar period. Over forty years ago, however, Hermand and Trommler pointed out that such dichotomous interpretations were frequently driven by contemporary agendas – social, historical, and political. During the Cold War, for instance, western scholars turned the Bauhaus into an emblem of artistic freedom by conflating its aesthetic modernity with liberal democracy.

The Berlin Wall fell twenty years ago, but current works on the Republic – often of good quality – still bear titles that encourage dichotomous analyses: Promise and Tragedy (Weitz, 2007), Glitter and Doom (Metropolitan Museum, 2006), Utopia and Despair (West, 2000). A reassessment of this important period in German history, without ulterior agendas, is now overdue. This conference will focus, therefore, on the experiences of the Weimar Republic’s contemporaries, rather than on the demands of its successors. It will provide a flexible forum where points of intersection and divergence between public and personal histories in all aspects of both the period itself and of its historiography can be examined, in order to begin the work of replacing those dichotomies that continue to mark the Republic’s reception to date with a more nuanced image of the era.

We aim to foster cross-disciplinary exchange, and invite researchers in all disciplines to present proposals for papers, of thirty minutes in length, in either German or English. Possible areas of inquiry include, but are not limited to, the following:

- Private sources (diaristic and autobiographical) that might help to balance the public view of the period’s history.
- Issues of class in relation to personal and public histories/historiographies (Alltagsgeschichte and oral testimonies/diaries etc. of the working-class).
- Contemporary views of the period in the media (newspapers, feuilleton, etc.).
- Assessments of the period in contemporary literature, the performative and visual arts.

Keynote speakers: Moritz Föllmer (Leeds), Debbie Lewer (Glasgow), David Midgley (Cambridge).

Abstracts (approximately 200 words) should be sent to reach Jochen Hung (jochen.hung@sas.ac.uk) by 15 February 2010.