“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 u...

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 r...

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 t...

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,...

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 majo...

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 Unit...

“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...

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...

   “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 an...

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 endurin...

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 ja...

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 formati...

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 ...

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'....