03.2 Hist 20 podcast: Hedda 1920-1929

Hedda in the 3rd decade of the 20th C

Transcript

University of California UCOP | podcast 3.2

Testing. Hi, everyone. I'm back with another installment of Hedda's life. Last time we checked in with her, she had

gone home. She was still in the middle of World War I. Beginning of the 1920s, we're going to find a very different

Hedda. She's 20-- or she turned 20 in August-- and she got married. She got married to [INAUDIBLE] in the

summer of 1920.

He was five years older than her. So nothing too extreme. He'd been born in a different part of Germany--

Breslau-- in a family of all right doing. They were tradespeople, but he was involved in finance. They bought a

house on the outskirts of Berlin. And they enjoyed life without war. They had three children in the 1920s. They had

Wolfgang in 1922. They had my grandmother, Ruth, in 1924, and then Robert, the youngest son, in 1926. And it

would be fair to say the 1920s were a good decade for them.

Berlin was essentially at the center of an artistic revival like Paris, like New York, like Chicago. Music, theater, film

was at the core of the arts that were being produced. If you've ever seen Metropolis, which is one of those early--

everything in film in the '20s was experimental.

This was a new technology. And Metropolis is experimental, because it's also about-- in a sense, it's about the

future. It's a film about the future at a time when people are thinking about the future, a future that includes

technology that is very, very new.

That film was made in Berlin. Fritz Lang, who was the director, was from Berlin. And this was, in a way, the world

in which they lived. They threw a lot of parties. [INAUDIBLE] might have been in finance, a banker, but they were

both closely connected to this artistic world.

Thea had a sister, married a very well-known music critic and musicologist. And so the wedding of Thea and Hans

Heinz Stuckenschmidt-- I'm not going to ask you to repeat that name-- but was just a very bohemian affair with

names that you might have heard of-- Kurt Weill was at the wedding. Lotte Lenya. So if you can't imagine Cabaret

without Lotte Lenya, essentially.

And so they threw tons of parties. My great-grandmother always had-- she had no patience for people who came

up with excuses as to why they might not be able to come or would let her know later whether they could come to

a party or not. She invited way too many people anyway.

And so her saying was then and continued to be pretty much until I knew her, and she passed away, was whether

you show up or not, we're going to have a great time. You can imagine that any party she threw was just one

party on the way to the next party.Anyway, something I want to mention about this time period is that as we talk, or as I'll talk about Hedda and her

family, which is essentially my family, in the 20th century, we're not going to be able to get away from the fact that

they were Jews in Germany, because so much of what's going to happen in the '30s and the '40s to them is

because they were Jews in Germany.

But in 1920, they were just Germans. They happened to be Jewish, but that was not a huge part of their identity. It

was not a huge part of their everyday life. And it certainly wasn't something that they thought about. [INAUDIBLE]

had fought-- [INAUDIBLE] Hedda's husband, my great-grandfather, had fought in the German Army, because he

was German. He was defending his country. He was responding to orders from generals of Germany, because he

was German. And so as Germans, they were celebrating the end of conflict.

Historians have analyzed the peace treaties as being just too punishing and essentially laying the path to the next

war. But for civilians and civilians in cities like Berlin, and the 1920s were not a decade during which they were

wondering how they were going to start the next war and take vengeance on the world for the outcome of World

War I.

No. No, the 1920s were a time for celebration, because they were not at war. And much of what Hedda

experienced in Berlin, people were experiencing in many other parts of the world, in many other parts of Germany

or in France. Perhaps not all of France was awash in art and music as Paris was, but France in the 1920s was

also a country that was celebrating the end of conflict and that in which civilians, in which people who were not

involved in them, and even people who were involved in politics in the army could focus on other things-- science,

innovation, creativity.

All that has a really hard time during times of war, largely because during times of war, resources are directed to

the war machine. And during times of war, governments have much more power and have the power to divert

resources away from what they consider to be superficial, unnecessary, towards what they think are critical to the

survival of sort of the war effort. And so essentially, while wars also allow women to have greater role in society,

because most men are away at war, wars also restrict the scope of society. Innovation, creativity is all going to be

focused on whatever it is the war machine needs.

And when wars are over, then all that creativity, all those resources can find outlets, outlets that are just as

important as-- I would say more important, where I think the most important action the government can do is avoid

war. But be that as it may, the 1920s that Hedda lived in were heady. Hedda was heady. Forgive the pun.

Now, not everybody liked what was going on there. You and I might really appreciate jazz, but to certain people it

seemed like it was just a foreign-sounding music, that this did not really have anything to do with real Germanvalues or real French values or whatever it is that Belgian values could have been defined as.

So while we've got cultural innovation, there were people on the right, and by right I mean what would eventually

become a fascist movement in Europe, who perhaps were less enamored of this grand, innovative, creative effort

or freedom that people were experimenting with.

And a large part of what you'll see in the 1930s is a crackdown on that, a crackdown on this innovation and on this

liberation of creativity and a definition of what German values are and what values and social values essentially

mean. There are no absolutes in art and creation. There are no absolutes and values. And what we'll see in the

next decade is, a large part, a reaction against this freedom that Hedda was experiencing in the 1920s.

If any of you have seen the film Cabaret with Liza Minnelli, the film takes place in the early 1930s, but essentially it

is reflecting-- it is showing you life in the roaring '20s in Berlin. At this time, it's a great illustration of that musical

and creative and artistic creativity.

And the film essentially places that time right around the moment the Nazis take power, right at the moment when

the definition of what German values are is going to be changed from above to essentially question what German

means, who gets to be German and what German art is. And we'll talk about that next time.

But for now, I just want you to hold on to the image of Hedda and her three young children and her young

husband and the many parties they all went to. Oh, and one more thing-- remember in the previous podcast, I

mentioned that the first mention of the word robot was in the 1920s-- in 1921-- in that play Rossum's Universal

Robots.

That play was staged in Berlin in 1923. And I'm willing to bet that Hedda [INAUDIBLE] Siegel-- or at that moment,

now she's called Hedda Siegel-- went to see it with her husband. And I like the thought of that. I like to think of

Hedda watching that. And I like to think of Hedda going to see Metropolis, which by the way, you should take a

look at the posters for Metropolis. The posters have the image of a robot on it. In this case, it's a female robot.

Female robots are rather rare, actually.

But Hedda's 1920s were both kind of artistically exciting but also tied to the technological innovations and these

discussions about what that means for humanity. And I really wish I could have had a conversation with her and

asked her what she thought of it. Well, I'll just have to dream of that conversation.