Berlin in the 20s and early 30s was a city of cultural and artistic ferment.

The arts went avant-garde and the culture went libertine.

It was as if, having shaken off the repressive autocratic traditionalism of Kaiser Wilhelm,

Berliners were in a hurry to make up for lost time.

Welcome to the history of the 20th century.

Music Episode 241, I am a camera.

Today I want to focus on the social and cultural change, Germany experienced in the aftermath of the war.

The Great War brought about great social and cultural change across the entire world,

and the decade of the 1920s is remembered most places for drastic, even shocking innovations.

We can think of Germany as representative of the period,

and what was happening in Germany was also going on to some degree or another everywhere in the world.

But there's something special and especially dramatic about the change you see in Germany

between, say, 1909 and 1929, and that's what I want to focus on today.

The period is remembered as the golden 20s in Germany,

and the cultural novelties of the time

are often collectively referred to as Weimar culture.

These innovations were not all unique to Germany.

We'll see them elsewhere in the world,

but they stand out in particular in Germany

because of the sharp contrast they

make with the stuffy pre-war imperial era that came before and with the, well, you already know what

came after. During the war, millions of young and healthy German men were drafted, meaning they were removed from their families and cut off from their communities and relationships with their wives and girlfriends, from their parents, elders, clergy, and other authority figures, and placed in stressful and demanding circumstances in and behind

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