Since the beginning of the republic, antisemites perceived a decadent modern cul- ture as a product of the destructive revolutionary movement and part and parcel of the ‘stab-in-the-back’ myth. Much that was culturally innovative or controversial was deemed a Jewish invention that, like defeat in the First World War and the republic, was poisoning German culture and the national soul. Within antisemitic discourse, Jews’ prominence in German culture in a democracy fully committed to their equality was one of many signs that the Weimar Republic was a ‘Jewish republic. Yet this view of Jewish predominance in culture was not limited to antisemites. After 1933, some Jews looked back upon the thriving culture of Weimar and pointed proudly to Jewish members of the avant-garde as symbols of German-Jewish success. In 1937, the writer Arnold Zweig asserted that the accomplishments of Weimar culture were inseparable from Jewish achievements, arguing that ‘German Jews … are the advanced guard and the representatives of Western Europe in the German mental composition.” Long after the war, historian Walter Laqueur argued that without the Jews there would have been no ‘Weimar culture, and historian George Mosse noted that Weimar’s modernist culture had been sometimes called an ‘internal Jewish dialogue.®

There has long been an emphasis on Jews’ conspicuous presence in German culture during the republic and it is certainly true that many Jews were crucial shapers of Weimar culture. Jews were highly overrepresented in modernist movements, perhaps more vis- ibly and actively than in any other realm including politics, the press, and the economy.

The Oxford Handbook of the Weimar Republic, 2022