Читать онлайн «The Rest Is Noise Series: City of Nets: Berlin in the Twenties»
Автор Алекс Росс
This is a chapter from Alex Ross's groundbreaking history of 20th century classical music,
It is released as a special stand-alone ebook to celebrate a year-long festival at the Southbank Centre, inspired by the book. The festival consists of a series of themed concerts. Read this chapter if you're attending concerts in the episode Pre-war Berlin: cabaret, satire and the rise of fascism.
Alex Ross, music critic for the
CITY OF NETS
Berlin in the Twenties
From The Rest Is Noise by Alex Ross
Contents
About the Publisher
Berlin in the Twenties
One day in 1932, during the last months of Germany’s first attempt at democracy, Klaus Mann, Thomas Mann’s son, walked into a room and saw the corpse of the young actor Ricki Hallgarten, his friend and sometime lover. Hallgarten had shot himself through the heart, splattering blood on the wall. Klaus wrote, “The blood stains looked like the scattered fragments of a mysterious pattern—a last message, a warning, the writing on the wall.
” That phrase, from the book of Daniel, became the leitmotif of Klaus Mann’s recollections of Germany in the 1920s, and, lest anyone miss the allusion, he went on to quote the biblical text itself: “MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN … God hath numbered thy kingdom … Thou art weighed in the balance, and art found wanting … Thy kingdom is divided. ”The Weimar Republic, as embodied in the culture of Berlin, invites melodrama. Every violent act or image seems to foreshadow the catastrophe to come. But it is too easy to write the story of German culture from 1918 to 1933 as the prelude to the next chapter. Berlin was a city of possibilities, of myriad outcomes, glowing with promise as well as threat. It played host to Communists, Nazis, Social Democrats, nationalists, New Objectivists, Expressionists, Dadaists, and straggling Romantics. Its spirit spoke in the meeting of opposites. In the wake of the humiliation of defeat, Berlin shook off its imperial past and reinvented itself as the prototype of media-saturated urban cultures to come—the first all-night city, the city without shame.
