First Thoughts:

• Peace & Order vs. Freedom and Exhileration
• Liberty, Liberation and License / Neue Sachlichkeit = New Realism
• Function of Catharsis
• ==>> cultural "golden age" ? Can this be true? Order restored: one vision; and another vision.

Review:

• The Deal ...would the military continue to support the govt that had signed the Versailles treaty? and at what price? Thousands killed in the streets.
  • What was feared more 'revolution' from the left? or counter revolution from the right?
  • role of the warrior bands: Freikorps and Party Gangs.
• Hatred: of Versailles, the Entente Powers, but also of those who betrayed the army, betrayed the nation
• Prominent Jews: Wertheim3; Wertheim interior. AEG factory .
• A commissioned portrait: A Berlin psychiatrist --Dix

Rathenau, his assassination and the selective enforcement of the law. [Ch 6]

Inflation and Cultural Disintegration [Ch 7]

On Inflation and its effect on public and private morality in Berlin in the early 1920s. As one economist noted: "Originally, in 1922, the German Central Bank and the German Treasury took an inevitable step in a process which had begun with their previous effort to 'jump start' a stagnant economy. Many months earlier they had decided that what was needed was easier money. Their initial efforts brought little response. So, using the governmental "more is better" theory they simply created more and more money. But economic stagnation continued and so did the money growth. They kept making money more available. No reaction. Then, suddenly prices began to explode unbelievably but, perversely, not business activity."

• A table of inflation; inflation; cartoon. another.
• the cost of bread ; building a new economy, and composite.
• related costs.

Social criticism in the arts:

• a perspective from Grosz of Liebknechts Berlin;
• on the trade; on Gross:
• Grauer Tag: social criticism Note the wall that divides the German bureaucrat for assisting vets, and the vets themselves; and the black-marketer in the background.
• the year 1923: Dix. the nazis considered this painting to be an 'insult to German womanhood!"
• More on vets; and another.

The myth of degeneracy;

• In the public culture of the period: cabaret; a variant (see the movie); nacht-lokal and party.The waltz . An amusing Soiree with your friends.
• From ''Glitter and Doom" Portraits of Weimar Germany. "But the Weimar years also brought unprecedented social and artistic freedom, making Berlin the most culturally advanced, exciting city in Europe. Film, theater, literature, design and the visual arts thrived, merging with and stimulated by the circuit of cabarets, salons and nightclubs. Homosexuals were unafraid, as suggested by Dix’s portrait of the jeweler Karl Krall, wearing a tight corset beneath his suit, or Schad’s famous depiction of Count St. Genois d’Anneaucourt " Among the upper stratum . Dix and friend
• Liberation but degeneracy?? Pp126-7.
  • On women and their issues: Abtreibung...vordemTor
  • How much freedom will a society tolerate? closer to reality: working girls; at its worst [''only for foreign currency']. A fine family (and a comparison). in a working girls salon. Three friends of Dix. Car girls. Nichts neues.
  • Nonetheless, gender roles are changing; a dearth of men between 20 and 35 meant that many would not marry. Moreover, many women had to work to survive. As we will see clothes change to reflect this new reality.

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Discussion: Consider:

• What is the difference between liberty and license?
  • Liberty and license are the same thing.
  • Liberty recognizes consequences of actions; license does not.
  • Liberty has restrictions; license does not.
• Good judgment results from... .
  • acting according to a moral code
  • good enforcement of the rules
  • making moral decisions according to one's convenience
• How does rationalizing differ from reasoning? Do politicians reason or rationalize?
  • Reasoning is a way of reaching a decision; rationalizing is the way of explaining the decision.
  • Reasoning and rationalizing are the same thing.
  • Rationalizing is a formal presentation of reasoning.

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If we have time: Classroom Discussion: Hmm...this is not an easy one. Civil war / disorder in the streets, fiscal chaos, secret deals being made between army and Russian soviets and concurrently executing domestic soviets, political assassinations, degeneracy, and the destruction of middle class and its wealth. And yet many found Berlin to be liberating (ok, so far they have been psychiatrists, Russian emigrés and women, not exactly the most stable group, nevertheless...).

Given what you wrote in your classroom report on Florence, do we have the conditions for a Golden Age of Cultural Achievement? How do you think Brucker and Thornton would interpret these characteristic features of Berlin life in the very early 1920s?

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Four Great Economists who lived through the crises and changed the discipline:

• Gottfried Habeler: international trade, "comparative advantage", "opportunity cost"
• Friedrich Hayek:"how pricing communicates information"; theory of money, "road to serfdom".
• John Maynard Keyes: General Theory, Economic Consequenes, father of Quantitative Easing / leverage in deficit spending.
• Joseph Schumpeter: His concept of Creative Destruction: that process by which progress [living standards, science, etc.] depends on the destruction of the old order. Because the old order will oppose and obstruct, it must be removed preferrably by peaceful means, and, once it is removed, human innovation and energy are liberated:
  • ..the same process of industrial mutation [...] that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism. It is what capitalism consists in and what every capitalist concern has got to live in.
  • "In breaking down the framework of society, capitalism thus broke not only barriers that impeded its progress but also flying buttresses that prevented its collapse. That process, impressive in its relentless necessity, was not merely a matter of removing institutional deadwood, but of removing partners of the capitalist stratum, symbiosis with whom was an essential element of the capitalist schema. [... T]he capitalist process in much the same way in which it destroyed the institutional framework of earlier society also undermines its own. Classic case: LP to Tape to Cassette to CD to digital music. Innovation destroys 'some' capital, but creates 'other' capital...it is morally neutral??