A Damn Fine Cup of Culture

Is there any other period in German history that feels as unsettlingly familiar in 2026 as the Weimar Republic? It’s become something of a cliché, but it’s frighteningly easy to tell a story about Germany after the First World War and before Hitler seized control of the country that also speaks to the present day: you don’t have to squint hard to see the Weimar Republic as a time akin to ours in many ways. In the years culminating in the Great Depression, authoritarianism and totalitarianism seem more and more attractive to all too many, while others put their heads in the sand and ignore the warning signs. (Stop me if this sounds familiar.) And the time lends itself to telling stories that appeal to audiences: the big-budget neo-noir series Babylon Berlin tells exactly that story, even if it may be too enamoured with its own aesthetic, making something of a fetish out of the period, and there’s Cabaret, the musical (and later film adaptation), based on Christopher Isherwood’s semi-autobiographical novel Goodbye to Berlin, which has been revived recently on the stage, attracting big stars.

During the era itself, too, you’ll find iconic films that are suffused with the anxieties of the day, such as Metropolis (1927) and M (1931), which film geeks will certainly be familiar with. Maybe less familiar, at least to those who didn’t go to school in a German-speaking country, is the 1929 novel Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin, one of the classics of modernist German literature – which Rainer Werner Fassbinder, enfant terrible of New German Cinema, adapted for television in 1980.