“New Objectivity”: Ambivalent Accommodations with Modernity

Abstract

These lines from the beginning of a piece of autobiographically based fiction about life in Berlin at the end of Germany’s Weimar Republic were written by an Englishman. Although Christopher Isherwood’s observations were of course those of a foreigner who stood apart from what was going on, the lines above capture some significant aspects not only of Weimar culture but also of one of the predominant attitudes with regard to that culture among German intellectuals of the time.

What would, a surgeon be worth if his hand, trembled out of sympathy? An emotional doctor is a bad doctor. Thank God that for the most part you are only so nauseously sentimental while drinking beer, Breslauer. Just like your colleague, this surgeon—what is his name? “... A competent man. Cold and sober as a modern refrigerator.”

—Irmgard Keun, Nach Mittemacht (83,1937)

The whole district is like this: street leading into street of houses like shabby monumental safes crammed with the tarnished valuables and second-hand furniture of a bankrupt middle class. I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.

—Isherwood, Goodbye to Berlin, 1