by Carl Halling

Created on: April 08, 2010

Introduction

Many cultures have made monumental contributions to the development of our great Western Judaeo-Christian civilisation, not least that of Germany, one of the most purely artistic, poetic, musical and spiritual nations in modern history. Yet it could be said that the greatest and most blessed nations are those most liable to corruption and decadence, and few societies have been more associated with this latter quality, which seems to seems to suggest both moral decline and a dark, sinister glamour, than that of Germany between the wars, and specifically its then capital city of Berlin. 

The Weimar era, which came into being in 1919 and lasted until Hitler's ascent to the Chancellorship in 1933, has been likened by some cultural critics to the contemporary West, and it could be said that much of what's happened to the West since the end of the second world war was to some degree presaged by the Berlin of the 1920s, familiar to millions through Bob Fosses' superb movie version of the Kander and Ebb musical "Cabaret", actually set in 1931, with Hitler on the very brink of power. While a work of art in its own right written for the screen by Jay Allen, "Cabaret" had been significantly informed by one of British writer Christopher Isherwood's two Berlin stories, "Goodbye to Berlin", penned in 1933, but referring to incidents that took place between six to eight years earlier.

 Needless to say the Weimar era didn't spring out of nowhere, having been shaped by the culture which birthed it, and while Germany had been the birthplace of Luther and the Great Protestant Reformation that exerted such a monumental influence on the evolution of Biblical Christianity, it had also long been associated with myriad revolutionary and esoteric ideas by the dawn of the Weimar Republic in 1919. For example, more than any other nation in the late 18th and early 19th Century, Germany had played host to Higher Criticism, a school of Biblical criticism which flagrantly attacked the authenticity of the Scriptures. Moreover, late 19th century Europe had witnessed a significant occult revival and of all its great nations, it was arguably Germany that had been most affected by this, even more so perhaps than France and Britain, and to the obvious detriment of Biblical Christianity, even while modernity thrived.

 Thence, the legendary hedonism of the so-called Golden Twenties could be said to have arisen as much - if not more - from her spiritual legacy as the more

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