Berlin after the Kaiser is a laboratory with the lights on: cabaret, the Bauhaus, a constitution written in a theatre in Weimar, and in 1923 an inflation that makes a wheelbarrow of banknotes worth less than a loaf. The city tries on modernity while the street rehearses the next uniform.
The pressure
Defeat, the blockade and a republic born in surrender make every certainty negotiable. In 1923 France and Belgium occupy the Ruhr over unpaid reparations, the mark collapses and middle-class savings are wiped out. In Munich, Hitler tries a coup from a beer hall.
Which future
Social Democrats want the republic to mean something. Nationalists dream of 1914. Communists look to Moscow's revolution. Artists build the new world in steel, glass and song. Nobody in 1923 is voting for 1933; they are voting against the last humiliation.
What survived
The middle years, 1924 to 1929, are calm and borrowed on American money. The Depression ends that. 1933 grows out of this city's arguments, its unemployed and its newspapers. The work that got out with the exiles lasted, and so did the lesson that a brilliant culture is not armour.
Whose story
Peter Gay saw outsiders becoming insiders for a few years; others stress how few Germans ever lived in that Berlin, and how the right turned it into a word for decadence.