#weimar germany
[ID: Tweet by Leeee J. Carter @carterforva reading, “The history of Nazis holding rallies in left-wing areas of Weimar Germany, instigating street fights, and then telling the press that only they could save Germany from the “violent communists” seems like an important thing for people to be studying right now.” ]
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During Pride Month, take a closer look at this 1926 painting of a gender-ambiguous couple on view now in Scenes from the Collection.Gert Wollheim, a German-Jewish artist, lived in Berlin at the height of the Weimar Republic. His portrait depicts the pair standing in a café during a period in Germany of economic instability and reckoning with the ghosts of World War I, when social convention and sexual mores were challenged. While fashionable and theatrical, the figures are not obviously women. Newly granted the right to vote, women of the era were called Neue Frau and enjoyed greater earning power and sexual freedom than ever before. Wollheim painted the couple to reflect those newfound liberties, and also used a visual trope to identify them as lesbians.
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Barricade at the “Bloody May Day” demonstration in Berlin, where SPD police killed over 30 communist workers for defying the Weimar government’s ban on protests, 1929.
“A shaft of light had passed over me, illuminating my empty life with possibilities I dared not question. But now, just as mysteriously, it had vanished. Only now did I understand what this meant. For as long as I could remember, I had - perhaps without knowing, or perhaps not daring to breathe the thought - been searching for someone. That was why I had been avoiding all others. If only for a moment, the painting had convinced me that i might find her, and find her soon. It had sparked a hope in me that would never sink into despair. Shunning the society of others, I withdrew into myself. I cursed the world around me, with greater vehemence than ever before.”
Sabahattin Ali, Madonna in a Fur Coat
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