(PDF) (DOC) (JPG)February 21, 2008

(Mahwah) – Eric D. Weitz, author of Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy (Princeton, 2007), spoke at Ramapo College of New Jersey on Thursday, February 21, 2008 at Ramapo College under the auspices of the Gross Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies and the History Club.

In his talk, “Jews, Culture and Mass Society in Weimar Germany,” Weitz explored the period’s revolutionary cultural creativity in relation to the emergence of Jews as proponents and practitioners of modernity. In the view of Dr. Weitz, this dynamic took place in an environment that saw manifold economic and political challenges as well as the emergence of Berlin, the German capital, as a center of avant-garde art, sexual emancipation, mass culture and modernist architecture. He also probed how anti-Semitism figured prominently in uniting members of the traditional elites with the Nazi-led radical Right to bring down the Weimar Republic. Ultimately, however, Weitz contended that the demise of the fragile republic and its Jewish population was not a foregone conclusion.

Eric D. Weitz is Distinguished McKnight University Professor of History at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of A Century of Genocide and Creating German Communism, 1890-1990, both published by Princeton University Press.

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