Vertigo - The Rise and Fall of Weimar Germany. Preface: The New Life

Preface. The New Life. History is sometimes made with a camera. In 1925, in her studio on Corfus and Dambélin, the photographer Frida Ries posed the young boxer Erech Brandl naked in front of her lens. His trained body was lit with a sophistication usually reserved for female nudes. When the art dealer Alfred Flechtime published the full-page pictures from the shoot, showing the boxer nude from the front and from behind in his trendsetting magazine Kvershnet cross section, both photographer and editor had a sense of being ahead of their time. Boxing had exploded in popularity in America and was now causing a stir on the German cultural scene. There was much to be learned from boxing matches. The prominent left-wing poet and playwright Bertrand Brecht thought an evening in the theatre ought to be like a boxing match. He installed a punching ball in his study, and the author of Vicky Balm trained regularly in a boxing club.

前言：新生活 历史有时是用相机记录的。1925年，在她位于科孚斯和丹贝林的工作室里，摄影师弗里达·里斯让年轻的拳击手埃雷希·布兰德裸露地站在镜头前。他那训练有素的身体被照亮，达到了一种通常只为女性裸体保留的精致效果。当艺术品经销商阿尔弗雷德·弗莱克斯泰姆在他那本引领潮流的杂志《Kvershnet横截面》上发表整版的照片时，展示了这位拳击手从正面和背面裸体的照片，摄影师和编辑都觉得自己走在时代的前沿。拳击在美国掀起了热潮，现在也在德国文化界引起了轰动。从拳击比赛中有很多可以学习的东西。著名的左翼诗人和剧作家贝特兰德·布莱希特认为，剧院的一个晚上应该像一场拳击比赛。他在自己的书房里装了一个沙袋，《维姬·鲍姆》的作者也经常在一个拳击俱乐部进行训练。

The word kerpakultur, body culture, did the rounds. The immaculate, fully trained body became an obsession of the age. The picture-hungry Weimar Republic had a particular weakness for women photographers and the female gaze. The most interesting, innovative creators in this new craft were women. Frida Ries had directed Erech Brandl to look at the floor. That way, he appeared more like an object than if he had shown his face and looked at the viewer. Ries also forbade him to pose in the usual challenging boxing stance. Rather than covering himself with raised fists, Frida Ries asked him to raise his right arm a little to make his body appear less shielded. This added vulnerability emphasized the radical and challenging way in which the usual roles of men and women had been swapped. Even in the provocative 1920s, a woman reducing a male body to the status of object as lovingly as Ries did in this picture wasn't something that happened often. It would have consequences. That was certain.

这个词汇"身体文化"（kerpakultur）开始流行起来，对完美无瑕、训练有素的身体的追求成为那个时代的痴迷。渴望图像的魏玛共和国对女性摄影师和女性视角有特别的偏爱。在这项新兴的技艺中，最有趣和富有创新的是女性创作者。弗里达·里斯让埃雷克·布兰德尔低头看向地面，这样他看起来更像一个物体，而不是一个直视观众的面孔。里斯还禁止他摆出通常具有挑战性的拳击姿势。相较于用握拳遮挡身体，弗里达·里斯要求他稍微抬起右臂，使他的身体看起来不那么受遮挡。这种添加多了一丝脆弱，强调了颠覆传统男女角色的激进和挑战性方式。即便在充满挑衅的1920年代，这种一个女性将男性身体降格为物体的作品，像里斯在这张照片中那样充满爱意，都是十分罕见的。这必然会产生影响，这是毋庸置疑的。

Using scenes like that photo shoot in Frida Ries' celebrity studio, this book tells the story of a time that in many respects looks like a blueprint for our own. Viewed from the perspective of the present day, the Weimar Republic appears like a lenticular image, a picture printed to look different at different angles, surprisingly contemporary at one moment, weirdly alien the next. At times, it seems almost more modern than we are, as if we're looking back at something that is still in front of us. And then again, it looks as far removed from us as the black-clad rigid figures in the family portraits of our great-grandparents. How euphorically it had begun in 1918 with the fall of the Kaiser and the proclamation of the first Democratic Republic on German soil.

利用弗里达·瑞斯名人工作室中的摄影场景，这本书讲述了一个时代的故事，这个时代在很多方面都像是我们当下的蓝图。从今天的视角来看，魏玛共和国就像一幅光栅图像，不同角度看会有不同的印象：有时显得非常现代，而有时又显得十分陌生。有时，它似乎比我们现在还要现代，仿佛我们是在回望一个仍在前方的事物。而有时，它又看起来离我们很遥远，就像我们曾祖父母家族肖像中那身穿黑衣的僵硬人物一样。1918年，随着德皇的下台和德国土地上第一个民主共和国的宣告，它以令人振奋的方式开始。

The old world is rotten. All its joints are creaking. I want to help to demolish it, the young expressive dancer and pioneering performance artist, Valesca Gerte, proclaimed, I believe in the new life. I want to help to build it. In every area of life, a new age seemed to be dawning. There were expectations of the new man, the new woman, the new building, even a new art movement, Neuys-Achlicchite, new objectivity. The architect, Bruno Taut, soon to be famous for the restrained functionality of his large housing estates, was not a man given to overreaction, yet he celebrated an almost religious ecstasy in 1920, saying, our tomorrow gleams in the distance, up with transparency, clarity, up with purity, up with crystal, and up and higher up with the fluid, the graceful, angular, sparkling, flashing light, up with the eternal building.

旧世界已经腐朽，所有的连接处都在嘎吱作响。年轻有表现力的舞者和先锋表演艺术家瓦莱斯卡·格尔特宣称：我想帮助拆除它。我相信新的生活，并愿意参与建设。生活的各个领域似乎都在迎接一个新时代的到来。人们期待着新的人、新的女性、新的建筑，甚至新的艺术运动，如“新客观主义”。建筑师布鲁诺·陶特以其住宅区的简约功能性而闻名，即便他不是个轻易激动的人，但他在1920年表达了一种近乎宗教的狂喜：我们的明天在远方闪耀，提高透明度、清晰度、提升纯净、提升晶莹，以及不断提升流动性、优美、棱角感、闪光和闪烁的光芒，提升永恒的建筑。

As cool as our responses today might be to the cubic buildings and the plain furniture of the new building, we can barely imagine the dizzying, vertiginous excitement with which they were designed at the time. And the aggression, Taut the architect, raged against stuccoed 19th-century buildings with a violence that called for dynamite and wrecking balls. Away with the gravestone and cemetery facades outside four-story junk stores and bric-a-brac markets, smash the shell limestone, Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian columns, smash all the ludicrous fakery. Oh, our concepts, space, homeland, style, God alive, those concepts stink to heaven, tear them to bits, dissolve them, let nothing remain, death to all that's musty.

尽管我们今天对这些立方体建筑和新楼里的简约家具的反应可能显得冷淡，但我们几乎无法想象当初设计这些建筑时带来的那种令人眩晕的激动。当时，建筑师陶特以极大的愤怒抨击那些19世纪带有灰泥装饰的建筑，他的激烈情绪就像是在呼唤炸药和推土机。他希望彻底摧毁杂货店和古董市场外那些像墓碑和墓地一样的建筑立面，粉碎壳石、陶立克柱、爱奥尼柱和科林斯柱，打破所有荒谬的伪装。噢，我们的概念、空间、家园、风格，天啊，这些概念都已经腐臭不堪，撕碎它们，解构它们，什么都不留，愿一切陈腐的东西消亡。

How does it fit together? How did this stirring proclamation result in the unadorned modern architecture that seems so sober and cool to us today, almost well-behaved in its balanced elegance? The deliberately dramatic radicalism, typical of these years in many fields, led me to inquire into the emotional state of the Weimar Republic. Very few moments in German history have prompted such intense emotions as these. Born out of the torment of war, the enthusiasm of revolution was overshadowed by the humiliations of defeat and a sense of intellectual homelessness, along with the risks of unfamiliar freedom.

这段文字表达的内容是：这两者是如何相互联系的呢？这个激动人心的宣言是如何与现在我们看来如此严谨、优雅平衡、甚至显得中规中矩的现代建筑风格联系在一起的呢？那种有意为之的激进戏剧性，是当年许多领域的典型特征，这引发了我对魏玛共和国时期情感状态的探究。在德国历史上，能引发如此强烈情感的时刻并不多见。这个时期诞生于战争的痛苦中，虽然有革命带来的热情，但也被战败的屈辱、知识上的无所适从以及不熟悉的自由带来的风险所笼罩。

It was a time of extreme fluctuation. 1923 saw the madness of hyperinflation with its billion-mark notes that even a street beggar would have refused. Inflation called into question centuries old notions of value obliterated traditions and prepared people for a turbulent decade that in the words of the historian, Detlef Poikert played breathlessly and extravagantly through all the positions and possibilities of the modern age, explored them all and rejected them at almost the same time. This book deals in the feelings, moods and sensations produced by the political attitudes and conflicts of the age, emotional manifestations such as unease, confidence, anxiety, unwie, self-reliance, a desire to consume, a desire to dance, a hunger for experience, pride and hatred.

那是一个极度波动的时期。1923年经历了疯狂的恶性通货膨胀，钞票上的面值达到了十亿马克，甚至连街头乞丐都不愿接受。通货膨胀动摇了几百年来对价值的传统观念，摧毁了传统，预示着一个动荡不安的十年。正如历史学家德特勒夫·波伊科特所描述的，这一时期充满活力又铺张浪费，探索了现代社会所有的可能性和立场，并几乎在同一时间拒绝了它们。这本书探讨了由当时政治态度和冲突产生的感受、情绪和感觉，包括不安、自信、焦虑、不安， 自力更生、消费欲望、舞蹈欲望、体验饥渴、骄傲和仇恨等各种情感表现。

How did people feel in the Weimar Republic? Impossible to generalize of course, but amidst the different contradictory perspectives, it is a question that needs to be asked. How did it feel to be young, to be a woman, a city-dweller or a farmer? How did the Frichob soldiers feel in 1918 when they couldn't understand why the war was over? What did the revolutionaries feel? When the widespread hatred of soft plush of decoration and ornament? How did young women see their future when inflation reduced their dowries to nothing and instead, in huge numbers, they received something fundamentally new? Secretarial work?

在魏玛共和国时期，人们的感受如何呢？当然无法简单概括，但在各种矛盾的观点中，这个问题亟需探讨。年轻人有什么感受？女性、城市居民或农民又是如何感受的？1918年，当Frichob士兵们无法理解战争为何结束时，他们的心情如何？革命者们的感受又是怎样的？在那种广泛存在的对奢华装饰和装潢的厌恶情绪中，年轻女性是如何看待她们的未来的？当通货膨胀使她们的嫁妆化为乌有时，大批女性投入了一项彻底新鲜的工作，即秘书工作，她们有着怎样的体验？

How did people feel when the cities grew and grew and no one knew, unlike us today, whether they would ever stop? And why was the melancholic Austrian writer and journalist Josef Rort of all people so enthusiastic about city traffic that he cried, I am devoted to the Glaistraic, a railway junction in Berlin. Why did the young author Rort Lancehof-Yock plant a kiss on the radiator of her car when she parked it in the garage at night? And why did she urgently recommend that her readers do the same? The story of the Weimar Republic is best told in the places that shaped its intellectual development.

当城市不断扩张，而没有人像我们今天这样知道它们是否会停止时，人们的感受如何？为什么忧郁的奥地利作家兼记者约瑟夫·罗特如此热衷于城市交通，以至于他高呼自己对柏林的铁路枢纽"Glaistrac"无比热爱？为什么年轻作家兰斯霍夫-约克在晚上将车停入车库时，会亲吻汽车的散热器？她为什么强烈建议读者也这样做？魏玛共和国的故事最好通过那些塑造其智力发展的地方来讲述。

Whether it be the dance hall, the bow house dwelling, the open plan office, heavy traffic, the photographic studio, the sports hall, the beer tent at election time, or the edge of the street when the fighting gangs were marching. We also catch a glimpse of the villages and small towns in which a yearning for the city was growing, supposedly turning people's heads, inspiring young women to run away, leaving many disappointed bachelors behind. In the countryside, everyday struggles contrasted with the promises of the beautiful new modern world of consumerism, whose siren call was heard loud and clear coming from the cities.

无论是舞厅、小屋住宅、开放式办公室、繁忙的交通、摄影工作室、体育馆、选举期间的啤酒帐篷，还是帮派游行时的街边。这些地方都能让我们一瞥那种对城市生活的渴望，尤其是在村庄和小镇里，这种渴望日益增长，似乎让人们心驰神往，激励年轻女性逃离她们的生活，留下许多失望的单身汉。在乡村，日常的辛苦与新兴消费主义的美好承诺形成鲜明对比，城市传来的“海妖之声”响亮而清晰，吸引着乡村的人们。

Is there a danger that we ignore life in the provinces if we focus on the glamorous urban scene of the 1920s, and by doing so are we guilty of repeating an error that Berlin cultural elites were accused of committing at the time? And conversely, what are we to make of the Weimar Republic's nostalgia for the countryside, of the fanatical settler movement which called young people into the fields, a forerunner of today's eco-culture and rural communes?

如果我们过于关注1920年代充满魅力的城市景象，是否有可能忽视了乡村的生活？这样的话，我们是否会重蹈当时被指责的柏林文化精英所犯的错误？另一方面，我们又该如何理解魏玛共和国对乡村的怀旧情感，以及号召年轻人回归田野的狂热定居运动，这些运动可以看作是当今生态文化和农村公社的前身？

The momentum of the cultural upheavals that were taking place would be unthinkable without jazz which inspired an intoxicated people, sending them into raptures. The gramophone record created pop culture which violently cranked up the intensity of life. The fact that one could dance the Charleston alone had consequences for the self-empowerment of the individual. To be able to join in solo on the dance floor was nothing less than revolutionary.

如果没有爵士乐，那时正在发生的文化巨变是不可想象的。爵士乐激发了人们的狂热情绪，使他们沉浸在极度的陶醉中。留声机唱片催生了流行文化，这种文化猛烈地提升了生活的强度。可以一个人跳查尔斯顿舞，这对个人自我赋权产生了影响。能够单独在舞池中起舞无疑是一场革命。

But then we adjust the image slightly and see the elegant people still standing on the sidelines. Those young decommissioned officers who now served in the dance halls of the Republic and were paid for by independent women who had no time to sit around for ages waiting until someone asked them to dance. How did they feel? House Fartaland, Fatherland House, a pleasure palace in Berlin even provided childcare when mothers wanted to dance in the afternoon.

但是，当我们稍微调整一下视角，就会看到那些优雅的人依然站在场边。这些年轻的退役军官如今在共和国的舞厅中工作，由那些独立自主的女性支付报酬，这些女性没有时间一直等着有人来邀请她们跳舞。他们心里怎么想呢？在柏林，祖国之家，一个娱乐宫殿，甚至在母亲们想要在下午跳舞的时候提供儿童看护服务。

This book tells the story of the highly charged politics of the body, exciting new developments in masculinity and femininity, about the need to be both more affectionate and more sexually ambiguous while at the same time toughening up and engaging in self-improvement in every area of life. Crucially, this was true of the armed combat groups formed of disaffected men that marched down the streets in close formation and gave the individual the intoxicating feeling of superior strength. This book will describe the attempts of rapidly changing governments to ride on the tiger of public disorder, but it is that very disorder that deserves the greatest attention, the pre-political states of mind that formed people's values, attitudes and convictions.

这本书讲述了关于身体政治的激烈争论，以及在男性气质和女性气质上的新发展，它探讨了在需要更多感情和性别模糊的同时，在生活的各个方面提升自我和增强韧性的重要性。尤其是，那些由不满的男性组成的武装战斗团体，他们整齐地列队行进在街头，赋予个人一种强烈的优越感。书中还将描述快速变化的政府试图驾驭公众混乱局势的努力，但最值得关注的正是这种混乱，这是一种潜在的心理状态，形成了人们的价值观、态度和信念。

It was no coincidence that journalism enjoyed a stylistic and perceptive heyday. The intellectuals of the Republic, whatever their politics, developed a particular sensitivity to the political content of apparently quite unpolitical everyday phenomena. Wanting to know what it felt like in the Weimar Republic means not always interpreting historical events from their end point. Unlike us, people at the time didn't know how things were going to turn out. In view of the monstrous and horrific development of national socialism, we might be tempted to see the Republic only as the pre-history of its conclusion and constantly search for early clues to its downfall, but even mass unemployment was not a compelling reason to vote for Hitler, and many of the unemployed didn't.

这不是巧合，新闻在某个时期达到了风格和感知的顶峰。共和时期的知识分子，无论其政治立场如何，对看似与政治无关的日常现象具有特别敏锐的政治感知。想要了解魏玛共和国的实际氛围，意味着不能总是从历史事件的最终结果来解读它们。不像我们现在，当时的人们并不知道事情将如何发展。面对国家社会主义的可怕和恐怖发展，我们可能倾向于只将共和国视为其终结的前史，并不断寻找其崩溃的早期线索，但即便是大规模失业也并不能成为支持希特勒的充分理由，很多失业者并没有这样做。

So who did? Why did a woman such as Louisa Zomitz, who was happily married to a Jew, sympathize with the NSDAP? Who did people at the times see when they saw Hitler, the same person whom we see today after two generations of processing? Why could so many Germans no longer hear one another? Why did so many of them see the debates in the Reichstag as so much empty noise and the newspapers that reported on it as propagating nothing but lies? During the global economic crisis of the late 1920s and 1930s, the balance of German emotions alternated between hatred and a longing for unity.

那么是谁呢？为什么像路易莎·佐米茨这样的女人，一个幸福地与犹太人结婚的人，会同情国家社会主义德国工人党（NSDAP）呢？当时的人们在看到希特勒时，看到的是我们经过两代人的认知加工后所看到的同一个人吗？为何这么多德国人无法再互相倾听？为什么那么多人觉得国会里的辩论只是无意义的噪音，而报道这些的报纸只是在传播谎言？在20世纪20年代末和30年代的全球经济危机期间，德国人的情感在仇恨和渴望团结之间摇摆不定。

The exhilarating diversity of the 1920s often came to be seen as a burden and by many as a curse. These people felt that their society was torn, split into irreconcilably opposed worlds that would never be mutually comprehensible. Inevitably, this dissatisfaction invites comparison with the present day. Around 1930, democracy lost one of its most important and most fragile resources, confidence. Much that had, during the boom times, felt like liberation and high-altitude flight now came to be seen as exploitation and betrayal.

1920年代令人兴奋的多样性常常被视为一种负担，许多人甚至认为这是一种诅咒。这些人觉得他们的社会四分五裂，分裂成了无法相互理解的对立世界。这种不满不可避免地让人联想到当今。在大约1930年，民主失去了其最重要和最脆弱的资源之一，即信心。许多在经济繁荣时期被视为解放和高空飞行的事物，现在被看作是剥削和背叛。

From 1930 onwards, the attitudes of many Germans changed in ways that fed deeply into tastes and fashion, the sense of the body, tonal register, and musical preference. The mood plummeted, the desire for salvation rose, new kinds of litiginous intoxication were sought, more thrilling, aggressive, and menacing than ever. Any historical narrative implicitly asks questions concerning individual responsibility. The march towards national socialism was not inevitable. Weimar democracy was not so weak that any other outcome was unimaginable. People had a choice, each for themselves, including in the polling booth. At the time, they couldn't see exactly how important that choice was.

从1930年开始，许多德国人的态度发生了变化，这些变化深刻地影响了他们的品味和时尚、身体感知、语言风格以及音乐偏好。情绪急剧下滑，对拯救的渴望提高，人们寻求新的、更加刺激、具有攻击性和威胁性的醉生梦死。任何历史叙事都隐含着对个人责任的提问。走向国家社会主义并非不可避免。魏玛共和国的民主并不是弱到没有其他结果。在当时，人们有选择的空间，包括在投票时。然而，他们当时并不能完全意识到这个选择的重要性。