Destruction and creation. Chaos and rationalism. Instability and progress. These seemingly antagonistic concepts occurred simultaneously in interwar Germany. In a moment of destruction and uncertainty, after the severe economic and psychological consequences of the First World War, Germany experienced a period of cultural and intellectual flourishing comparable to that which occurred in Pericles' Athens or Renaissance Florence. The Weimar Republic lasted barely fourteen years (between 1918 and 1933), but what happened then marked the future of Europe and even the world, as the period ends with the rise of Nazism to power. A crucial stage for history, which also hides dangerous parallels with the present, and which CaixaForum now revisits in its new exhibition.
CaixaForum once again bets in this exhibition, titled Uncertain Times. Germany between wars and which can be visited until next July 20, on creating an immersive exhibition, as it already did in its previous exhibition of Alice in Wonderland. On this occasion, however, the visitor does not embark on a journey through the dream world and fantasies of little Alice, but on a dark historical journey that begins after the First World War and extends to the most immediate present. Through dark rooms, where the only things that shine are paintings, music, and films, just as art flourished at that time as a response to uncertainty and darkness.
The journey begins with the recreation of a 20th-century bourgeois salon, inspired by Thomas Mann's novel The Buddenbrooks. In it, its inhabitants happily dance The Blue Danube by Johan Strauss, while enjoying great luxuries, abstracted from reality and the poverty of their contemporaries. However, this false joy soon fractures with the outbreak of the First World War. The visitor goes from a bright and luminous salon to a gloomy corridor that simulates one of the many trenches of the war and recalls some of the figures left by the conflict, such as the millions of soldiers mobilized and dead. Upon crossing this door, the "world of yesterday" is left behind, as described by the writer Stefan Zweig, characterized by security and stability, to enter the darkness and instability of the conflict.
However, after the psychological and social trauma of the war, the Germans seek to recover from the defeat and humiliation experienced by the German Empire after the conflict. The Kaiser abdicates in November 1918 and the Weimar Republic is born as a parliamentary democracy, and it does so in a crucial city for Germanic values, as the city of Weimar is the birthplace of the poets Goethe and Schiller. This city will also be the birthplace of the Weimar Constitution, which reflects the principles of the new system and introduces groundbreaking changes such as universal suffrage, allowing women to vote for the first time. At this time, all arts flourish, from plastic avant-gardes to cinema and photography as political weapons, passing through the importance of the new Bauhaus design school.
A period of great cultural production that the exhibition revisits through the different themes and concerns that emerged at that time. Complex issues such as new beauty standards, after the mutilated bodies left by the war, new forms of gender expression, or even the new role of women in society, after the female population had massively entered the labor market while men fought in the trenches. All this, without forgetting to explore the new artistic trends that emerge in this era, as all existing disciplines are rethought, and new movements appear such as Dadaism or abstract expressionism, and even new scientific currents such as quantum physics or Heidegger's existentialist philosophy.
These new ways of thinking occur in a complex society, marked by uncertainty and the crisis of rationalism, and by great social differences. In a few years, there was scarcity and hyperinflation in the post-war period, which led to social conflicts and looting, followed by the freedom and creativity of the Roaring Twenties, before the Crash of 1929 and the subsequent great economic crisis. A period in which social differences became more evident than ever, as shown by Georg Grosz's series of lithographs, which emphasizes how wealth and poverty coexisted in the same streets.
The objective of the exhibition, which is self-produced by CaixaForum and was already on display at its Madrid headquarters at the end of last year, is, as described by the director of CaixaForum Barcelona, Mireia Domingo, "to offer a transversal vision, from all areas, of one of the most complex periods in history, a short but crucial stage for history", and to explain this stage in a simple and didactic way.
With this pedagogical purpose, in addition to immersive experiences and music from the era such as Wagner or Schoenberg, the exhibition also features ninety original works, loaned by German museums such as the Stadtmuseum Berlin or the Käthe-Kollwitz Museum in Cologne, as well as the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, the Museo Nacional de Artes Decorativas and the Institut Valencià d'Art Modern. Photographs, engravings and films are the protagonists of this exhibition, always accompanied by their historical contextualization, created by artists such as Kandinsky or Münter, but also by designers from the Bauhaus school such as Mies van der Rohe or Erich Dieckmann.
The awakening of monsters
A historical review that, however, has much that is contemporary. As warned by the philosopher and architect Pau Pedrosa, one of the curators of the exhibition, "the monsters that awoke after this period of creativity could rise again." And it is that, this period of creative and intellectual effervescence ended abruptly with Hitler's rise to power. With this political change, creation gives way to destruction, with episodes such as the burning of books that were considered anti-German. In the same way, the parliamentary democracy of the Weimar Republic gives way to the totalitarianism established by Nazism.
A radical change, which dangerously, could be repeated today since, as the exhibition curator has warned, many of the parallels and ideas that emerged in this period of Germany still resonate today. "Every day that passes the exhibition is even more contemporary," Pedrosa warned, and it is that the instability that characterized the Weimar Republic seems to be a constant also today. For this reason, CaixaForum wanted to exhibit this historical period, not only for its complexity and creativity, but also for its resonances with the contemporary world because, as the popular aphorism goes, the people who do not know history are condemned to repeat it.
The exhibition, therefore, after traversing another gloomy corridor, which seeks to represent a World War II trench, ends precisely in the present and with the visitor having to choose between two different paths to leave the room: the world of certainties, or uncertainty. Two paths that, however, converge in the same room, because precisely uncertainty and certainties mix in our present. A present where technology and science are more advanced than ever, offering more and more certainties and advances, but where uncertainty also reigns in social and economic matters. In this last room, furthermore, an interactive game is proposed to learn about visitors' opinions on different disciplines with statements such as "democracy is a farce" or "employment and housing are more unstable than ever."