UC Irvine

The Weimar Republic was a unique period of German history because of the situation in which competing notions of the basis of political order were in play at the same time, leading both to extreme instability but also to a situation in which issues of aesthetic representation had crucial consequences for political developments. This merging of aesthetic and political questions resulted in the development of competing forms of political representation on both the left and the right. Both Johannes Reichl and Helmuth Kiesel have shown that this competition led to similarities between the Lehrstuck and the Thingspiel as theatrical forms developed by communists and Nazis (Reichl 110-20, Kiesel 87-90). But while Kiesel argues that the correspondences stem from their common participation in totalitarian political forms, it may be that these movements were not so much examples of a totalitarian aesthetic as products of a crisis situation in which foundations of authority were in conflict with each other. The only effective way to resolve this conflict was through different representational attempts to establish the parameters of political identity.