I was assigned "The Weimar Republic" by Detlev Peukert for a college survey class and my recollection of it fits your requirements.
Eric
---------
Thanks. That might be what I am looking for. I'll get it and see. As I was ordering it, I see its subtitled The Crisis of Classical Modernity. That is certainly the point I am looking for along with the facts. As I said, I really need a textbook like history with plenty of facts.
I am about sixty pages into Weitz, in the Walking the City chapter which opens the book. It's great, lively, and I found out some things I didn't know, like where the Jewish Studies Institute was that Cohen founded and was later directed by Julius Guttmann---in the old Jewish quarter or ghetto and near a newly constructed synagogue.
In other walks, you get to hear about pickled pigs feet, beer, rye bread, sauerkraut, smells of steamed coffee and chocolate.
Well, and correction on a former post. The title of Mann's short story which Joanna's daughter may like is called A Man and his Dog. Also Mann lived in the outskirts of Munich, not Frankfurt.
One detail I would very much like to know more about is the Warburg Library and what was in it when Cassirer used it to write his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms.
The reason for this is that when it was moved to London just before the war and later Gombrich became its director, I have to wonder why he never mentioned Cassirer.
You know, I don't why I can't get enough of this period. I suppose I'll OD on it eventually. Most of my thoughts around it are not really about Strauss anymore, but Cassirer and his extraordinary richness of thought. Also his baring on the looming intellectual crisis of the enlightenment and rationalism, and the ratio-mechanization of society.
It's this latter aspect which can obviously be seen in the Bauhaus architecture for public housing and factories. But there was also a routinization and categorization of classes, sub-groups, minorities, daily life, and of course the work force itself partitioned into its functionality. Form follows function was the Bauhaus slogan, but it penetrated every aspect of the society---it was the form modernization took.
Wading into a little bit of the Goldhagen thread here. What I think is obscured by looking at anti-semiticism per se and its populism and attempting to find its origins in the individual German psyche, is the broad social institutionalization of every aspect of Weimar society as a modernist project. Within this context then under Weimar Jews were partitioned by profession, trade, class, wealth, social standing.
What took place under the National Socialist was a re-partitioning of Jews, as Jews, without regard to individual profession, class or social standing. Their social standing was purely as Jews, period. This was done as series of legal policies instituted over a period of what, about five or six years. That's seems like a short period, but the Third Reich had moved the whole society into a futuristic speed race with history. The state was transformed into the paramount function of waging war. And the only duty of the state was war. Every group of people within it had a clearly defined role, position, standing, and most of all a function to perform in this war machine. By the end of the Thirties Jews had been reduced to non-German, non-citizens with no function at all.
I know we know all that, but it seems to be forgotten in this thread on Goldhagen. (I've only read one essay of his) He focuses down on perpetrators and their motivations. But what he doesn't seem to understand is that under a thoroughly mechanized, routinized, and function dominated society, individual or group opinions, attitudes, motivations are rendered completely irrelevant. Well, you could have the wrong opinions or resist, but the routinized punishments were automated to take care of most of those people.
This was a total re-structuring of society and it was done on bureaucratic and institutional means. For example, membership lists in former Weimar political parties were sorted out and obviously the Communist party members were tracted down by these lists and hauled off. What any individual Communist current believed or thought or had done lately was irrelevant. They were names on the list, and people on that list went to such and such a place, period. There were no hearings or days in court to argue or plead. It wasn't even guilt by association. It was just the functional governmental apparatus that followed proscribed courses of action of what was to be done with the names of this or that list. That is why the Third Reich recorded everything. The record keeping fanaticism was the routinization of all social functions. Political party memberships, places of work, schools attended, income, places of residence, religion, family trees---the records of these facts defined who and what you were and what your function should be in the new rationally ordered state---a state whose primary function was to wage war.
I may regret saying this, but it seemed to me that after the take over, the Third Reich didn't really need any popular based anti-semiticism, except for propaganda purposes. Once the government could circumscribe non-Aryans as not German and therefore not citizens, it didn't matter what anyone's thoughts were on the subject. So, if the whole basis of the state was founded on anti-semiticism and the routinization of society in order to carry out war, who needs individual perpetrators?
[In some sense this search for anti-semitic perpetrators was a little like blaming individual US soldiers for torturing Iraqis, when the whole occupation is about nothing but torturing Iraq.]
It's the rationalization and routinization of society that Arendt focuses on and makes visible the entire social system that was turned into a mechanized death factory. Mechanized death in the camps or I would add mechanized death in war. There was no civil society or room for anything like a mass populism left except in the context of a state function. It was this routinization and pre-fabricated functional status, the re-partitioning of the whole population that Arendt intended to capture in her The Origins of Totalitarianism.
And it was also the central feature that Horkhiemer and Adrono focus on in the Dialectic of the Enlightment.
Anyway, I am sure we'll hear more on all this...
CG