Intrecci tra letteratura e società nella Berlino della Repubblica di Weimar [Intertwining between literature and society in the Berlin of the Weimar Republic]

Abstract

In the Weimar era Berlin becomes the capital of those contradictions that characterize the very concept of ‘modernity’: A city of unbridled consumerism and streets crowded with homeless people, accused of permissiveness in morals and customs and at the same time rigid in codifying the spaces and behaviors of the different social classes and of a new and constantly changing femininity. But the lights from the shopping centers did not only cast their brightness onto the streets, they also cast, metaphorically, their shadows. The literature of the time perfectly captures this psychological and social dimension of the new value assumed by consumerism: The protagonists, mostly women, generally move from the province towards the big city in the hope of grasping the opportunities to get a place in the spotlight, yet they end up returning defeated to that provincial life they wanted to escape, or more often, are devoured by the metropolis they thought they were conquering. As we also read in many reports of the time, the streets of Berlin are crowded with hungry people, the unemployed and that middle class which is slowly sliding into poverty.

Keywords

• weimar republic
• literature and society
• moral issue in literature and essays
• women in the metropolis
• berlin
• germany
• german literature
• german language
• german history
• metropolis
• women in literature
• society
• europe