On the years of love and catastrophe – Lesley Chamberlain in TLS:

‘Uwe Wittstock, a prizewinning journalist whose late mother was two years old in 1933, suggests that while we struggle to grasp the catastrophe now, it was all the more unimaginable to its contemporary victims. February 1933: The Winter of Literature revisits moments in those well-documented lives by way of diaries, letters and public events. The personal routines, giddy socializing and creative obsessions belong to some of the best-known names in German culture of the last century, from the monumental novelist Thomas Mann and his brilliant, provocative adult children Erika and Klaus to the communist playwright Bertolt Brecht, the fabulous jazz-age composer Kurt Weill, who was Brecht’s collaborator, and the unforgettable satirical painters Otto Dix and George Grosz.’

(…)

‘The Nazis targeted not only individuals, but also the democratic institutions they served. Heinrich Mann, Thomas’s brother, fellow novelist and a staunch supporter of the Republic, was eased out of the Prussian Academy of Arts in what struck everyone as a scandal. Fellow academicians, ashamed, found themselves powerless to object. He was a huge name on the literary scene, thanks to Der Untertan and, Professor Unrat, soon to be filmed with Marlene Dietrich as The Blue Angel. Yet so vulnerable was his position that the French ambassador offered him his embassy should he need refuge.’

(…)

‘Ossietzky, meanwhile, as editor of Die Weltbühne (“The World Stage”), the sharpest political and social weekly of the Weimar Republic, had already served two years in prison for decrying German military violations of the Versailles treaty. As the “winter of literature” closed in his friends begged him to flee, but this brave man insisted he would stay “to watch history unfold”.
On February 17 Mühsam rushed to the pub where Ossietzky was speaking that evening and spread the newspaper out on the table. Henceforth Reichsminister Hermann Goering was permitting the police to shoot to kill. “We will probably never see one another again”, Ossietzky responded, but “let us promise … to remain true to ourselves and to stand up with our body and our lives for what we have believed in and fought for”. Meanwhile, on February 18 the disruptive Brownshirts of the SA, Hitler’s Sturmabteilung, broke up the premiere of Kurt Weill’s musical The Silver Lake. Weill, the genius who had set Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera to music, was Jewish. The playwright Georg Kaiser was not – indeed, he was only vaguely leftist – but the Nazis went after him nonetheless. Wittstock doesn’t make the point, but it was a reflection of how politically powerful theatre had been in Germany since the time of the French Revolution that it represented such a threat. Overall, the Nazis feared “Bolshevization” – and their fear of socialist radicalism and artistic modernism stirring up Germany in the Soviet wake was in many ways well founded. The German Communist Party (KPD) would win eighty-one seats in the March 5 election (though its mandates would be annulled three days later). The Nazis especially hated the Jewish Mühsam for his involvement in the briefly established Soviet Bavarian Republic of 1918.’

(…)

‘Wittstock’s present-tense chronicle is packed with detail, from the crowd that formed a human pyramid so that someone could hand Hitler a rose at his window to the first book-burning in Dresden on March 8. As orgies of destruction spread across the country, university students lined up to pronounce “fire verdicts” on chosen works. “I consign to the flames…”, they chanted, naming Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, essays by the country’s foremost drama critic, Alfred Kerr, and anything by Ossietzky and his outstanding predecessor, the journalist and poet Kurt Tucholsky. Wittstock was mindful of the Capitol riots of January 2021 as he researched his book. He knows that history can repeat itself.’

(…)

‘My only criticism is that all this detail doesn’t actually build tension on the page. This reader had to work hard to bring the drama together.’

(…)

‘Key figures in Illies’s German story are once again Klaus and Erika Mann, their choices homosexual and occasionally incestuous. The serial heterosexual loves of their uncle Heinrich also feature, though it’s his poor taste in women that upsets the family when they reunite in exile. (The erratic behaviour of his alcoholic wife, Nelly Kröger, he tries to blame on a fall.) Well known but worth repeating is the record-breaking callousness of Brecht as anti-lover of the decade. Unlike the novelist Hermann Hesse, who only left his bride to honeymoon alone, Brecht left his actual wedding to the actress Helene Weigel to spend the evening with his mistress. “Here you have someone on whom you can’t rely”, he told each new conquest, perhaps believing that exculpated him.’

(…)

‘If this was the age of “the New Objectivity” in Germany, it was also, in Erich Kästner’s variation on the theme, the age of Reasonable Romance. It seems to have been a value-free erotic zone stretching from Munich to Berlin, Vienna to Paris. Its actors had little concern for politics, except when it spoilt the fun. Nightclubs and foreign travel, great villas built on some of Europe’s most beautiful coasts: such were the backdrops to their realized dreams. When numerous leading intellectuals were forced to bed down for a short idyllic summer beside the Mediterranean, it didn’t seem like the Hitler emergency at all. When the Mann family held court at Sanary-sur-Mer from June to September 1933, Aldous Huxley and Sybille Bedford, as well as the German writer Lion Feuchtwanger in his mansion on the cliffs, were their near neighbours.’

(…)

‘Or, indeed, you could be Benn, a practising doctor and brilliant poet who, back in a Berlin he would never leave, was setting a new standard for the merciless “objective” coldness of the age. “Life is the building of bridges over rivers that seep away” seems like decent enough German pessimism; “Love is a crisis of the organs of touch” is simply cruel. Benn still attracted a steady stream of women, one of whom, invited for a drink to his flat for the first time, felt that, dressed in his medical white coat, he was going to dissect her with surgical instruments. Was it Benn’s coldness that led him to invest emotionally in the Nazi vision of a new civilization? His fellow writers tried to dissuade him from advancing his uncongenial views, as if they didn’t really take him seriously. The Nazis left him alone because they didn’t want the support of an expressionist degenerate. When his muse returned he wrote some of the greatest poems of the century.’

(…)

‘Neither of these books analyses the extremes it chronicles, but one remembers the strange and ambivalent role played by sexuality in Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (originally drafted in 1944), where the culture of Reason, now apparently reaching its apotheosis in Hitler, was somehow the product of rechannelled sexual aggression. A kind of sexuality hitherto underground had become a new extreme cultural and political force.’

(…)

‘He’s rather lenient, to this reviewer’s mind, and rather hard on Thomas Mann’s “noun-heavy moralizing”. I would have liked to hear him call Brecht not only a great artist, but also a pernicious moral fraud. Illies engages with some relish in his tale, where Wittstock, two generations older, is outraged and sad.’ Read the article here.

Wittstock’s book is very much worth reading. It’s informative and leaves the reader enough space for his own judgements, excitements and interpretations. The reader has to work hard, that’s what a reader does, after the hard work of the author the reader starts working, and the reader should not complain. Neither should the author.
The case against Brecht has been ongoing for as long as I can remember. Leaving your wedding party in order to go to your mistress is not a crime. It’s not for us to judge this behavior. It might be a bit cruel. But a world without any cruelty is unimaginable. Perhaps his wife was able to forgive. I never read any Brecht biography.
Some people don’t leave their wedding party nor their significant other but they turn out to be utterly boring, and that’s nasty as well.
Anyhow, a moral fraud and a great artist. That’s more interesting than a wife beater and great artist (Picasso).

Benn is an interesting case. Talking about the grey zone. And a good poet.
Then there was the age of Reasonable Romance.
Now we live in the age of Unreasonable Prudishness. They have both their attractions.

How to analyze the extremes, that has always been an urgent question. Let's start with the background of the extremes, the detailed historical context, which is what Wittstock does.