Weimar Cities?

[John McCreery]

I stumbled across the following article "Weimar Istanbul" via a link from Arts & Letters Daily. The author argues explicitly for the existence of a class of "Weimar cities," of which Weimar-era Berlin is the prototype, in which creativity flourishes because the cities in question are on the cusp of chaos. As anthropologists we might say that they are cities observed at liminal moments in their histories, as one era ends and another has yet to take shape, monsters abound and the atmosphere is permeated by the threat of imminent violence. I wonder how many of us live in cities like that. I wonder, too, how many cities one might expect to exemplify this liminal state -- Karachi and Islamabad pop into my mind -- display the kind of creative chaos the author of this piece envisions.

[Francine Barone]

I wonder how many cities are not perennially on the cusp of chaos of some kind or other. Very few places I've lived wouldn't fit this description for a least some of its residents:  

 

What is a Weimar City? It is a city rich in history and culture, animated by political precariousness and by a recent rupture with the past, vivified by a shocking conflict with mass urbanization and industrialization; a city where sudden liberalization has unleashed the social and political imagination—but where the threat of authoritarian reaction is always in the air.

 

And in a way, that's what city life has always been about - seen from within and without. City-dwellers and non-city dwellers envy the freedom of cities, but fear their untamable nature. I noticed this idea a lot when I was in the field. I lived in a small city and residents were torn between tradition and the future, on the one hand wanting the city to flourish with creativity, but on the other, aware that this could mean grave risks in giving up the security and predictability of the past. Such a model presumes that there is a single moment of disjuncture, but cities are always changing; always at liminal moments.

[John McCreery]

Francine, there is much in what you say, when the usual sort of difference is drawn t between the dangerous, sinful, but also filled with opportunities city and the bliss, harmony, and constraint of an imagined little community. I suspect, however, that the author of this piece is pointing to a different sort of comparison, between cities in different historical moments. All cities may seem chaotic to those who live in the countryside; but the fact is that most cities do not produce the kind of creative ferment for which Weimar Berlin or the Vienna of Freud and Wittgenstein are famous. Vienna itself makes a great example, seeming at the moment to be a cultural backwater, living off the accomplishments of earlier generations. Could there be something worth saying about cities on the cusp of great crises and a flowering of creativity as the normal level of chaos associated with urban life undergoes a phase change into something dramatically different?