Peter Gay (1923–2015)

Mozart: A Life, by Peter Gay (pp 177) Published 1999. This Penguin Lives book is a nice introduction in the life of arguably the best Western composer in the world. It covers his childhood as a father-dominated prodigy, his usefulness as an income producer to his family, his eventual attempt at independence, and his mostly but not entirely successful life as an adored composer. I had no idea of his attraction to scatalogical humor and, frankly, a biography this brief would have been nine the worse for imitating it. I was also unaware of how musicians and composers, including geniuses, were thoroughly dependent on the largesse of money-granting nobles. It was quite difficult for them to exist without patrons, especially if an artist was addicted to a rich lifestyle. Details of his life aside, this brief biography points me toward some of his better appreciated works, many of which I should be able obtain through my dear electronic friend Alexa.… (more)

The Weimar Republic was born from the collapse of one empire and was murdered in the rise of another. In the span between, however, it was the site of one of the most extraordinarily fruitful cultural movements in Western history, one that would spread far beyond the borders of interwar Germany to shape the cultural aesthetics of a century. Peter Gay’s book is an extended essay about this development. Over the course of a half-dozen chapters, he offers a perceptive analysis of German culture in the 1920s, one that assesses the shapes it took and how it reflected the tumultuous events surrounding it.

What Gay describes amounts to an explosion of cultural exploration in the aftermath of the demise of the German empire in 1918. Freed from its oppressive cultural conservatism, many German artists, writers, and designers pushed the avant-garde to new levels of innovation. These efforts were fueled by their criticisms of a society still dominated by much of the Wilhelmine old order, which provided them with subject material to portray and critique. Yet Gay makes it clear that to think of Weimar culture exclusively in terms of Expressionism and the Bauhaus school is false, as he shows the equally important contribution made by conservative intellectuals who sought to come to terms with Germany’s circumstances in their own works. In the short term their contributions proved more relevant, as the rightward turn of German youth in the early 1930s that Gay describes fueled the rapid growth of the Nazi-led right, the triumph of which brought an end to the cultural experimentation of the Weimar era.

As one of the 20th century’s foremost cultural historians Gay left behind an impressive body of insightful works. Yet his short book stands out from them thanks to a personal tone that inflects much of the work. As a refugee from Nazi Germany, Gay was a personal witness to the aftermath of the era he describes, one that gives his book an almost elegiac tone in its description of a culture doomed to extinction. Writing as he does with an assumption of his readers’ familiarity with the era, this is not a book that should serve as someone’s introduction to the period. Yet it is one that anyone seeking to understand interwar German history must come to terms with, thanks to Gay’s graceful prose and his penetrating judgments of his subject.… (more)