Jähner tries to have it both ways, blending secondhand nostalgia with a mild didacticism ... If Jähner makes some piquant additions to the cultural lore of Weimar, his political history is more dubious ... Capably translated ... A book about Weimar should tell us less about ourselves than about German consciousness on the other side of 1933. The period is so encrusted in caricature that it requires a harder hammer to expose what stumbling through modern life for the first time felt like.
Jähner’s new history of the Weimar era vividly portrays and endorses this spirit of excess ... Its very title, Vertigo, fittingly conjures the sensation of spinning dizziness ... He excels when he takes us into the ballrooms and pleasure palaces of a new entertainment culture, where reveling citizens listened to jazz and danced the Charleston ... There is a palpable nostalgia for Weimar on his final pages, a sadness that this exhilarating awakening ended in the human catastrophe of Nazism and World War II. Yet his account is not fatalistic.
Energetic and engaging ... Draws well on the brilliant reporters and commentators ... Jähner benefits hugely from Shaun Whiteside’s swift and agile translation, always alert to the edgy, crackling modernity of Weimar prose.
Jähner’s pages are stained with the blood of abortive coups, uprisings and assassinations ... Jähner is wonderful on the details of everyday life, from houses and offices to cars, typewriters, dresses and dances ... His political coverage is relatively fleeting, probably because German readers are already so familiar with it. And like so many writers he tends to focus on eye-catching extremes ... But his book contains so many pleasures.
If you want to know where our polarised, gullible, narcissistic world might end up, I advise you to read this book. The contemporary parallels in Harald Jähner’s irresistibly rich history of Germany’s Weimar Republic are so powerful that at least one of its impacts on a reader is likely to be that you will nod in appalled realization and murmur to yourself, 'So that’s how it goes' ... Fascinatingly detailed, widely researched, memorably well written (and flawlessly translated by Shaun Whiteside), Vertigo is narrative history of the very best sort. We fully enter into Weimar’s flamboyant, divided, ultimately century-shattering decade and a half. And now, as then, in our world of sloganeering and papered-over divisions, of social-media credulity and extravagant excess, it shows us with disturbing sharpness just where our lack of serious self-examination may lead.
[An] informative and enjoyable study ... Everything was visceral, and Jähner conveys this intensity of experience to the reader. As he writes in his preface, Vertigo 'deals in the feelings, modes and sensations produced by the political attitudes and conflicts of the age; emotional manifestations such as unease, confidence, anxiety, ennui, self-reliance, a desire to consume, a desire to dance, a hunger for experience, pride and hatred.' If the book has a flaw, it is that it does not properly explore the politics that gave rise to these emotions. But this has been done numerous times elsewhere. What Jähner, a cultural journalist, does, and does extremely well, is to take us inside the dance hall, the boxing club, the photographic studio, and the new open-plan office.
...meticulously researched yet accessible ... Goebbels’ words too closely echo certain modern-day leaders’ rhetoric for anybody to be at ease. Harald Jähner has given us in Vertigo a blueprint for the growth of fascism. Will the world be canny enough to avoid traveling down that road again?
