A history of Germany's short-lived experiment with democracy between the world wars, when vibrant cultural experimentation collided with political and economic turmoil.
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.
