Vertigo

“Jähner makes some piquant additions to the cultural lore of Weimar.” 

“A serious, deeply researched addition to the literature.”

“Jähner 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…The book understandably loses its lightheartedness as it moves into the early 1930s. But even in these sections, Jähner remains true to his basic concern, adding splashes of color to a story that he does not want to convey in a monotonous gray.”

“Jähner has an attuned sense of the Weimar mood.”

“The Weimar Republic is a byword for hedonism and excess. A new history captures the mood with gusto…For obvious reasons most histories of the Weimar years are dominated by politics, with Hitler and his cronies lurking ominously on the margins. But Jähner’s account is more unconventional, more surprising and, frankly, more enjoyable…I enjoyed it enormously.”

“Vertigo is outstandingly readable. It’s an entertaining map of 15 crucial years of Europe’s history, but it also functions, as the author no doubt intended it to, as a super-vivid then-to-now translation of how easily dictatorship roots itself under civilisation’s skin. We are, with insight and elegance, being thoroughly warned.”

“Energetic and engaging…Jähner’s approach not only carries a heavy cultural spin but puts the politics of collective feeling—from exhilaration to despair—centre stage.”

“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. He takes us into the minds of the iconoclasts: those who wanted to ‘smash’ the Old World—be it classical architecture, capitalism, or traditional gender roles–and of those who wanted to preserve it…Vertigo also casts an unsettling light on our own times.”

“Outstanding…A gripping account of a nation’s experiment in democracy.”

“Wonderfully written and compulsively, electrifyingly readable. The Weimar Republic and its chilling fall is—like Shakespearean tragedy—an enduringly fascinating, profoundly human story. And with consummate skill and a rich breadth of research, Harald Jähner makes us look again at what we thought we knew and gives this history new, extraordinary depth. Taking us through the neurotic violence of the 1918 German revolution, and the neon flowering of Weimar art and culture, thence to the dark rise of Hitler, Jähner deftly overturns many old assumptions about economics and politics along the way. And against this backdrop, he also invites us to explore everything from nude gymnastics to modernist architecture, fast cars to dance halls, and, fundamentally, love and loss and the cold horror of hate.”

“Any decent centrist will shiver at this wonderfully illustrated account of how Weimar’s heady metropolitan progressiveness failed to cope with loss of national pride, technological modernism, social change, early globalization, and financial crash. The confidence of the middle classes was lost, readying them to accept wild conspiracy theories: a new fusion of hard left and hard right, National Socialism, was swept to power by Germany’s flyover country, with disastrous results which the traditional elites only saw too late. Vertigo provides a priceless lesson for anybody interested in Germany then—or the world today.”

“Vertigo is outstanding. Harald Jähner’s gift for illuminating the big picture with telling detail gives the reader an uncanny sense of what it was actually like to be present in Germany during the Weimar Republic. This is history at its very best.”

“From women in the workplace to traffic lights, from yo-yos to dance culture, Harald Jähner tracks the 15 chaotic years of the Weimar Republic with his characteristic verve and attention to detail. Vertigo is one of the most gripping accounts of an era spanning war defeat, humiliation, and failed revolution in 1918 to the violence, intimidation, and propaganda of the Nazis' rise to power in 1933. It contains many lessons for the world now.”