Review by Choice Review
Weitz (Univ. of Minnesota) offers a comprehensive history of the Weimar Republic that combines a sober approach to the politics and economics of this conflicted era with a highly engaging and readable new take on its famous cultural and social experiment. While his analysis of Weimar history as a series of paradoxes (promise and tragedy, creativity and destruction, social liberation and authoritarian constraint) is essentially conventional, Weitz structures his book around emblematic case studies that draw on new scholarship in German studies. Space, architecture, and visual culture constitute primary motifs in Weitz's look at Weimar modernity and mass society, as illustrated by the book's impressive plates and photographs. Berlin plays a central role, reflecting that city's renewed importance since German unification. One of the book's achievements compared to previous Weimar histories is Weitz's integration of important work on gender, sex, and the body throughout his nine chapters (though race and ethnicity receive curiously short shrift here, given the author's well-known work on genocide, e.g., A Century of Genocide, CH, Sep'03, 41-0467). The choice to consign scholarly references to footnotes and a bibliographic essay contributes to the book's overall accessibility for students and general readers. Summing Up: Essential. All levels/libraries. H. D. Baer University of Oklahoma
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
Does the very thing that qualifies someone to write a review - the fact that he is the kind of reader to whom the book is "especially" addressed - disqualify him from doing so? I ask not as one "well versed in classical music" but as a representative of "those who feel passing curiosity about this obscure pandemonium on the outskirts of culture." Those better versed may be able to pounce on Alex Ross, the music critic of The New Yorker, if he gets things wrong - if he mistakenly claims the music goes from a D major to a D minor or whatever - but my ignorance of musical technicalities means that I pose a special and more profound test of Ross's skills. When he's treating an invalid (pronounce the word however seems appropriate) like me, he will have to proceed like a therapist faced with a physical inadequacy that can't, of itself, be fixed. His prose is going to have to work on the surrounding muscle to compensate for a more deep-seated weakness. If he does this - if he succeeds in articulating what my ears have been ignorantly hearing - then he will have produced a thoroughly invigorating program of rehabilitation. "The Rest Is Noise" is a work of immense scope and ambition. The idea is not simply to conduct a survey of 20th-century classical composition but to come up with a history of that century as refracted through its music. We start with Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss, "the titans of Austro-German music" in Graz, on May 16, 1906. Strauss is there to conduct a performance of his opera "Salome." It turns into an extraordinary night - not because of the shrieks, discords and howls of the music but because, to Mahler's astonishment, the audience loves it. This may have been "just one event in a busy season, but, like a flash of lightning, it illuminated a musical world on the verge of traumatic change. Past and future were colliding; centuries were passing in the night." Vividly actualized, extensively and astutely analyzed, the episode also serves as a model for the book as a whole. Time and again Ross finds an event that expresses a larger movement - a person or a scene in which tendencies and meaning converge. In Paris, Claude Debussy and Erik Satie stand for a "stripped-down, folk-based, jazz-happy" avant-garde, while in Vienna Arnold Schoenberg and his 12-tone progeny, Anton Webern and Alban Berg, illuminate "the terrible depths with their holy torches." From Stravinsky to Sibelius to Schoenberg (who "learned instrumental forms by subscribing to an encyclopedia, and waited for the S volume to arrive before composing a sonata"), the emerging heavy-weights of the new music are sketched with a brevity and confidence that are the products, surely, of deep immersion and study. Steeped though Ross is in Theodor Adorno and Thomas Mann, his own style is mercifully free of the "implacable imperative of density" commended by the critic-devil in Mann's "Doctor Faustus" (a novel that provides a framing parable for the book's early sections). Nevertheless, with so much ground to cover, after 150 pages one fears that "The Rest" may subside into a linked series of adroitly composed New Yorkerish profiles. Fortunately, just as things begin to sag, totalitarianism comes to the rescue. As Ross examines the compromised fate of composers under Stalin and Hitler, the book again rises to embrace its darker purpose. Inevitably Dmitri Shostakovich is the emblematically contorted figure, moving from derisory laughter at the very idea of having to explain "the socioeconomic dimensions of the music of Chopin and Liszt" to an uncomfortable accommodation with the state that both facilitates and threatens his work. In post-Wagnerian Germany, meanwhile, could something ominous be heard looming in all those "humongous Teutonic symphonies"? Conceding from the outset that "no composer more painfully exhibited the moral collapse of German art than Richard Strauss," Ross probes the composer's complex, often contradictory relation to the Nazi regime with considerable dexterity. This is where the debate at the conceptual heart of Ross's undertaking is thrown into sharpest focus: is the history of music self-contained or can a larger, extramusical history be distilled from it? Actually, as Ross makes clear, the alternatives are mutually implicated and imbricated: "precisely because of its inarticulate nature," music is "all too easily imprinted with ideologies and deployed to political ends." With its key figures reappearing like motifs in a symphony, "The Rest Is Noise" is a considerable feat of orchestration and arrangement. So much so that at times history itself seems bent on playing into Ross's hands. Who could have imagined that, as a "surreal" consequence of the rise of fascism, many of the giants of European classical music - Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Rachmaninov and Otto Klemperer (to say nothing of Mann and Adorno) - would end up living on each others' doorsteps in Los Angeles? In such proximity, events of world-historical importance offered an irresistible incentive to pettiness. When NBC broadcast Shostakovich's "Leningrad" Symphony in 1942, most of the émigré composers "experienced a mass attack of envy and resentment." Schoenberg and Stravinsky both did their best to squeeze huge fees from sympathetic Hollywood studios. Thereafter, scoring music for films became one of the principal ways in which new orchestral music maintained a viable position in the cultural marketplace. And while America produced both homegrown composers of "straight music" (to use the jazzer's preferred term) and composers of popular music deserving classic status - Ellington, Gershwin, Bernstein - many of the most challenging ideas of the avant-garde were disseminated through jazz (often regarded as "black classical music"). This means that, in the postwar years, Ross's catchment area has to be extended still further. Inevitably, as we draw closer to the present, the quantity and range of material make it difficult for the book to sustain the concentration achieved mid-century. The fragmentation of the musical center means that the story becomes dispersed, and we are urged, irresistibly, toward the cultural edges. With its obligation to touch on everyone - Terry Riley, Alfred Schnittke, Thomas Adès - the book begins to resemble a reference work in narrative guise. I don't see how it could have been done differently, but the centrifugal force generated by the obligation to be comprehensive also causes a distortion of emphasis. Perhaps the problem rests on the necessary if unsustainable distinction between improvisation and composition. John Coltrane is mentioned, but relatively speaking, his importance here seems to derive from the way Steve Reich saw him play a bunch of times. Keith Jarrett does not get a look in, even though his improvised solo piano concerts in some ways represent the culmination of virtuoso classical performance stretching back to Liszt. It would be unfair, though, to dwell on omissions when so much has been included. "The Rest Is Noise" is a great achievement. Rilke once wrote of how he learned to stand "more seeingly" in front of certain paintings. Ross enables us to listen more hearingly. STEPHEN KING ON ERIC CLAPTON 10 STEPHANIE ZACHAREK ON PATTIE BOYD 11 BRUCE HANDY ON THE BEATLES 12 PANKAJ MISHRA ON COLTRANE 14 ANTHONY GOTTLIEB ON OLIVER SACKS 16 MICHAEL KIMMELMAN ON A FORGOTTEN VIRTUOSO 18 Ross's aim is not simply to conduct a survey but to write a history of the century as refracted through its music. Geoff Dyer's many books include "But Beautiful" and, most recently, "The Ongoing Moment."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
University of Minnesota history professor Weitz takes readers on a walk through Weimar Republic-era Berlin in the footsteps of a 1920s flaneur, an urban ambler. Wandering among cafes and department stores, Weitz notices the "New Women," the jazz bands, the prostitutes, the beggars, the war wounded. He considers how radio and motion pictures changed public gatherings, internationalizing mass entertainment. Separate chapters, with a wealth of well-chosen illustrations, explore Weimar's new theories of architecture, graphic arts, photography, theater, philosophy and sexuality. Weitz selects key exemplars of each discipline-Brecht, Weill, Mann, Bruno Taut, Erich Mendelsohn, August Sander, L szlo Moholy-Nagy, Hannah H?ch, Siegfried Kracauer, etc.-for in-depth focus before turning to the backlash that their radicalism aroused. In his closing discussion of the collapse of the republic, Weitz elaborates on the right's resistance to modernization, as well as the overall fragility of the democratic spirit. A lively style and excellent illustrations make this intellectually challenging volume accessible to both academics and armchair scholars. 8 color (not seen by PW) and 52 b&w photos. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Weitz (history, Univ. of Minnesota; Creating German Communism, 1890-1990) has produced an elegant and captivating study of Germany's Weimar years, that turbulent period from 1918 to 1933 when the old German society seemed to break apart. In this period, Germany became a constitutional democracy, the arts blossomed, modern and liberal ideas flourished, and the economic and political situation staggered from one crisis to another, ending in the Nazi ascendance to power. This period is often treated as simply the forerunner to the Nazi era, but Weitz shows that it was far more than that. Leading readers through the sights and sounds of Berlin and into the worlds of politics, economics, daily life, material culture, sexual liberation, and, finally, the revolution and counterrevolution from the Right, he concludes that the Nazi era was not inevitable. To reach this point, Weitz has synthesized in clear and engaging fashion a great deal of the huge primary and secondary literature of Weimar, taking into consideration the social and political circumstances of Western Europe between the wars. This book will undoubtedly be assigned to college students, but it will reward anyone interested in this fascinating and pivotal era. If you have only one book on the Weimar period, this should be it. For all libraries.-Barbara Walden, Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
