Aus Licht und Schatten: Das goldene Berlin der 1920er Jahre

The Berlin of the Weimar Republic becomes the capital of those con- tradictions that characterize the very concept of modernity. Berlin is the city of the Glasarchitektur, of the unrestrained consumerism and of the streets crowded by the homeless, the city of moral permissi- veness and at the same time rigid in codifying spaces and behavior of the different social classes, the city of a new femininity, that the dominant culture tries to repress. From a literary perspective Berlin is analyzed through the voices of the writers who experienced the city and its contradictions. Georg Heym was able, among the first and even before the war, to recognize lights and shadows of a city that was rapidly changing. In their reports, Joseph Roth and Egon Erwin Kisch described with bitter irony the lights of Berlin, the cafes, the salons, the huge shopping centers, but also its even longer shadows, represented by those excluded from the welfare society: the working class and a constantly growing part of the middle class. In the novel by Irmgard Keun, The Artificial Silk Girl, the desire for a better, more fulfilling life leads Doris through a path full of failures to poverty and a moral abyss. Berlin thus becomes the harbinger of the dark future that awaited Germany and the whole of Europe.