Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider

Peter Gay. W.W. Norton: 1968.

I have loved Weimar since my early teens. My first exposure was my parent’s LP of the 1962 off-Broadway production of The Threepenny Opera (translated and adapted by Marc Blitzstein). I played it over and over. I could not get enough of the sinuous music, gangster anti-hero, overt radicalism, and the cynical take on the human race. At age 17, I…