| Focusing primarily on Hans Fallada's Little Man, What Now? (1932), Irmgard Keun's The Artificial Silk Girl (1932) and Erich Kastner's Fabian (1932), this study looks at perceptions of the Weimar Republic during its crisis years, 1929 to 1933. These three novels were all published during the "crisis years" and were very popular at the time of their publication. They are especially useful for analysis, because they follow many of the conventions of the Neue Sachlichkeit (or "New Objectivity") genre. Typical of Neue Sachlichkeit, the novels claim to achieve some level of social realism; as such, the authors cast the Weimar Republic itself as a literary character, revealing what they perceived to be the Republic's strengths and flaws, as well as the threats challenging it.; Analysing these three novels, in addition to other primary and secondary source material, this study looks at contemporary representations of the Weimar Republic's "crisis years." Dividing the study into three sections---perceptions of the state and government, representations of morality and culture, and finally a reading of the rejection of Berlin which occurs at the end of each novel---this thesis finds that there is no clear line between the dissolution of the Weimar Republic and the rise of Hitler and the Nazi Party. It contends that there is evidence within these novels of the characters being aware of the Weimar Republic dissolving, but there is little evidence that they see Hitler as any particular threat.{09}In their rejections of Berlin, and of the Weimar Republic as a whole, they do not cling to any new answer or cause. |
