Back in Brussels, but still under the influence of Berlin, I picked up "Weimar Culture" by Peter Gay. Peter Gay was born in Berlin in 1923 and, as Jews, he and his family were forced to flee Nazi Germany, escaping to America in 1939. His original family name was Fröhlich, which he translated into English in what was obviously a more innocent age! "Weimar Culture" is an essay on the cultural history of a time and place - essentially Berlin in the twenties - revealed to us more impressionistically in the stories of Christopher Isherwood ("Cabaret"etc.). Isherwood went to Berlin presumably a) because it was cheap and b) because it held out the promise of free (gay!) sex. The "Youth Movement" and an unprecedented "Sexual Revolution" were very much a part of the whole excitement of Berlin in the 20's, when it was the capital of the modern movement in literature and the arts, pioneering in the cinema and theatre, in social studies and psychoanalysis - the centre of a sort of new Periclean age.
Gay lays particular stress on the importance of the exiles who exported Weimar culture all over the world. He writes:

...the exiles Hitler made were the greatest collection of transplanted intellect, talent, and scholarship the world has ever seen.

He then lists just a few of the names which make up the "dazzling array of these exiles":

Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann, Erwin Panofsky, Bertolt Brecht, Walter Gropius, George Grosz, Wassily Kandinsky, Max Reinhart, Bruno Walter, Max Beckmann, Werner Jaeger, Wolfgang Köhler, Paul Tillich, Ernst Cassirer - quite a few of whom I'd actually heard of! Now they're all on The List!

Gay's subtitle, "The Outsider as Insider" is particularly revealing. The fact is that the advocates and enthusiastic followers of the avant-garde movement came from a small and unrepresentative layer of German society - left wing, liberal, largely Jewish. Most Germans emphatically rejected Weimar culture as "shallow", "rootless", "destructive", "cultural Bolshevism", "asphaltlitteratur". Now we can see how it forshadowed much of what we take for granted in today's cultural landcape.

"Weimar Culture" is, in a sense, a sort of annotated bibliography. Still, I must confess to a certain schoolboy weakness for lists - "Top Ten Weimar Culture Stars", say. As soon as I've posted this, I'm straight on to the Wikipedia to check out some of those names!