ABSTRACT
The years of the Weimar Republic (1918–1933) were, as is well-known, a period of immense intellectual and artistic ferment in German history, and the spread of cosmopolitan styles of thought and life at this time can be seen as characterising in many ways the very spirit of Weimar Germany. Despite the many powerful currents of nationalist ressentiment unleashed by German defeat in the First World War and the Treaty of Versailles, cosmopolitan thinking played a significant part in the shaping of German political and intellectual life in the period; and though widely understood as an anti-Semitic code word for “rootless” intellectual and financial elites, cosmopolitanism (Weltbürgertum or Kosmopolitismus) in German discourse of the period gained increasing traction as a marker of some essential tendencies of the age, reinforcing and reactivating German intellectual advances from the age of the Enlightenment and the emergence of modern German national identity in the late eighteenth century – the age of Kant, Lessing, Herder, Goethe, Schiller and Frederick the Great.
