Today, as in all revolutionary times, when the existence of the individual trembles to the roots, when life and death are separated by a hair, the ecstasy of delirium and dance sprouts up as if in search of mass narcosis. – Carl Ludwig Schleich, Cocaineism, 1921
The Weimar Period has captured the popular imagination through musicals like Cabaret and films like Marlene Dietrich’s The Blue Angel. Often portrayed as a society dancing on a volcano, both the political right and left have used Weimar Germany’s permissive urban nightlife and debauchery as examples of either societal degeneration or as an open, “anything-goes” paradise. Jazz, cocaine, prostitution, and other forms of vice form one half of the Weimar stereotype: the other of course being runaway inflation, civil unrest, and the rise of Hitler.
