They "ate, slept, made love, raised children, and tried to keep body and soul together by finding ways to make a living." Those were the words of the late, great Wall Street Journal deputy editorial page editor George Melloan in his excellent and essential 2016 Great Depression memoir, When the New Deal Came to Town.
Melloan was describing life in Whiteland, Indiana in a decade commonly viewed as the worst economically in the U.S.’s modern history. And while Melloan in no way glossed over the myriad of errors the federal government made in the 1930s on the way to a sluggish economic decade for the United States, his book was a reminder of two things: First, an economic slowdown in the U.S. is an economic boom most anywhere else. Second, even in the bad times (by American standards) people go on living. They certainly did in Whiteland.
Melloan’s book frequently came to mind while reading German cultural journalist Harald Jahner’s very good and very important new book Vertigo: The Rise and Fall of Weimar Germany. With Vertigo, Jahner (my review of his fascinating previous book, Aftermath: Life In the Fallout of the Third Reich, can be found here) “deals in the feelings, moods and sensations produced by the political attitudes and conflicts of the age.” In other words, people managed to eat, sleep, make love, and progress despite the shocking stupidity of the country’s first democratic government that was founded in Weimar after WWI. Jahner helps answer the question of how people coped as they were robbed, which is why Vertigo is so important.
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