Negative Positive
Title: scholarly to the point of unreadability
Review: Unless you are doing graduate-level work on the Weimar era (which I am), stay far away from this book as an intro. It is not for the timid reader. I'm trying to get my hands on the original German edition, but whether it is the writing or the translation, Peukert's book reads as if it were authored by the illegitimate, illiterate love-child of James Joyce and Henry James. Contentwise, it has very little to do with the popular perception of "Weimar Culture;" for that, check out Peter Gay. This book deals primarily with social and economic conditions, and hardly ever mentions politics, and even more rarely, art. If you like charts and graphs and figures though, this is full of them. That said, this is the preeminent book on Weimar Germany. It helps to have a philosophy degree to read it, though. Anthony Heilbut's excellent Exiles in Paradise is more than worth checking out if you're interested in the mass emigration of German artists and intellectuals to the US.
Is the review positive or negative? 