Vienna at the turn of the century and Berlin in the 1920s have both entered the topology and mythology of modernism. Both were doomed cultures, linked by the Great War, which destroyed the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Second Empire and gave birth in defeat to the Austrian Republic and the Weimar Republic. Vienna and Berlin mark two stages in the crisis and disintegration of the 19th-century European order and the rise of mass society and mass politics. Hitler's progress from Vienna to Berlin cannot be understood without the devastating impact of war and defeat, compounded by the burden of Versailles (war guilt, loss of territory and reparations) and the Great Depression. The crucial role of the Weimar Republic in the short 20th century (Hobsbawm) hardly needs underlining. Its importance for Germany appears more clearly when we realize that the Weimar years represent the one decisive period between 1914 and 1989 in which all the social and economic contradictions of modernization, of national and political struggles, found open expression. If the Weimar Republic is the crucial chapter in German -and European -history, the literature of the Republic likewise provides the crucial chapter in German literary history in the 20th century. It thus poses considerable challenges to literary historians, since its only unity is that of the 'age of extremes', i.e. a unity of ideological differences, which document the bitter and finally murderous contestation of the very meaning and function of literature. In the spectrum of ideological positions and the corresponding conceptions of literature and literary history of the period we can list the following: catholic, conservative, conservativerevolutionary, nationalist, völkisch, regional, racist, panGermanic, antisemitic, liberal, social democratic, communist, proletarian and so on. We are looking at a situation of incipient civil war, involving a whole series of sociopolitical divisions and reflected in a segmentation of literary production and reception, which defies any common denominator. The divisions of Weimar society

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