AS Peter Gay observed in his classic study of the culture of the Weimar Republic, “For over a century Germans had looked upon politics with a mixture of fascination and aversion.” German writers and intellectuals, most notably those on the left of the political spectrum, had long dreamt of having a direct involvement in political events and affairs of the state. In the immediate aftermath of military defeat at the end of the First World War and the collapse of the monarchy, it appeared that those dreams were about to be realized. Indeed, some writers even briefly took political office in the politically turbulent first months of 1919, most notable amongst them the dramatist Ernst Toller, the anarchist writer Erich Mühsam, and the intellectual Gustav Landauer, who took leading roles in the short-lived Bavarian Republican government, an honor declined by Hermann Hesse, while Ret Marut, who would become better known as the novelist B. Traven, was also highly active in the Munich Republic. Certainly in no previous period of German history did writers and intellectuals engage so directly with political events and social forces and seek so actively to have a direct influence on them as they were to do during the Weimar Republic. Nor was this engagement confined to those on the left. Political and social developments forced even conservative middle-class writers, who generally had a conception of literature as high art that had no business dirtying its hands with politics, and who would therefore have preferred to remain above the fray, to abandon their Olympian detachment and enter the arena to try to shape events.