In this study, the author shows how the birth of the Weimar Republic ushered in a brilliant but fevered epoch haunted by "anxiety, fear, a rising sense of doom". The author brings to life the world of the art historians and psycho-analysts, the Expressionists, the Bauhaus and Marlene Dietrich, the youth movements, the political extremists and the "hunger for wholeness" barely hidden by the democratic facade. He also explores the Republic's tragic end: the nation was consumed by unimaginable barbarism and millions were killed or scattered across the face of the earth, yet the Weimar spirit paradoxically found "its true home, in exile".