Karl Toepfer: Empire of Ecstasy: Nudity and Movement in German Body Culture, 1910-1935 (1997)
Filed under book | Tags: · 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, avant-garde, ballet, bauhaus, body, dance, expressionism, germany, photography, theatre, weimar republic
Empire of Ecstasy offers an interpretation of the explosion of German body culture between the two wars—nudism and nude dancing, gymnastics and dance training, dance photography and criticism, and diverse genres of performance from solo dancing to mass movement choirs. Karl Toepfer presents this dynamic subject as a vital and historically unique construction of “modern identity.”
The modern body, radiating freedom and power, appeared to Weimar artists and intelligentsia to be the source of a transgressive energy, as well as the sign and manifestation of powerful, mysterious “inner” conditions. Toepfer shows how this view of the modern body sought to extend the aesthetic experience beyond the boundaries imposed by rationalized life and to transcend these limits in search of ecstasy. With the help of much unpublished or long-forgotten archival material (including many little-known photographs), he investigates the process of constructing an “empire” of appropriative impulses toward ecstasy.
Toepfer presents the work of such well-known figures as Rudolf Laban, Mary Wigman, and Oskar Schlemmer, along with less-known but equally fascinating body culture practitioners. His book is certain to become required reading for historians of dance, body culture, and modernism.
Publisher University of California Press, 1997
ISBN 0520918274, 9780520918276
422 pages
PDF’d HTML, HTML (from the publisher)
See also Mel Gordon, Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin, 2000–.
Comment (0)Jeffrey Herf: Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (1985)
Filed under book | Tags: · engineering, enlightenment, fascism, germany, marxism, modernism, national socialism, nationalism, nazism, politics, romanticism, technology, weimar republic
“In a unique application of critical theory to the study of the role of ideology in politics, Jeffrey Herf explores the paradox inherent in the German fascists’ rejection of the rationalism of the Enlightenment while fully embracing modern technology. He documents evidence of a cultural tradition he calls ‘reactionary modernism’ found in the writings of German engineers and of the major intellectuals of the Weimar right: Ernst Juenger, Oswald Spengler, Werner Sombart, Hans Freyer, Carl Schmitt, and Martin Heidegger. The book shows how German nationalism and later National Socialism created what Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister, called the ‘steel-like romanticism of the twentieth century’. By associating technology with the Germans, rather than the Jews, with beautiful form rather than the formlessness of the market, and with a strong state rather than a predominance of economic values and institutions, these right-wing intellectuals reconciled Germany’s strength with its romantic soul and national identity.”
Publisher Cambridge University Press, 1985
ISBN 0521338336, 9780521338332
251 pages
Reviews: R.J. Overy (English Historical Review), Geoff Eley (Telos).
Commentary: Thomas Rohkraemer (Contemporary European History).
Andreas Killen: Berlin Electropolis: Shock, Nerves, and German Modernity (2006)
Filed under book | Tags: · 1880s, 1890s, 1900s, 1910s, berlin, city, electricity, germany, history, modernity, neurasthenia, psychiatry, telephone, weimar republic
“Berlin Electropolis ties the German discourse on nervousness in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to Berlin’s transformation into a capital of the second industrial revolution. Focusing on three key groups—railway personnel, soldiers, and telephone operators—Andreas Killen traces the emergence in the 1880s and then later decline of the belief that modernity caused nervous illness. During this period, Killen explains, Berlin became arguably the most advanced metropolis in Europe. A host of changes, many associated with breakthroughs in technologies of transportation, communication, and leisure, combined to radically alter the shape and tempo of everyday life in Berlin. The resulting consciousness of accelerated social change and the shocks and afflictions that accompanied it found their consummate expression in the discourse about nervousness.”
Wonderfully researched and clearly written, this book offers a wealth of new insights into the nature of the modern metropolis, the psychological aftermath of World War I, and the operations of the German welfare state. Killen also explores cultural attitudes toward electricity, the evolution of psychiatric thought and practice, and the status of women workers in Germany’s rapidly industrializing economy. Ultimately, he argues that the backlash against the welfare state that occurred during the late Weimar Republic brought about the final decoupling of modernity and nervous illness.
Publisher University of California Press, 2006
Weimar and Now: German Cultural Criticism, Volume 38
ISBN 0520931637, 9780520931633
303 pages
review (Eric J. Engstrom, H-German)
review (Harry Oosterhuis, History of Psychiatry)