Veronika Fuechtner: Berlin Psychoanalytic. Psychoanalysis and Culture in Weimar Republic Germany and Beyond (2011)
Filed under book | Tags: · 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, art history, berlin, germany, history, modernism, psychoanalysis, psychology, weimar republic
One hundred years after the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute was established, this book recovers the cultural and intellectual history connected to this vibrant organization and places it alongside the London Bloomsbury group, the Paris Surrealist circle, and the Viennese fin-de-siècle as a crucial chapter in the history of modernism. Taking us from World War I Berlin to the Third Reich and beyond to 1940s Palestine and 1950s New York—and to the influential work of the Frankfurt School—Veronika Fuechtner traces the network of artists and psychoanalysts that began in Germany and continued in exile. Connecting movements, forms, and themes such as Dada, multi-perspectivity, and the urban experience with the theory and practice of psychoanalysis, she illuminates themes distinctive to the Berlin psychoanalytic context such as war trauma, masculinity and femininity, race and anti-Semitism, and the cultural avant-garde. In particular, she explores the lives and works of Alfred Döblin, Max Eitingon, Georg Groddeck, Karen Horney, Richard Huelsenbeck, Count Hermann von Keyserling, Ernst Simmel, and Arnold Zweig.
Publisher University of California Press, 2011
Volume 43 of Weimar and Now: German Cultural Criticism
ISBN 0520258371, 9780520258372
248 pages
PDF (updated on 2012-7-18)
Comment (0)Matthew Biro: The Dada Cyborg: Visions of the New Human in Weimar Berlin (2009)
Filed under book | Tags: · 1920s, 1930s, avant-garde, berlin, cyborg, dada, germany, weimar republic
Finding the cyborg in early twentieth-century German art
In an era when technology, biology, and culture are becoming ever more closely connected, The Dada Cyborg explains how the cyborg as we know it today actually developed between 1918 and 1933 when German artists gave visual form to their utopian hopes and fantasies in a fearful response to World War I.
In what could be termed a prehistory of the posthuman, Matthew Biro shows the ways in which new forms of human existence were imagined in Germany between the two world wars through depictions of cyborgs. Examining the work of Hannah Höch, Raoul Hausmann, George Grosz, John Heartfield, Otto Dix, and Rudolf Schlichter, he reveals an innovative interpretation of the cyborg as a representative of hybrid identity, as well as a locus of new modes of awareness created by the impact of technology on human perception. Tracing the prevalence of cyborgs in German avant-garde art, Biro demonstrates how vision, hearing, touch, and embodiment were beginning to be reconceived during the Weimar Republic.
Biro’s unique and interdisciplinary analysis offers a substantially new account of the Berlin Dada movement, one that integrates the group’s poetic, theoretical, and performative practices with its famous visual strategies of photomontage, assemblage, and mixed-media painting to reveal radical images of a “new human.”
Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 2009
ISBN 0816636206, 9780816636204
318 pages
PDF (updated on 2012-7-25)
Comment (0)Frances Guerin: A Culture of Light: Cinema and Technology in 1920s Germany (2005)
Filed under book | Tags: · 1920s, cinema, film, film history, germany, silent cinema, technology, weimar republic
Cinema is a medium of light. And during Weimar Germany’s advance to technological modernity, light – particularly the representational possibilities of electrical light – became the link between the cinema screen and the rapid changes that were transforming German life.
In Frances Guerin’s compelling history of German silent cinema of the 1920s, the innovative use of light is the pivot around which a new conception of a national cinema, and a national culture emerges. Guerin depicts a nocturnal Germany suffused with light – electric billboards, storefronts, police searchlights – and shows how this element of the mise-en-scene came to reflect both the opportunities and the anxieties surrounding modernity and democracy. Guerin’s interpretations center on use of light in films such as Schatten (1923), Variete (1925), Metropolis (1926), and Der Golem (1920). In these films we see how light is the substance of image composition, the structuring device of the narrative, and the central thematic concern.
This history relieves German films of the responsibility to explain the political and ideological instability of the period, an instability said to be the uncertain foundation of Nazism. In unlocking this dubious link, A Culture of Light redefines the field of German film scholarship.
Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 2005
ISBN 0816642869, 9780816642861
314 pages
PDF (updated on 2014-9-5)
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