German Visual Culture - Böcker

Who is «German»? What defines «Germanness»? These questions about national identity have continued to confound both Germans and foreign observers in light of Germany’s complex history: its changing borders between 1871 and 1989 make even a geographic definition of the nation complex, let alone allowing for a clear definition of the national character. Questions about German identity continue to play out not only in political discussions but also in visual cultural forms. This essay collection examines the multi-faceted nature of German identity through the lens of myriad forms of visual representation. The contributors explore the nature of German national identity in different historical periods from the Middle Ages to the present and consider how conceptions of that identity have been depicted across the broad spectrum of visual culture: from painting to sculpture, advertising to architecture, television and film to installation art. Because of the unusual approach, the essays address broad questions about identity formation, authenticity, and affirmation in the German context. Together, the essays in this volume demonstrate the complexities of identity construction and offer new insights into the «German Question» from the perspective of visual culture.

This book is a cutting-edge, interdisciplinary collection of essays by some of today’s most forward-thinking scholars. The contributors explore the ways in which the prefix «trans» erupts German identity and the identity of Germany itself. The volume calls German identity into question and examines the ways in which the prefix «trans» is deployed to these ends in relation to national borders, historical limits, political institutions, social practices, and forms of cultural and aesthetic expression. The collection reveals the ways in which the transcendence of national, corporeal, disciplinary, and institutional limits is embodied by the use of the prefix «trans»– and has the potential to do so much more.The volume engages the multifaceted nature of «trans»– and a Germanness that defies geography – to explore how Germans and Germany are increasingly situated «beyond» limits. Collectively, these investigations reveal a radical discourse of Germanness, a discourse with significant implications for historical and contemporary German self-understanding.The book asks the following: What is German identity beyond geography? And what are the promises and perils for Germany, and German identity, in becoming transGerman?

«Compressed Utterances brings focused attention to collage in a Germanic context, whose contours and impact are still so little appreciated. As this stunning volume shows, collage serves as a key medium not only for understanding art historical developments but social and political transformations as well, often embodying the dynamic forces of avant-garde criticality.»(Thomas O. Haakenson, Associate Professor, History of Art andVisual Culture, California College of the Arts)　«A deep dive into the paradigmatic medium of the twentieth century, Compressed Utterances is the foundational text of the growing field of collage studies. The book’s established and emerging authors investigate an astonishing range of previously unknown collage work to explore German artists’ and writers’ deployment of this medium as appropriative, intertextual, alienating, and temporally slippery.»(Elizabeth Otto, Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art,The University at Buffalo, State University of New York)　Composite pictures create narratives and images from many fragments. They turn often disparate and juxtaposing images and text into a singular image or message. Collage makes from the broken and, arguably, no other country has reflected the fractious nature of its history more than Germany.　The collage form is one of the best expressive forms to be taken up and experimented with by German artists since 1912. Compressed Utterances: Collage in a Germanic Context after 1912 brings together essays by scholars, students and curators to examine the use of collage by German-speaking artists, making in their homeland and abroad, whose works are closely connected to the tumultuous histories of Germany and neighbouring German-speaking nations since 1912 to the late 2000s.

Early twentieth-century Germany was a site of extremes, in which cultural production was entangled in the swiftly changing political and economic landscape. Radical utopias and pragmatic solutions for life and culture were proposed, modernism embraced and dramatically rejected. Britain in the same period can seem comparatively stable, a nation wedded to established cultural forms in the face of social change. Yet throughout the period, there remained a lively interchange between the two countries. This collection of essays, by scholars working between Britain and Germany, elsewhere in Europe and in North America, looks anew at the complicated cultural relationship between Britain and Germany in the years between 1919 and 1955. It sets out to explore the connections between the two countries during this time in the fields of fine art and arts institutions, architecture, design and craft, photography, art history and criticism. It explores how practitioners in the two countries learned from and influenced each other, seeking to highlight the relevance of these interchanges today.

«This book makes a strong case that memorials are embedded in local visual and historical traditions. While its comprehensive and detailed references make it a must-read for specialists, it will appeal not only to the many specialists working on memory and memorials, but also to general audiences interested in questions of visual culture and memorialization. Beautifully and engagingly written and illustrated.» (Professor Harold Marcuse, University of California, Santa Barbara)This study offers an unconventional reading of modern and postmodern German memorials from a medievalist perspective. Beginning with a memorial for German soldiers in El Alamein and continuing with memorials for victims of the Nazis in Germany, the book challenges the visual differences between modern and medieval art and transforms the interactions between the two into six productive conversations. The examples discussed move from Christian themes or visual practice directly connected to medieval art in the surrounding local urban landscape, to secular or abstract projects that seem disconnected from premodern forms and formats. The wide variety of techniques, materials, iconography, layouts, and styles demonstrates that medievalism is a method of observation, one that can underscore the links between several works of art, offer a broader context, add layers of meaning, and explore relationships with nearby visual and social environments, physical and mental landscapes, conflicts and memories. The medieval association may also contribute to a project’s potential to arouse empathy and to stand the test of time and distance from the events it is meant to recall. The book’s medieval prism will afford the reader greater insight into these works of art and a better understanding of their contribution to modern and contemporary memory culture in Germany.

Otto Dix (1891–1969) was a leading figure of the Neue Sachlichkeit movement in painting in 1920s Germany. This groundbreaking study analyses for the first time in depth the relationship between Dix’s verist-realist portrait paintings and the rapidly expanding mass media culture of the Weimar era. Focusing on a selection of portraits created in the first half of the 1920s, the book explores four specific aspects: the way in which Dix engaged with fashion and celebrity culture; how he responded to the challenge posed by photography; how he dealt with a situation where black-and-white reproductions were the most common medium through which diverse audiences encountered his work, and the ways in which Dix’s career development ran in parallel with the commentary on his artistic production in journalistic and specialist media publications. Temporality, medium-specificity and reproduction are identified as concerns that drove his aesthetic responses to a historically specific environment.New archival material, letters and interviews by the artist, and a wide range of publications by art critics, cultural theorists and art historians of the Weimar era are drawn on to reveal new information about key paintings such as Self-Portrait with Nude Model (1923) and Portrait of the Dancer Anita Berber (1925).

Although Anselm Kiefer’s work is routinely compared with the Gesamtkunstwerk, the «total work of art» pioneered by Richard Wagner, Disorders at the Borders represents the first time this relationship has been thoroughly investigated. But it is a relationship that involves much more than just aesthetics. Furthermore, it is a highly ambivalent one. The Gesamtkunstwerk was an embodiment of a certain view of nationhood, and nationhood is a concept that Kiefer has spent much of his career rendering thoroughly problematic. But Wagner’s innovative, inclusive art form was intended above all as a counter to the individualism that the composer was far from alone in identifying as the besetting sin of modernity, and that was widely thought at the time to be most evident in America. It can thus be contextualized within the long German tradition of counter-Americanism – as, to a large extent, can Kiefer. For whilst he owes his spectacular success in no small degree to the positive reception of his work in America, he has throughout his career displayed a resistance to the artistic influence of that country. Moreover, he and Wagner take a mutual stance regarding a series of questions: can art be separated from society, or the individual arts from each other? Is painting purely visual, and music purely sonic? Do things, in short, ever really exist or operate in isolation? That they answer in the negative to all of these is what, ultimately, connects Kiefer with Wagner.

«With astuteness and feeling, Stina Barchan captures the wonderful friendship between Hannah Höch and Kurt Schwitters and their artistic affinities. She deftly traces how each threaded together archival treasures and different forms of three-dimensional montage in their homes and workspaces to create living art in difficult times.»(Maud Lavin, Professor Emerita, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and author of Cut with the Kitchen Knife: The Weimar Photomontages of Hannah Höch)«Focusing on Hannah Höch’s archive (rather than her artworks) and her post-Second World War activities (rather than the Dada period), Stina Barchan bypasses conventional approaches to the artist and compellingly argues that Höch’s holistic approach to art and life in this period was among the most fundamentally subversive and radical of her career.»(Adrian Sudhalter, author of Dadaglobe Reconstructed)The archive of the German artist Hannah Höch (1889–1978) has long been an important source of material for historians researching the interwar avant-garde and artists associated with Berlin Dada. This book explores Höch’s practices of organisation when assembling the documents in her house outside Berlin from 1939 until her death. Through extensive research, the author argues that Höch’s archive should be considered not just a collection of documents but a work in its own right, intimately connected with the artist’s daily life. Noting the importance of understanding the mechanisms of this work, the book suggests that Höch took charge of both preserving and exploring the possibilities of Dada long after the group had been officially dissolved.The file that Höch assembled on her friend, the artist Kurt Schwitters (1887–1948), plays an important part in the book, its content revealing how domestic habits infused both artists’ practices. Juxtaposing Höch’s archive and Schwitters’s Merzbau, the author argues for an interactive movement between the two that has fundamental implications for how we understand both artists’ oeuvres.

Who is «German»? What defines «Germanness»? These questions about national identity have continued to confound both Germans and foreign observers in light of Germany’s complex history: its changing borders between 1871 and 1989 make even a geographic definition of the nation complex, let alone allowing for a clear definition of the national character. Questions about German identity continue to play out not only in political discussions but also in visual cultural forms.This essay collection examines the multi-faceted nature of German identity through the lens of myriad forms of visual representation. The contributors explore the nature of German national identity in different historical periods from the Middle Ages to the present and consider how conceptions of that identity have been depicted across the broad spectrum of visual culture: from painting to sculpture, advertising to architecture, television and film to installation art. Because of the unusual approach, the essays address broad questions about identity formation, authenticity, and affirmation in the German context. Together, the essays in this volume demonstrate the complexities of identity construction and offer new insights into the «German Question» from the perspective of visual culture.

Otto Dix fought in the First World War for the better part of four years before becoming one of the most important artists of the Weimar era. Marked by the experience, he made monumental, difficult and powerful works about it. Whereas Dix has often been presented as a lone voice of reason and opposition in Germany between the wars, this book locates his work squarely in the mainstream of Weimar society. Informed by recent studies of collective remembrance, of camaraderie, and of the popular, working-class socialist groups that commemorated the war, this book takes Dix’s very public, monumental works out of the isolation of the artist’s studio and returns them to a context of public memorials, mass media depictions, and the communal search for meaning in the war. The author argues that Dix sought to establish a community of veterans through depictions of the war experience that used the soldier’s humorous, grotesque language of the trenches and that deliberately excluded women and other non-combatants. His depictions were preoccupied with heteronormativity in the context of intimate touch and tenderness between soldiers at the front and with sexual potency in the face of debilitating wounds suffered by others in the war.

How does the visual nature of spectacle inform the citizenry, destabilize the political, challenge aesthetic convention and celebrate cultural creativity? What are the limits – aesthetic, political, social, cultural, economic – of spectacle? How do we explain the inherently exclusionary, revolutionary, dehumanizing and utopian elements of spectacle?In this book, authors from the fields of cultural studies, cinema studies, history and art history examine the concept of spectacle in the German context across various media forms, historical periods and institutional divides. Drawing on theoretical models of spectacle by Guy Debord, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Jonathan Crary and Michel Foucault, the contributors to this volume suggest that a decidedly German concept of spectacle can be gleaned from critical interventions into exhibitions, architectural milestones, audiovisual materials and cinematic and photographic images emerging out of German culture from the Baroque to the contemporary.

The Doppelgänger – the double, twin, mirror image or alter ego of someone else – is an ancient and universal theme that can be traced at least as far back as Greek and Roman mythology, but is particularly associated with two areas of study: psychology, and German literature and culture since the Romantic movement. Although German language literature has been a nexus for writing on the Doppelgänger, there is a paucity of scholarly work treating a broader selection of cultural products from the German-speaking world. The essays in this volume explore the phenomenon of the double in multiple aspects of German visual culture, from traditional art forms like painting and classical ballet to more contemporary ones like film, photography and material culture, and even puppet theatre. New ways of understanding the Doppelgänger emerge from analyses of various media and time periods, such as the theme of the double in a series of portraits by Egon Schiele, the doubling of silk by rayon in Weimar Germany and its implications for class distinctions in Germany, and the use of the x-ray as a form of double in Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain and Christoph Schlingensief’s performance art.