Bøker i Visual Cultures and German Con-serien

This book examines the confrontational war pictures of Otto Dix (1891-1969) and explores their role in shaping the memory of World War I in Germany from 1914 to 1936.Dix's thirty-eight months on the World War I battlefields profoundly influenced his post-war artistic career, saw him produce some of the most enduring images of the conflict and establish himself as one of Europe's leading modernists. Offering substantial new research and presenting numerous primary sources to an English readership for the first time, the book examines Dix's war pictures within the broader visual culture of war in order to assess how they functioned alternatively as cutting-edge modernist art and transgressive war commemoration. Each chapter provides a case study of the first public display of one or more of Dix's war pictures at key exhibitions and explores how their reception was subjected to changing socio-political and cultural conditions as well as divergent attitudes to the lost war.Bringing a unique perspective and original scholarship to Dix's war works, this book is essential reading for art historians of World War I and the visual culture of Weimar Germany.

How to Make the Body: Difference, Identity, and Embodiment brings together contemporary and historical readings of the body, exploring the insights and limits of established and emerging theories of difference, identity, and embodiment in a variety of German contexts. The engaging contributions to this volume utilize and challenge cutting-edge approaches to scholarship on the body by putting these approaches in direct conversation with canonical texts and objects, as well as with lesser-known yet provocative emerging forms. To these ends, the chapter authors investigate "the body" through detailed studies across a wide variety of disciplines and modes of expression: from advertising, aesthetics, and pornography, to social media, scientific experimentation, and transnational cultural forms. Thus, this volume showcases the ways in which the body as such cannot be taken for granted and surmises that the body continues to undergo constant--and potentially disruptive--diversification and transformation.

Jeanne Mammen's watercolour images of the gender-bending 'new woman' and her candid portrayals of Berlin's thriving nightlife appeared in some of the most influential magazines of the Weimar Republic and are still considered characteristic of much of the 'glitter' of that era. This book charts how, once the Nazis came into power, Mammen instead created 'degenerate' paintings and collages, translated prohibited French literature and sculpted in clay and plaster-all while hidden away in her tiny studio apartment in the heart of Berlin's fashionable west end. What was it like as a woman artist to produce modern art in Nazi Germany? Can artworks that were never exhibited in public still make valid claims to protest? Camilla Smith examines a wide range of Mammen's dissenting artworks, ranging from those created in solitude during inner emigration to her collaboration with artist cabarets after the Second World War. Smith's engaging analysis compares Mammen's popular Weimar work to her artistic activities under the radar after 1933, in order to fundamentally rethink the moral complexities of inner emigration and its visual culture. While Mammen's artistry is considered through the lens of gender politics to reveal her complex relationship with the urbanisation of her time, this book also highlights the crucial role played by a lost generation of inner émigré women artists as agents of German modernity.The examination of Mammen's life and work demonstrates the crucial role women artists played as both markers and agents of German modernity, but the double marginalisation they have nonetheless encountered as inner émigrés in recent history. It will be of interest to students of German studies, art history, literature, history, gender studies and cultural studies.

Unsettling traditional understandings of housing reform as focused on the nuclear family with dependent children, Single People and Mass Housing in Germany, 1850-1930 is the first complete study of single-person mass housing in Germany and the pivotal role this class- and gender-specific building type played for over 80 years-in German architectural culture and society, the transnational Progressive reform movement, Feminist discourse, and International Modernism-and its continued relevance.Homes for unmarried men and women, or Ledigenheime, were built for nearly every powerful interest group in Germany-progressive, reactionary, and radical alike-from the mid-nineteenth century into the 1920s. Designed by both unknown craftsmen and renowned architects ranging from Peter Behrens to Bruno Taut, these homes fought unregimented lodging in overcrowded working-class dwellings while functioning as apparatuses of moral and social control. A means to societal reintegration, Ledigenheime effectively bridged the public-private divide and rewrote the rules of who was deserving of quality housing-pointing forward to the building programs of Weimar Berlin and Red Vienna, experimental housing in Soviet Russia, Feminist collectives, accommodations for postwar "guestworkers," and even housing for the elderly today.