Week 9

The Golden Years of Weimar

Die Sinfonie der Grosstadt, 1927http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYKu5zegpfc

Weimar Culture

• High vs. Low Culture • Mass culture and the Avant-Garde• Clash of values and new expectations • The Individual vs. the Collective• Social tensions and class stability• Mass Consumption & Modernisation• Technology and its repercussions

Avant-Garde Movements

Bruno Taut’s Glass Pavilion

The First International Dada Fair, Berlin, 1920

Dadaism

Expressionist Architecture

The Einstein Tower in Potsdam (1919-20),designed by Erich Mendelsohn

The Chilehaus in Hamburg (1922-24),

designed by Fritz Höger

Expressionist Film

Scenes from Das Cabinet des Dr Caligari (1920)Nosferatu (1922), directed by F. W. Murnau

The ‘Tower of Babel’ from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927)

Expressionist Theatre• Ernst Toller, Die

Wandlung (Transformation, 1919).

• George Kaiser, Die Koralle (1917), Gas (1918) & Gas II (1920).

The director and impressario Max Reinhardt(1873-1943) did much to popularize an Expressionist

aesthetic in the theatre of the Weimar Republic

Union of Art and Technology

Bauhaus, 1919-1933

Bauhaus, Dessau

Social Critique in the Arts

Neue Sachlichkeit / New Objectivity

Otto DixSkat Players

1920

Großstadt (Metropolis) Triptych (1927-28) by Otto Dix

Life in the Big City

The Pillars of the Establishment (1926) by George Grosz

Three Whores (1926) by Otto Dix

Industriebauen (1920) by Georg Scholz and Deutsche Familie (1932) by Adolf Uzarski

Satires of Middle Class Life

Mass Culture and Entertainment

Der Blaue Engel / The Blue Angel, 1930

• Directed by Joseph von Sternberg

• Starred Emil Jannings & Marlene Dietrich

• The sexually liberated woman!

Metropolis, 1927

• Directed by Fritz Lang• Heady embrace of

technology and the machine world alongside its threat to humanity

• The logical conclusion: harmonization of labor and capital

Revue Nègre

Josephine Baker

Tiller Girls

Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times, 1936

Book ReviewDue: Monday in Lecture, Week 1, Term 2

• You may choose any book that is at least 200 pages and has been published since the year 2000.

• The purpose of a book review is to provide a summary of the work, evaluate its strengths and weaknesses, and, most importantly, present your overall assessment of the work.

• Towards this assessment, you should discuss one or more of the following: the book’s audience, its usefulness (for scholars, students, the general public), and its contribution to the field. 

Sample Book ReviewAvailable on Jstor:

Hannah Schissler, “Review: Rebuilding West German Society: A Gendered View”, Reviewed work: Protecting Motherhood: Women and the Family in the Politics of Postwar West Germany by Robert G. Moeller

Central European History, Vol. 26, No. 3 (1993), pp. 326-334

http://www.jstor.org/stable/4546350

Linda Gordon, “Review: Nazi Feminists?”, Reviewed work: Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family and Nazi Politics by Claudia Koonz

Feminist Review, No. 27 (Autumn, 1987), pp. 97-105http://www.jstor.org/stable/1394813?&Search=yes&term=feminists&term=gordon&term=linda&term=nazi&list=hide&searchUri=

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Robert Gellately, “Review: [untitled]”, Reviewed work: Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen

The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 69, No. 1 (Mar., 1997), pp. 187-191http://www.jstor.org/stable/2953473?&Search=yes&term=gellately&term=hitler

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