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List of contents
Introduction: Welcome to the Resistance!, Deborah Ascher Barnstone (University of Technology Sydney, Australia) and Elizabeth Otto (State University of New York at Buffalo, USA)
1. How Art Resists, Deborah Ascher Barnstone (University of Technology Sydney, Australia) and Elizabeth Otto (State University of New York at Buffalo, USA)
Art That Alters Worldviews
2. Cut with the Kitchen Knife: Visualizing Politics in Berlin Dada, Patrizia McBride (Cornell University, USA)
3. Existence-Minimum Architecture Walter Gropius’s Dammerstock, 1929, Kevin Berry (University of Pennsylvania, USA)
4. Authority and Ambiguity: Three Sculptors in National Socialist Germany, Nina Lubbren (Anglia Ruskin University, UK)
Art That Inspires Action
5. Teach Your Children Well: Hermynia Zur Mühlen, George Grosz, and the Art of Radical Pedagogy in Germany between the World Wars, Barbara McCloskey (University of Pittsburgh, USA)
6. Parting Shots: Ella Bergmann Michel’s Wahlkampf 1932 (Letzte Wahl), Jennifer Kapczynski (Washington University In St. Louis, USA)
7. War Feeds its People Better: Meryl Streep, Brecht and the Limits of Revolutionary Theater, Noah Soltau (Carson-Newman University, UK)
Art That Critiques Symbols
8. Montage as Meme: Learning from the Radical Avant-Gardes, Sabine Kriebel (University College Cork, Ireland)
9. On the Subversiveness of Two Silverpoints by Otto Dix, James van Dyke (University of Missouri, USA)
10. A Whisper Rather than a Shout: Ursula Wilms and Heinz Hallmann’s Topography of Terror, Kathleen James-Chakraborty (University College Dublin, Ireland)
Art That is Created in Acts of Resistance
11. From Anti-Nazi Postcards to Anti-Trump Social Media: Resistance, Opposition, or Cold Comfort? Peter Chametzky (University of South Carolina, USA)
12. Opera as Resistance: Helmut Lachenmann’s Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern, Joy Calico (Vanderbilt University, USA)
13. Montage as a Form of Aesthetic Resistance Today: Marcel Odenbach and Thomas Hirschhorn, Verena Krieger (University of Jena, Germany)
List of Contributors
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Deborah Ascher Barnstone is Professor and Head of Architecture at the University of Sydney, Australia. Barnstone is a licensed architect in Germany, holds a Master of Architecture degree from Columbia University, and holds a PhD from TU Delft. Her recent monograph works include Beyond the Bauhaus: Cultural Modernity in Breslau, 1918-1933 (2016), Art and Resistance in Germany (2018), and The Break with the Past: Avant-garde Architecture in Germany, 1910-1925 (2019). She co-edits Bloomsbury's Visual Cultures and German Contexts book series.Elizabeth Otto is Associate Professor of Art History and Visual Studies, State University of New York at Buffalo, USA
Summary
In light of the recent rise of right-wing populism in numerous political contexts and in the face of resurgent nationalism, racism, misogyny, homophobia, and demagoguery, this book investigates how historical and contemporary cultural producers have sought to resist, confront, confound, mock, or call out situations of political oppression in Germany, a country which has seen a dramatic range of political extremes during the past century.
While the current turn to nationalist populism is global, it is perhaps most disturbing in Germany, given its history with its stormy first democracy in the interwar Weimar Republic; its infamous National Socialist (Nazi) period of the 1930s and 1940s; and its split Cold-War existence, with Marxist-Leninist Totalitarianism in the German Democratic Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany’s barely-hidden ties to the Nazi past.
Equally important, Germans have long considered art and culture critical to constructions of national identity, which meant that they were frequently implicated in political action. This book therefore examines a range of work by artists from the early twentieth century to the present, work created in an array of contexts and media that demonstrates a wide range of possible resistance.
Foreword
Explores how cultural producers have resisted, confounded, mocked, or called out diverse forms of political oppression in Germany.
Additional text
This collection of originally researched essays sheds new light on art in and as resistance across Germany’s long twentieth century, providing a critical vocabulary for the analysis of art as politics and politics as artistic expression from the Weimar and Nazi periods to contemporary movements against right-wing nationalism. This volume will be indispensable in understanding Germany’s particular place in the landscape of artistic resistance, from everyday registers of artistic action to the high art of leading sculptors and painters, graphic and collage artists, filmmakers and architects.
