Research on the history, culture and society of the Weimar Republic
This new book on Leni Riefenstahl’s extensive body of work promises to analyze the ‘often forgotten obstinacy and forwardness’ of her art without ignoring its political functions.
Markwart Herzog, Mario Leis: Kunst und Ästhetik im Werk Leni Riefenstahls
Weimar cinema has become a very dynamic field of research over the last few years. One of the most important contributions surely is Anton Kaes’ Shell Shock Cinema: Weimar Culture and the Wounds of War, but The Many Faces of Weimar Cinema. Rediscovering Germany’s Filmic Legacy (ed. by Christian Rogowski), Stephen Brockmann’s A Critical History of German Film and Tobias Nagl’s Die unheimliche Maschine: Rasse und Repräsentation im Weimarer Kino also add significant new insight into the cinematic culture of the interwar years.
The most interesting current in recent scholarship is the critical reassessment of the traditional canon of Weimar cinema that focused too much on modernist masterpieces like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and M. Brigitte Braun’s research on local and regional film is noteworthy in this respect.
WEIMAR PUBLICS/WEIMAR SUBJECTS. Rethinking the Political Culture of Germany in the 1920s (ed. by Kathleen Canning, Kerstin Barndt, and Kristin McGuire) is a collection of ‘interdisciplinary scholarship on Weimar political culture […] uncovering arenas of conflict and change that had not been studied closely before, such as gender, body politics, masculinity, citizenship, empire and borderlands, visual culture, popular culture and consumption.’
Contributions include:
Anton Kaes: The Return of the Undead: Weimar Cinema and the Great War
Thomas Mergel: High Expectations – Deep Disappointment: Structures of the Public Perception of Politics in the Weimar Republic
Peter Fritzsche: The Economy of Experience in Weimar Germany
Kathleen Canning: Claiming Citizenship: Suffrage and Subjectivity in Germany after the First World War
Weimar culture has often been portrayed quite one-dimensionally as a ‘dance on the volcano’, a surge of avant-garde, high art before the backdrop of political and economic crisis. The contributors to the new publication Weimar Culture Revisited (ed. by John A. Williams) take a different apporach:
‘Since the 1990s there has been a dramatic shift in the research on culture in general away from the strict focus on high arts and literature to everyday popular culture. A younger generation of scholars now takes the broad view of culture as not merely the work of elite artists and intellectuals, but as constructed in everyday practice and thorough popular participation.’
Professor Erica Carter, expert on Béla Balázs’ early film theory, will give a seminar on her recent research titled ‘Melodrama and the Emigré Audience: Case Studies from 1930s Film’ at the Institute at Germanic & Romance Studies in London on 14 April 2011.
Much has been published on Weimar cinema, but the question of race has been neglected until now. This new book sheds some light on this issue:
Tobias Nagl: Die unheimliche Maschine: Rasse und Repräsentation im Weimarer Kino
