Enemy of Secrets: Transparency and Displacement in Interwar Glass
Abstract Glass is magic. Not quite liquid, not quite solid, it is a shape-shifter. A curious displacer, it dislodges space while itself appearing almost absent, optically permeable—ghostly. Glass’s unique conflation of materiality and immateriality recommended it for both practical and conceptual exploitation during the modern period. This essay considers glass objects and architecture produced in Germany during the Interwar years as both reactions to the cataclysms of World War I and responses to the shift in political values that fueled the advent of the Third Reich. It traces both glass’s own power to displace—to shift and change the cultural landscape of modernity—and its paradoxical powerlessness to resist its own displacement: its gradual evacuation of color, texture and presence—and the cultural and political consequences.