The Last Dwelling before the Last: Siegfried Kracauer’s Critical Contribution to the Modernist Housing Debate in Weimar Germany

2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 99-140
Author(s):  
Hans-Georg von Arburg
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Weimar Republic ◽  
Housing Crisis ◽  
Subsistence Level ◽  
Weimar Germany ◽  
Population Explosion ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Siegfried Kracauer ◽  
New Type ◽  
Big Cities

Abstract In early twentieth-century Germany a population explosion in its big cities created a housing crisis. A widespread and heavily medialized debate prompted a search for solutions and triggered a rhetoric of the last dwelling. From large communal estates to subsistence-level dwellings, a new type of housing was propagated in newspapers, magazines, exhibitions, films, guidebooks, and advertisements. Siegfried Kracauer, architect, journalist, and author, also became engaged in this debate, willfully reinterpreting New Objectivity’s aesthetics of things (Dingästhetik) both in architectural critiques for the Frankfurter Zeitung and in his novel Ginster. This article analyzes Kracauer’s critical contribution to the modernist housing debate in the Weimar Republic.

The Crisis of the Psyche and the Future of Germany: The Encounter with Freud in the Weimar Republic

2013 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 325-345 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony D. Kauders
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Weimar Republic ◽  
German Culture ◽  
Weimar Germany ◽  
The Future ◽  
Favorable Change ◽  
Younger Generation

Some two decades ago, Peter Fritzsche wrote the first of two influential essays that questioned the then common conviction that Weimar Germany was all about doom and gloom. “What is distinctive about twentieth-century German culture,” he argued, “is not simply ‘crisis’—economic, political, cultural—but the widespread consciousness of crisis and the allied conviction that these emergency conditions could be managed to Germany's advantage.” Recently, Fritzsche's view has been taken up and expanded by a younger generation of German scholars, who have detailed how “crisis” meant different things to different people, often denoting the possibility of favorable change. This insistence on “crisis” as the beginning of something (positively) new is in many ways the most far-reaching application of the anti-teleological turn in Weimar historiography.

The opera of the film? Eugen d’Albert’s Der Golem

2007 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 139-166
Author(s):  
BENJAMIN GOOSE
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Mass Culture ◽  
Weimar Republic ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Audience Appeal ◽  
Critical Responses ◽  
Post War

ABSTRACTAlthough Eugen d’Albert’s later works were a staple of new opera during the Weimar Republic, they have since been considered at best partially successful attempts to adapt his earlier and more successful ‘verismo’ idiom to the new post-war aesthetics. His 1926 opera Der Golem, however, helps to challenge this reputation. Its similarities to one of the most famous early German films, Robert Wegener’s 1920 Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam, point to an intriguing relationship with one of musical modernism’s most controversial nemeses: the cinema. An analysis of critical responses to d’Albert’s opera, read in the context of characteristic early twentieth-century debates about popularity, shows how Der Golem encouraged more complex responses to mass appeal than the clear rejection often attributed to better known figures of modernism. Although the opera both flirts with and problematises different modes of audience appeal – most notably in an early scene, which has a direct parallel in Wegener’s film – its reception avoids easy alignment with mass culture. Der Golem’s unmistakeable debt to its modernist context suggests that narratives of modernism should be able to account for d’Albert’s post-war works, rather than treating them as a throwback to the nineteenth century.

‘Words Filled With Tears’: Amorous Discourse as Lamentation in the Palaiologan Romances

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Panagiotis Agapitos
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Old French ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
New Type ◽  
Folk Poetry ◽  
Old French Romance

This chapter examines a particular way in which feelings of love are expressed in the Palaiologan romances (c. 1250–1350). This manner of expression is presented through the systematic use of an imagery and vocabulary of lamentation, that incorporates into these highly artful poetic narratives a discourse deriving from folk poetry. These amorous laments (moirologia), as they are sometimes called by the narrators or even the characters, are not direct quotations of actual folk laments or songs as folklorists in the early twentieth century believed. They are a way of presenting amorous feelings to Byzantine listeners or readers (initially within an aristocratic courtly milieu, later also within a bourgeois environment) in a manner attuned to their contemporary and specific socio-cultural context, yet structurally keeping to the conventions set by the ‘Hellenising’ novels of the Komnenian age. These folk-like songs reflect a new type of poetic and emotional sensibility in late Byzantium, partly in response to Old French romance as it was available in the thirteenth century (orally, at least), partly in response to a growing interest in ‘folk subjects’ as attested by the collections of vernacular proverbs and popular lore.

Print and the Urdu Public

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Megan Eaton Robb
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
South Asia ◽  
Local Politics ◽  
Temporal Orientation ◽  
Muslim Identity ◽  
Ethnographic Interviews ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Training Materials ◽  
New Type ◽  
Government Records

In early twentieth-century British India, prior to the arrival of digital medias and after the rise of nationalist political movements, a small-town paper from the margins became a key node for an Urdu journalism conversation with particular influence in the United Provinces and Punjab. Understanding this newspaper’s rise shows how a print public characterized by bottom-up as well as top-down approaches influenced the evolution of a new type of Urdu public in twentieth-century South Asia. Addressing a gap in scholarship on Urdu media in the early twentieth century, during the period when it underwent some of its most critical transformations, this book contributes a discursive and material analysis of a previously unexamined Urdu newspaper, Madinah, augmenting its analysis with evidence from contemporary Urdu, English, and Hindi papers; government records; private diaries; private library holdings; ethnographic interviews with families who owned and ran the newspaper; and training materials for newspaper printers. Madinah identified the Urdu newspaper conversation both explicitly and implicitly with Muslim identity, a commitment that became difficult to manage as the pro-Congress paper sought simultaneously to counter calls for Pakistan, to criticize Congress’s treatment of Muslims, and to emphasize Urdu’s necessary connection to Muslim identity. Since Madinah delineated the boundaries of a Muslim, public conversation in a way that emphasized rootedness to local politics and small urban spaces like Bijnor, this study demonstrates the necessity of considering spatial and temporal orientation in studies of the public in South Asia.

The Changing Aesthetics of Vocal Registration in the Age Of ‘Verismo’

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Gentili
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
New Techniques ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Vocal Registers ◽  
New Type ◽  
Classical Singers

Abstract The idea that classical singers should join the notes of the vocal line by maintaining a consistent vocal colour is a relatively recent historical construct. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, singers in the Italian tradition were loyal to a very different vocal aesthetic, which valued the distinct differences in timbre between different vocal registers, as this article shows through a comparative analysis of pedagogical writing and pre-1925 recordings. The latter reveal that, in the early twentieth century, old and new techniques for uniting the vocal registers coexisted, and reflected an aesthetic transition towards a more gendered quality of the operatic voice. This process was intertwined with profound transformations in Italian operatic culture. The demands of a new realistic idiom known as verismo required a new type of vocalism, which prompted singers to re-conceive the ‘art of vocal registration’.

A Pledge Unredeemed: The Housing Crisis in Weimar Germany

1970 ◽  
Vol 3 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 112-139 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dan P. Silverman
Keyword(s):  
Weimar Republic ◽  
State Governments ◽  
Housing Crisis ◽  
National Socialist ◽  
Weimar Germany ◽  
Historical Significance ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Problem Solving Process ◽  
The Military

If every German had had his own home,” wrote the National Socialist Karl Fiehler in 1932, “the revolution of 1918 would not have been possible.” Typical of the Nazi tendency toward exaggeration, Fiehler's assertion nevertheless recognized the role of housing in a stable society. Article 155 of the Weimar constitution of August 11, 1919, promised suitable housing for every German, but that promise remained unfulfilled. The Weimar regime, in fact, left many promises unfulfilled, and the collapse of the republic might be attributed to a lack of effectiveness in solving basic social and economic problems. Existing studies of the Weimar republic provide inadequate treatment of the problem-solving process employed to attack specific problems such as the housing shortage. Students of Weimar Germany have been fascinated with the beginning and the end of the republic, paying little attention to the relatively stable years from 1924 to 1929. Examination of the German housing problem will not explain why the republic fell. Historians have already supplied a rich variety of “explanations” for the fall of the republic: the burden of Versailles, reparations, inflation, depression, constitutional deficiencies, political fragmentation, and unhealthy compromises between the republic and the military, labor and management, and federal and state governments. Not everyone has been convinced. The German sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf criticizes “explanations that do not explain, statements that do not state anything.” Perhaps, as Michael Stürmer suggests, it is time to go beyond the origins and collapse of the Weimar republic. The historical significance of the Weimar republic lies in how it functioned as well as how it fell.

Not So Scary After All? Reform in Imperial and Weimar Germany

2010 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 149-172 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward Ross Dickinson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Weimar Germany ◽  
Modern Germany ◽  
Imperial Germany ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Central Piece ◽  
History Of ◽  
Exciting Development ◽  
Interpretive Frameworks

An interesting interpretive standpoint has come in recent years to characterize synthetic treatments of Imperial and Weimar Germany, and oddly, it is most often laid out in connection with discussions of reform and reformers. The history of reform in early twentieth-century Germany, we now consistently hear, is more complex than we once thought, and this fact is a central piece of evidence that early twentieth-century Germany, too, was more complex than we thought. In fact, the invocation of the sheer variety and creativity of Wilhelmine reform as a challenge to the available interpretive frameworks in the historiography on modern Germany is in danger of becoming formulaic. The available models, it appears, are unable to contain the massive proliferation of studies of the varieties of reform in Imperial Germany; they are beginning to burst at the seams. This is uniformly perceived as an exciting development, a chance to rethink modernity in Germany.

László Moholy-Nagy's New Vision and the Aestheticization of Scientific Photography in Weimar Germany

2004 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 525-556 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oliver A. I. Botar
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Weimar Germany ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Art Photography ◽  
New Vision

ArgumentI propose that both Moholy-Nagy's suggestions that products of applied, particularly scientific, photography be employed as exemplars for art photography, and his practice of integrating such applied photographs with art photographs in his publications and exhibitions, laid the groundwork for an aestheticization of scientific photography within the twentieth-century artistic avant-garde. This photographic “New Vision,” formulated in the 1920s, also effected a kind of “scientization” of art photography. Rather than Positivist mechanism, however, I argue that the science at play was “biocentrism,” the early twentieth-century worldview that can be described as Naturromantik updated by biologism. His key inspiration in this regard was one of the most important figures of biocentrism, the biologist and popular scientific writer Raoul Heinrich Francé, and his conception of Biotechnik [bionics], in which he proposed that all human technologies are based in natural technologies.The biological, pure and simple, taken as the guide.– Moholy-Nagy (1938, 198)

scholarly journals Psychological knowledge in Tatar theological heritage

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 939-961
Author(s):  
R. R. Safiullina
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Educational Institutions ◽  
Psychological Issues ◽  
Public Figures ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary Thought ◽  
New Type ◽  
Religious Ideals ◽  
Psychological Knowledge ◽  
Islamic Society

The article presents the results of the study on how the Psychological issues were reflected in Tatar literature and in book-composing traditions, in textbooks and works of Tatar scientists, teachers, religious and public figures of the early 20th century. Ideological, aesthetic and artistic features of the works of Tatar literature representatives developed in accordance with Sufi traditions, with the domination and prevalence of didactic and humanistic principles. Without losing its eastern roots, which go deep into Sufi philosophical and aesthetic thought, Tatar literature in the early twentieth century becomes susceptible to the perception and creative rethinking of new, modernist experiments. Publications by Musa Bigiev, M. al-Gaffari, and others, which appeared in the early twentieth century, devoted to the problems of creating high art, in which religious ideals of Islamic society would be expressed and which would contribute to religious reform, were an important factor that played a role in the development of Tatar theoretical and literary thought in the early twentieth century, where there is a special interest in the psychological direction in Russian literature studies. At the same time, translated essays devoted to the issues of Psychology appear on the pages of Tatar periodicals; a number of educational institutions of a new type begin to teach these subjects. Some authors of tutorials seek to use language and speech techniques in their texts to influence and convey information to students, in the form of Psychological Pedagogy methods such as observation, conversation and analysis.

Some Polish Composers of To-Day

Tempo ◽  
1948 ◽  
pp. 25-28
Author(s):  
Andrzej Panufnik
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Fertile Soil ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Progressive Group ◽  
Karol Szymanowski

It is ten years since KAROL SZYMANOWSKI died at fifty-four. He was the most prominent representative of the “radical progressive” group of early twentieth century composers, which we call “Young Poland.” In their manysided and pioneering efforts they prepared the fertile soil on which Poland's present day's music thrives.

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