Dramaturgical, Theoretical, and Musical Associations between Max Brand’s Maschinist Hopkins and Alban Berg’s Operas

In the German-speaking countries during the morally uninhibited years of the Weimar Republic, the opposing cultural epochs of Expressionism and Neue Sachlichkeit dominated the aesthetic landscape. Opera was a central proponent of both movements, as implemented by the Expressionist practitioners and those who favored the subsequent topical and objectifying Zeitoper that sought to move away from representations of psychological distortion to depict social realism that emphasized mechanical technology and lighter, popular narrative themes. Max Brand’s famous Zeitoper, Maschinist Hopkins, will be analyzed to illustrate how it bore fundamental trace elements back to Alban Berg’s Expressionist opera Wozzeck, and likewise, how Hopkins in turn influenced Berg’s second opera Lulu, to constitute a linear association of narrative, music, and theatrical design that simultaneously conformed to and defied the operatic models that all three operas are historically associated with. It will also be suggested that both composers were consequentially influenced by Richard Wagner, promoting vestiges of an even older lineage, which contributed to this association between the three operas at a time when Wagner was less applicable to the trends of innovation and progress.

Visualizing Disease and ‘Depravity’ in the Weimar Republic: The Film Roles and Dance Performances of Anita Berber and Otto Dix’s Bildnis der Tänzerin Anita Berber

During Germany’s Weimar Republic (1918–33), women who did not conform to conventional expectations for “proper” female behaviour were met with suspicion and criticism. Due to their embrace of sexual liberation and economic independence, interwar New Women were often unfairly associated with prostitutes and cultural degeneration. Anita Berber, a drug-addicted nude dancer and actress in multiple Aufklärungsfilme, was regarded as the embodiment of debauched modern womanhood. However, her persona intrigued Neue Sachlichkeit artist, Otto Dix, who enjoyed offending bourgeois sensibilities. Dix captured her likeness in the painting Bildnis der Tänzerin Anita Berber (1925) but altered her features to make her look aged and sickly. Amid growing bourgeois fears about postwar societal decay, Dix utilized Berber’s painted body to engage Weimar discourses about the threat of the sexually liberated Neue Frau, the pervasiveness of the so-called depravity of metropolitan life, and the fear of the loosening grip of patriarchal social control.

On the Paradigmatic Influence of the Bauhaus in the Nordic Countries

Presented here is a brief review of the route for and delayed time factor of Bauhaus influences, in particular via architectural journals, into the Nordic countries, as well as some examples of contemporary influence of the Bauhaus Dessau building’s plan form from 1926 in the public building type, the city hall. A question being raised is what types of assimilation can be noted, and not least, where and why they occur. By the 1950s, is it a consolidation of impulses and/or a changed paradigm for compositional analysis that we see? It turns out that there are clear examples of such influence notably in Finland both in competition projects from the 1930s and in the odd completed building, such as the town hall in the municipality of Valkeakoski, 1950-56. Here one also sees examples of architectonic solutions originating in the Deutscher Werkbund, founded in 1907, and subsequently in the Neue Sachlichkeit/New Objectivity ideology developed in 1923-33. The Deutscher Werkbund in its turn was influenced by innovative designer Peter Behrens and his AEG Turbine Factory in Berlin from 1909, as well as in architecture more directly influenced by the Bauhaus architect and leader Walter Gropius and Bauhaus ideas and practice. One such solution affecting building plans was, in particular, the side corridor system which is used in the Bauhaus bridge element. An architectonic device was the exposed staircase behind a large glass window which was to become ubiquitous. Meanwhile the glass curtain wall of course becomes a well-known feature, but as used mostly in other large-size building types. For this aspect of assimilation a major example of technologization characterized by self-serving aesthetics, in Rødovre city hall, 1954-56, in Denmark, will be discussed.

Legendarisches Erzählen und die Poetik literarischer Sachlichkeit in Joseph Roths Roman Tarabas. Ein Gast auf dieser Erde (1934)

Legendary Narrative Schemes and the Poetics of Literary ›Sachlichkeit‹ in Joseph Roth’s Novel Tarabas. Ein Gast auf dieser Erde (1934) The article examines Joseph Roth’s position on the literature of ›Neue Sachlichkeit‹ using Tarabas as an example. In the first part, it analyses the statements made in Roth’s essays and shows that the author necessarily wants the literary representation of reality to be linked to its aesthetic formation. It then goes on to examine how Tarabas draws on legendary narrative schemes in the biography of its protagonist but problematizes them with regard to the necessary observation of reality. In a concluding third step, it shows that through the person of the protagonist the novel exaggerates and thus rejects essential aspects of the anthropology of ›Neue Sachlichkeit‹.

Irmãos de Sangue: um mergulho na República de Weimar

Apresento aqui a tradução de Blutsbrüder (Irmão de Sangue). A preocupação maior neste trabalho foi encontrar o ritmo mais próximo possível do texto alemão que é leve, dinâmico, marcado por coloquialismos e pela linguagem sóbria da Nova Objetividade [Neue Sachlichkeit], movimento artístico, cultural e literário que surgiu com a Proclamação da República de Weimar, e o fim da Primeira Guerra Mundial.

CONCEPTUALIZATION OF THE NOTION “MAGICAL REALISM” IN GERMAN LITERATURE

The article is devoted to the study of magical realism in German literary criticism, the origins of the term and its conceptual principles are considered. The author of the article relies on the research of German scientists, in particular M. Scheffel, D. Kirchner, H. Roland, T.W. Leine, M. Niehaus, J. Schuster and notes the differences and contradictions in the interpretation of the term, the vagueness of the concept and its heterogeneity. It is emphasized that the period of formation of the magic-realistic method of writing in Germany in the historical perspective generally covers the period from 1920 to 1960 and includes the beginning of the era of National Socialism and the Second World War. In German literature, the term was not immediately established, its assertion and dissemination were hampered by several factors: first, its contradiction, because it combines semantically opposite concepts – “realism”, which directly correlates with reality, the true image of reality, and “magical”, based on the supernatural, fantastic, reaching beyond reality; second, the moment of its origin falls on a rather complex and contradictory period of German history, which is reluctantly mentioned or silenced; third, magical realism has sometimes been mistakenly identified with the notion of “Neue Sachlichkeit”. Analysis of all factors shows that the origin and formation of the magic-realistic method in German literature has its own characteristics and uniqueness and differs from the world-famous examples of Latin American or English literature. As a result, the author notes that German magical realism is historically determined and in many of its examples reflects the traumatic postwar experience with a pronounced inrospectivity and humanistic orientation. As an aesthetic concept, magical realism expands the boundaries of realism: by depicting the objective world in its real dimensions, it focuses its gaze on the unreality hidden behind real objects.