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.

The Sound of Life in Marcel Beyer’s Flughunde (The Karnau Tapes)

In Marcel Beyer’s celebrated Flughunde (1995), the discovery of an underground archive of sound in the aftermath of the Cold War—preserved despite strategies apparently calling for its mechanical destruction—reassigns agency and voice to instrumentalized victims of National Socialism. By highlighting the close connection between an alleged security custodian of the archive, the actual National Socialist sound cartographer Hermann Karnau, and Moreau, a character bearing a strong resemblance to the protagonist of H. G. Wells’s 1896 novel The Island of Doctor Moreau, Beyer’s novel draws attention to a utopian experiment with life that was carried out in the wake of the colonial enterprise in the Pacific and posits additional historical undertones manifested in Karnau’s National Socialist experiments with sound. Karnau’s attempt to master vocal timbre in particular foregrounds technologies that make it possible to manipulate voice and memory in the post-Fascist and post-Communist present. In spite of technological alteration, archived voices of colonial and National Socialist subjects manifest a vitalist aesthetic. With its concern for race, sound, and memory, the novel breaks new ground in telling the story of the National Socialist and colonial past in the aftermath of the Cold War.

Auf den Spuren ihrer Geschichte: Black German Detectives and the Cases of Anäis Schmitz and Fatou Fall

The various types of detective work that Black individuals and communities undertake enables them to collect evidence and knowledge and disseminate tactics for resistance. I first contextualize the advent of Black German detection in real life and then turn to fictional Black German detectives in literature and on television. In doing so, I explore the interconnectedness of Black German belonging—both real and imagined—through the act and art of detection. The earliest official, fictional Black German female detectives within these media, Anäis Schmitz and Fatou Fall, allow for an exploration of the intersectionality of race, cisgender, and heteronormative reproduction. Their introduction to this genre overlaps in the timing of their debut appearances (2019), but the characters contrast in terms of representation, due in part to the medium employed and to the racial positionality of their creators. Thus, I investigate how crime novels and crime television shows shift the representation and recognition of Black Germans but remain attuned to how institutional and historically anchored racist structures “frame” Black German belonging.

“Fruchtcocktails” and “Explosionen”: Navigating War and Destruction in Olga Grjasnowa’s Gott ist nicht schüchtern (2017)

With more than two thirds of Olga Grjasnowa’s Gott ist nicht schüchtern set in present-day Syria, the novel’s main objective is to convey to its readers a sense of the Syrian Civil War and its effects on individual lives. Grjasnowa goes to great lengths to describe the early days of the uprising, the atrocities committed by the Assad regime, and the slow but definite destruction and ultimate uninhabitability of the Syrian nation state. But the text also reveals the importance of coping mechanisms and strategies for survival and resistance. By foregrounding the quotidian spaces of everyday life and the often banal routines for navigating war and destruction, this article interrogates to what extent life under extreme conditions is still conceivable and explores what kinds of insights the depiction of war opens up for envisioning a more hospitable environment for newcomers in the host country.

DDGC and Digital Misfit Archives

In this forum contribution, the authors reflect on the founding of the Diversity, Decolonization, and the German Curriculum (DDGC) scholarly collective by considering the important role of digital venues in this endeavour. Drawing on the work of Sara Ahmed, the authors consider the individual constitutive spaces in which knowledge is created and circulated by the members of the collective as digital misfit archives. Such archives contain information unwelcome in official academic sites such as conferences and journals and are designed to centre the perspective of scholars structurally marginalized by the academy.