Weimar Surfaces: Urban Visual Culture in 1920s Germany(27 Weimar & Now: German Cultural Criticism)

Germany of the 1920s offers a stunning moment in modernity, a time when surface values first became determinants of taste, activity, and occupation: modernity was still modern, spectacle was still spectacular. Janet Ward's luminous study revisits Weimar Germany via the lens of metropolitan visual culture, analyzing the power that 1920s Germany holds for today's visual codes of consumerism.

Table of Contents:
List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction. Modern Surface and Postmodern Simulation: A Retrospective Retrieval Agendas of Surface and Simulacrum Weimar Surfaces Now Tactility in the City Exhibiting Superficies Philosophies of Counterfeit Resistances to Weimar Surface Surface, Academy, and World 1. Functionalist Facades: The Reformation of Weimar Architecture The Building's New Face Decoration Do's and Don'ts Brave New World Glass Culture The Pains of Tabula Rasa Surface Art at Home Fashioning the Female Body 2. Electric Stimulations: The Shock of the New Objectivity in Weimar Advertising Advertising as Power Electric Modernity The Architecture of Light Shock Treatments "Light Lures People," Rejecting the Modern The Embrace of the Avant-Garde Postmodernity and the Space of Advertising 3. Into the Mouth of the Moloch: Weimar Surface Culture Goes to the Movies From Caligari-Effect to Film-Set Omnipotence Kracauer versus the Weimar Film City Celebratory Film Streets The Weimar Movie Palaces: Facades on Facades "The Total Artwork of Effects," Cinema and the Secularization of Ritual 4. The Display Window: Designs and Desires of Weimar Consumerism The Phantasmagoria of Selling Through the Looking Glass The Opening in the Wall Window Techniques The Display Window as Mechanical-Age Artwork Transparencies of Truth and Lie Mannequins on Both Sides of the Glass The Murderer at the Window Post-Wall Re-Creations Appendix: Selected Weimar Periodicals and Newspapers Notes Illustration Sources Index

About the Author :
Janet Ward is Associate Professor of German Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She is the coeditor of Agonistics: Arenas of Creative Contest (1997), co-editor of the forthcoming German Studies in the Post-Holocaust Age: The Politics of Memory, Identity, and Ethnicity (2001) and is currently writing a book on post-Wall architecture in Berlin

Review :
"This outstanding book has retrieved all the luminous qualities of its subject matter to produce an astonishing revelation of gleaming appearances on splendid display. It is unrivalled by any previous study." - Marcus Bullock, coeditor of Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings 1913-26 "Weimar Surfaces creates provocative new connections between the historical constellations that found a privileged expression in Weimar Berlin and the more contemporary debates on the legacies of modernism and modernity. A compelling study." - Sabine Hake, author of The Cinema's Third Machine "Janet Ward's study of Weimar architecture and design is the most comprehensive and integrated study of the surface of Weimar experience yet written.... A first-rate and stimulating book." - Sander L. Gilman, coauthor of Hysteria Beyond Freud"