The Divided Heritage: Themes and Problems in German Modernism

Within a wide-ranging, interdisciplinary discussion, The divided heritage considers twentieth-century German art in its social and political context. It focuses on the problems of German cultural production, rather than on a narrative of styles and movements, and it applies both social history and critical theory to an investigation of the visual arts. The collected essays are arranged in four heavily illustrated groups, each drawing attention to the cultural continuities and disjunctures of the period. The first set looks at the issue of cultural disruption, on both a social and political and a conceptual level; the second discusses the effect of representation of gender on the continuity of cultural history; the third highlights the variants within historical patterns of patronage; the city in German social and cultural theory and its place in the world of visual representation. The volume editor brings together the views expressed in an introductory chapter.

Table of Contents:
List of illustrations; General introduction Irit Rogoff; Part I. The Divided Heritage: 1. Introduction - against the cliché of constants beyond history Klaus Herding; 2. A historical continuity of disjunctures Walter Grasskamp; 3. Absent guests - art, truth and paradox in the art of the German Democratic Republic David Elliott; 4. Post-war debates - Wols and the German reception of Sartre Franz-Joachim Verspohl; 5. Habermas and postmodernism Martin Jay; Part II. Images and Identities: 6.Introduction Maud Lavin and Irit Rogoff; 7. Strategies of pleasure and deconstruction - Hannah Höch's photomontages in the Weimar years Maud Lavin; 8. The anxious artist - ideological mobilisations of the self in German Modernism Irit Rogoff; 9. The female artist - attitudes and positions in West German feminist art after 1968 Gerlinde Gabriel; Part III. Artist/Patron/State: 10. Official support and bourgeois opposition in Wilhelminian culture Sebastian Müller; 11. Art and oppression in fascist Germany Hans-Ernst Mittig; 12. Patterns of post-war patronage Carla Schulz-Hoffmann; Part IV. The City: 13. Berlin 1870–1945 - an introduction framed by architecture Iain Boyd Whyte; 14. The centrality of the city in social theory Ira Katznelson; 15. The painted city as nature and artifice Jill Lloyd; 16. Town planning and architecture in Berlin 1945–1985 Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani; 17. Representing Berlin: urban ideology and aesthetic practice Rosalyn Deutsche; Notes; Index.

Review :
"...offers provovative...analyses of German art in the context of the multifaceted problems of German identity." Katherine Roper, German Studies Review