ARTH 500
Clark Visiting Professor Seminar: Art, Media, and Politics in the Weimar Republic Fall 2024
Division I
Cross-listed

In the fraught context of Germany between its defeat in the First World War in 1918 and the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, arguments about art, arguments about media, and arguments about politics were inextricably intertwined. Many saw the modernized city together with recently developed media such as film, radio, and the photographically illustrated magazine as transforming not only art, but also politics, sense perception, and the nature of subjectivity. In this course, we study signal works created in Germany during the Weimar Republic to understand the relations among aesthetics, politics, and media both old and new at this pivotal moment. The texts and films that we will examine will afford us a broad view of some of the most interesting and pertinent aspects of Weimar-era debates regarding the nature of gender and sexuality, the relation between the “German” and the “foreign,” and the role in modernity of the artist and the work of art. We will study the writings of Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, and Bertolt Brecht, writers who were formed by their participation in Weimar debates, then driven into exile by the rise of the Nazis, and whose texts have had a profound impact on contemporary thinking about art, media, and politics.