Weimar’s Others:

Art History, Alterity and Regionalism in Inter-War

Germany
Dorothy Price and Camilla Smith

Crushed underneath the broken marble of former empires / lies an entire narrative / of the bloody conquest /
the colonial scroll palimpsest / the interest in the unrest / the beginning and the end.1 (Philipp Khabo
Koepsell, 2014).

In 2014 the British Museum in London staged an ambitious sweep through six hundred
years of German history as told through a carefully selected range of diverse material
objects. Curated by the museum’s then director Neil MacGregor, Germany: Memories
of a Nation explored how the country had fashioned and refashioned its fragmentary
identity from the Holy Roman Empire through to unification in the 1870s, post-war
division and eventual reunification in 1989. The curatorial narrative moved boldly and
fluidly across different regions and times: visitors encountered artworks by Albrecht
Dürer, Käthe Kollwitz and Gerhard Richter; they could marvel at the technological
achievements of the Gutenberg printing press and the development of Meissen
porcelain, as well as explore modernist examples of Bauhaus design and the VW Beetle
(plate 1). Together, such objects revealed the complex jigsaw that constitutes Germany’s
ruptured past. Indeed, the historical malleability of German borders, so succinctly
mapped through material artefacts, reminded viewers of just how many of the
country’s former major polities, including the Holy Roman Empire and the Prussian
state, have long since disappeared.
As the popularity of the exhibition, its accompanying BBC radio series and
substantial monograph attested, curiosity about a country that now represents an
economic powerhouse, and which has sat at the helm of Europe since 1993, remains
unabated. Yet amidst the plethora of seminal moments in Germany’s long and
fractured history, it is the Weimar Republic above all that has received more attention
in popular culture and academic discourse since the fall of the Berlin Wall than
almost any other phase of German history.2 Germany’s fragile republic was a period of
intense creation, regular crisis and oft-cited ‘inevitable’ collapse into a dictatorship of
unprecedented extremes within modern Europe.3 As the peace-time interlude between
the First World War and the ascendancy of Hitler, it continues to yield significant
Detail from Ernest Neuschul, historical, economic and cultural lessons about Germany’s place in the matrix of
Black Mother, 1931 (plate 5). contemporary global politics.4
On the centenary of its foundation, then, it is the aim of this special issue of Art
DOI:
10.1111/1467-8365.12454 History to ask: how has the wealth of scholarship on Weimar culture from the last two
Art History | ISSN 0141-6790 and a half decades, since re-unification, contributed specifically to the discipline of art
42 | 4 | September 2019 | pages
628-651 history (as opposed to German studies, film studies, political history or performance

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1 Käthe Kollwitz, Memorial studies, for example) and vice versa? And where might art-historical research on the
Sheet for Karl Liebknecht
[Gedenkblatt für Karl Weimar Republic be heading? What, if any, are the continued resonances of art made
Liebknecht], 1919–20. during the era, well beyond the immediacy of its origins in 1920s and 1930s Germany?
Woodcut printed in black on
Japan paper, 35.6 × 49.8 cm. How might a focus on art-historical margins – what we are referring to in this special
London: The British Museum.
issue as Weimar’s ‘others’ – either change our thinking about what the Republic
was, or perhaps confirm the dominant narratives of decadent excess, moral decay
and imminent political danger that have so long defined this period of study? What
role, if any, do the Republic’s intellectuals, artists and cultural producers continue to
play in the present? This special issue explores the cultural practices, production and
reception of art from both the Republic’s cities and its rural provinces. As a de-centrist
project, it seeks what Gustav Frank has suggested ought to be an openness to diversity
in its varied explorations of Weimar visual culture.5 It does so by foregrounding in-
depth analyses of art made by historiographically under-represented Berlin-based
women such as Lotte Laserstein and Jeanne Mammen, as well as lesser-known
work by regionally-based artists including Elsa Haensgen-Dingkuhn, Gela Forster
and Heinrich Hoerle. In addition, it includes essays on the overlooked material and
iconographic contexts for the Merz collages of the more celebrated Kurt Schwitters,
as well as in-depth research on the production and appearance of Notgeld – the vast
sums of emergency money that were produced during Germany’s period of hyper-
inflation, between 1914 and 1923. It is this shift of focus, then, from the usual suspects
of Weimar cultural historiography (Otto Dix, George Grosz, Bertolt Brecht, Thomas
Mann, Marlene Dietrich, Fritz Lang and countless others – justly celebrated but

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perhaps over-determined figures from the era) that opens up further possibilities for
a varied and nuanced account of the period under investigation. It does this through
a variety of methodological lenses, from material cultural analysis to gender, queer
and disability studies. ‘Weimar’s Others’ heralds a shift from centre to periphery and
attends closely to the regional inflections and intersectional biases of art made in
Germany between the First and Second World Wars.6

Centres and Peripheries

The hasty political compromise that became the Weimar Republic was spawned in
November 1918 after the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II and the ensuing popular
revolution that swept the country. Both had been engendered by Germany’s crushing
defeat in the First World War. Yet the political struggles that followed between the
newly emergent communists and the right-wing upholders of an outmoded, pre-war
imperial order began not in the nation’s capital Berlin but in the port town of Kiel. The
republic’s regional genesis was further underscored through the choice of Weimar
as the city in which the new constitution was eventually declared on 11 August 1919.
Choosing Weimar, not the capital Berlin, for such a historically momentous political
occasion was a deliberate strategy; it shifted the values and ideals of the emergent
republic away from the extreme partisan politics of the immediately preceding bloody
civil war that had been bitterly fought on Berlin’s streets. Weimar enabled an alternative
2 Henry van de Velde, Central cultural vision for Germany’s future, away from metropolis. As a city of poets, it was
Building of the Former Art traditionally associated with the golden age of Goethe and Schiller, but it soon became
School [Hauptgebäude der
ehemaligen Kunstschule the site of the first incarnation of that quintessentially modernist institution, the
Weimar], 1904–11 Photo: Bauhaus (plate 2). One hundred years ago, in 1919, Walter Gropius literally stood at the
Tillmann Franzen/VG Bild-
Kunst, Bonn. nexus between Germany’s past, present and future. The founder and first director of

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the state-sponsored school of applied arts and design, he was also commissioned to
produce a commemorative bronze plaque marking the inauguration of the Weimar
government. The inscription was placed in the German National Theatre in which
Goethe and Schiller were most often performed and in which the new constitution
had been vigorously debated by politicians of all parties.7 Thus, from the outset both
Germany’s cultural producers and its regions were pivotal to the political visions of
a Republican future. Yet when we originally conceived this collection of essays, our
thinking was motivated by a general sense that scholarship on Weimar Germany
often conflated it with its metropolitan capital, Berlin, standing in for the entire
country.8 As the regional origins of the Republic remind us, Berlin was not the only
or even the whole story. Whilst a variety of cultural practices in outlying areas of the
country may have been inflected by aspects of Berlin’s metropolitan chic, they also
retained their own peculiar strengths and variations, some of which are explored by
our contributors. It also seemed apposite that a special issue of Art History should be
devoted to the varieties of Weimar visual culture produced during the same period that
engendered some of the key disciplinary accomplishments of the modern discipline’s
founders: Aby Warburg, Ernst Cassirer, Erwin Panofsky, Fritz Saxl, Gertrud Bing and
the so-called ‘Hamburg School’.9

Hamburg and the Survival of Art History

It was unequivocally through the vision of Hamburg-based Jewish banker-turned-
scholar, Aby Warburg, financially assisted by his brother Max, that in May 1919
the newly established University of Hamburg opened its doors for the first time.
As a member of a long-standing family from the area, it was Warburg’s mission
to overturn the city’s diminished reputation from being a purely mercantile port
peopled by intellectually impoverished traders into a municipality with scholarly
ambitions that matched its outward-facing character. By donating his personal
library, Warburg enabled the new university to become the premier centre for
humanist scholarship in inter-war Europe. Emily Levine has expertly outlined
the origins of the Hamburg School, pointing out the peculiarities of the regional
ambitions of the city and the propitious timing of its decision to establish a seat of
learning.10 Germany after the bloody civil war was ready for intellectual renewal and
cultural change. The prospect of a modern university initiated by members of the
lay public, albeit hugely financially influential ones, coincided with the humanist
ideals of the newly established democracy (in much the same way that the founding,
survival and fate of the state Bauhaus was also intimately bound to the politics of the
new order). Ernst Cassirer was appointed as the university’s first chair of philosophy
in 1919 (and ultimately rector of the University from 1929 until he went into exile in
1933).11 Although already a distinguished scholar in pre-1914 Germany, Cassirer had
until this point been unable to obtain a full professorship on account of his Jewish
identity. As Levine observes:

That the birth of Hamburg’s university coincided with that of a new age might
have been enough to land Cassirer a position there. That he promoted an
interpretation which placed German thought into the context of European
intellectual history, however, signalled the potential for a strong partnership
with Hamburg’s reimagined urban identity.12

The cosmopolitan aspirations of both republican Hamburg and the Warburg family
provided a favourable environment in which Jewish intellectual excellence could

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flourish. For many centuries prior to the country’s unification in 1871, Jews in
Germany had been denied the rights of full citizenship. By 1900, however, the
situation began to improve, although German Jews were still prohibited from
holding high offices in the military, judiciary, diplomatic service and equivalent
senior posts.13 Under the Weimar constitution, restrictions on Jewish social,
cultural and political advancement were lifted. For the first time in the nation’s
history, Jews were able to play a major role in the political, diplomatic, economic
and cultural life of their native country.14 In 1921 Erwin Panofsky joined Cassirer
as a teaching assistant and by 1928 he had become full professor. Between them,
Warburg, Cassirer, Panofsky, Gertrud Bing, Fritz Saxl (Warburg’s librarian), Edgar
Wind and others in their intellectual circle established Hamburg and in particular
the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg (Warburg Library for the Science
of Culture, abbreviated to KBW) as the pre-eminent centre in Europe for a particular
branch of art-historical enquiry. For Warburg this included a focus on the after-life
– or survival – of motifs from classical antiquity (das Nachleben der Antike) via recourse
to an interdisciplinary visual study of iconology, symbolic meaning and Pathosformeln
(pathos formulae). As Georges Didi-Huberman has commented, for Warburg
‘Nachleben meant making historical time more complex, recognising specific, non-
natural temporalities in the cultural world.’ He explains:

The surviving form does not triumphantly outlive the death of its competitors.
On the contrary, it symptomatically and phantomatically survives its own
death: disappearing from a point in history, reappearing much later at a
moment when it is perhaps no longer expected and consequently having
survived in the still poorly defined reaches of a ‘collective memory’.15

Scholars like Margaret Iversen and Didi-Huberman have expertly unravelled some
of the indeterminate impulses of Warburg’s thought and both point to the idea that
fully conscious explanations of the concept of Pathosformeln remain purposefully
elusive.16 Giorgio Agamben has suggested that it refers to ‘an indissoluble intertwining
of an emotional charge and an iconographic formula in which it is impossible to
distinguish between form and content’.17 Iversen observes that ‘Warburg thought of
antiquity as best symbolized by a Janus-faced herm […] of Apollo and Dionysus’ in
dialectical tension, one dependent upon the other and that “the pathos formulae” […]
were exemplary expressions of primitive emotion and “tragic unrest”.’ For Agamben
‘what is unique and significant about Warburg’s method as a scholar is not so much
that he adopts a new way of writing art history as that he always directs his research
toward the overcoming of the borders of art history.’18 In recent scholarship it is the
unfinished Bilderatlas (picture book) or Mnemosyne that has redirected the discipline’s
attention to this specific moment in its own historical formation.19 Begun in 1924 and
left unfinished at Warburg’s death in 1929, black-and-white reproductions of classical
and Renaissance sculptures, frescoes, Eastern and Western medieval manuscript pages,
popular prints, calendars, tapestries, astrological charts, playing cards, newspaper
clippings, stamps and advertisements were pinned in various arrangements over a
sequence of more than sixty cloth-covered boards. Neither definitively montage, nor
quite mosaic, these were images in motion – never permanently fixed and subject
to regular re-iteration. Their heterogeneity was inherently suggestive – a far cry
from the methodological system of interpretation promulgated posthumously in the
exilic aftermath of the Hamburg School. As Iversen has outlined, for several decades
after Warburg’s death Panofsky (and Gombrich after him) became responsible for

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reifying some of the key tenets of Warburg’s dialectical thinking into a more easily
manageable register of different levels of iconographic interpretation.20 Panofsky and
Gombrich’s identification of a logical set of coordinates with which to understand,
identify and taxonomize what Warburgian thought might entail was counter-intuitive.
Warburg’s ideas remain evasive – and deliberately so; value lies precisely in their
resistance to narratives of progress. Rather, it is on the taut thread between Dionysian
and Apollonian impulses where symptoms of collective pain in human culture may
be identified and critiqued; the dark and violent underside of Renaissance culture
(and latterly ‘the colonial scroll palimpsest’ of Philipp Khabo Koepsell’s epigraph) is
where redemptive possibilities might be sought. As Emily Levine has commented,
‘unfortunately for Warburg, the struggle between reason and irrationality was also
deeply personal, thwarting his productivity’, and led to a significant mental breakdown
for which he was hospitalized in Kreuzlingen between 1921 and 1924.21 It was largely
visits by, and continued belief in the scholarly enterprise of, Cassirer that enabled
Warburg to return to the library in 1925 to resume his work (before his untimely death
from a heart attack a few years later).
Levine’s richly detailed account persuasively argues for the auspicious conditions in
which Weimar cultural life could thrive in regional cities like Hamburg. In this special
issue, Hamburg signifies as a location for both the origins of art history and its limits.
By 1933 Saxl, Bing, Wind, Cassirer and the library had fled to London to escape Nazism
and Panofsky was already teaching in the USA. With Warburg dead, the revolutionary
but difficult aspects of his thinking were inevitably by-passed in favour of Panofsky’s
more systemized approach to methods of iconographic interpretation.
Returning though for a moment to Hamburg in 1919, whilst Warburg, Cassirer,
Panofsky, Saxl and their circle were mostly preoccupied in the reading room of the
KBW on Heilwigstraße, across town a young Elsa Haensgen-Dingkuhn (the subject of
Elinor Beaven’s essay in this volume) was enrolling in the newly re-opened Staatliche
Kunstgewerbeschule (State Arts and Crafts School) at Lerchenfeld in Hamburg-Nord
(now the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg or HFBK Hamburg). A new
building for the school had been inaugurated in 1913 to accommodate its growing
enrolment figures, but during the war educational activities were suspended and the
building had served as a military hospital. When it resumed its function as an art
school in 1918, the ceremonial speech dedicated to the completion of a wall painting
in the auditorium was delivered by Aby Warburg.22 Whilst it is unlikely that Haensgen-
Dingkuhn and Warburg knew each other personally, their parallel ties to the Hanseatic
city through art and its histories – as retrieved here – is a coincidence that is testament
to the role of regionalism within Weimar’s art histories and one of the strands of this
special issue.23 Indeed, the major role that towns like Hamburg, Frankfurt, Weimar,
Dresden, Munich, Mannheim and others played in the fostering of interwar Germany’s
unparalleled intellectual and artistic climate – many of which feature in the range of
essays assembled here – are central to our re-thinking the urban dynamics of the era
under investigation.

The Lure of Berlin

Cultural histories of Weimar Germany remain dominated by the inevitable lure of
Berlin.24 Undoubtedly an exemplary modern city during this period, it was a vigorous
barometer of the ways in which modernity was made manifest in post-First World
War Germany. Yet can the dominant narratives of the capital’s avant-garde adequately
represent the experiences of democracy for the German nation at large? With a
population explosion from just under two million in 1919 to well over four million

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by 1933, it was the second largest city in Europe and attracted numerous visitors of all
hues from across the continent and beyond. With its trade exhibitions, film studios,
light installations, living window displays and cross-dressing nightclubs, visitors were
‘struck dumb with amazement’.25 However, the city’s critics were quick to condemn
the overcrowding, crime and poverty that had been generated by rapid urbanization
and industrialization. In much of the masculinist culture of the era, the figure of
the prostitute who haunted the ‘Berliner Strich’ (Berlin’s red-light district) became
synonymous with the city. In gendered satirical visions of modernity, so fierce was
the competition amongst the ‘modish’ women lining the streets, that they often
outnumbered the potential clientele. For art critic and editor of the journal Kunst und
Künstler, Karl Scheffler (1869–1951), its quick construction and modern infrastructure
signified the negative eradication of past histories. Berlin became the city of ‘modern
ugliness’.26 For Georg Simmel (1858–1918), Germany’s first cultural sociologist of
modernity, it was also the site of modern alienated individualism, brought on by
the commodification of relationships as transactional exchanges within the mature
money economy.27 In many respects, the rapid urbanization and modernization that
developed in Germany overall during this period was not unlike the landscape found
elsewhere in France or Britain. Yet Germany’s defeat in war, the loss of its colonies, the
abdication of its monarchy and its failed 1918–19 revolution meant that it was marked
by political strife from the very beginning of the post-war period.
Despite or perhaps because of its bloody beginnings, the Weimar Republic
also developed into a radical testing ground for social reformism, parliamentary
democracy, mass consumerism and nationalist mobilization. A particularly revealing
episode can be found in the activities of the African Aid Association: the occupation of
the Rhineland by French colonial troops after 1918 had caused a vehement propaganda
campaign against what came to be known as the ‘schwarze Schmach’ (Black Shame) in
Germany.28 Anti-black sentiment was at its height in the immediate aftermath of the
war. Yet as Christian Rogowski has demonstrated, Black Germans mobilized and in
1918 the first self-help group for people of African descent living in Germany was
founded in Hamburg, the Afrikanischer Hilfsverein (African Aid Association). Prompted
by an attack on a fellow Black German, on 24 May 1921 the film actor Louis Brody
penned an open letter, published on behalf of the association in the Berliner Zeitung
am Mittag. He called on Germany to respect its colonial migrants ‘and not constantly
to stir up hatred against them by reporting on Black Shame’.29 He exhorted the
German populace to remember their obligations as a result of their own colonial
misadventures, particularly as their former colonial subjects now found themselves
in legal and political limbo. Brody’s letter is both extraordinary and significant in
giving voice to the concerns of Weimar Germany’s burgeoning black population at a
time when black voices were at best mute and more often than not invisible. This was
a political era in which revolutionary artists, Bauhaus architects, social democrats,
radical nationalists, Zionists, communist intellectuals, sexual reformers, ‘new women’
and avant-garde artists frequently intersected and often collided. It was a time when
Germany developed the greatest number of social housing projects in Europe and
cooking a meal efficiently was likened to the time-motion systems of Henry Ford
and Frederick Taylor.30 Sexual reform movements saw the world’s first Institute for
Sexual Science established by Magnus Hirschfeld in Berlin; Bertolt Brecht believed that
technology in the future might permit people to be taken apart and put back together
like machines. Mass sport and expressionist dance possessed the potential to rebuild a
nation, while after the Dawes Plan, American imports including jazz, the Charleston,
chewing gum, cotton, machinery and tobacco were marketed to provide succour to a

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defeated nation intent on forgetting the immediate past.31 For white women over the
age of twenty-one, article 109 of the new constitution afforded them the freedoms and,
in principle at least, the rights of suffrage and equality with white men that preceding
generations had fought for without success. Yet for most ethnic minorities living, born
or married within Weimar Germany, the promised freedoms and ideals of the new
Republic often brushed up against the entrenched Imperial legislation and conservative
regulations, particularly around fraught questions of German citizenship. Questions
about who belonged and who did not were vigorously debated with reference to the
1913 citizenship laws which promoted the principle of jus sanguinis (the law of blood)
over jus soli (law of the soil or residency). As Annemarie Sammartino has indicated,
‘German ancestry became an important test of an applicant’s suitability for German
citizenship’.32 Yet the criteria for determining who was and who was not eligible were
increasingly ambiguous. In 1920 the Reich Interior Ministry stipulated that the most
important measure was a foreigner’s ‘way of life’.33 With such loose guidelines, it was
far easier for individual states to find grounds for dismissal of applications than it was
to grant them. Those who could become citizens and those who were excluded were
determined by privileges of ethnicity and race. So what positions were left open to
those who were unable to obtain citizenship?

Weimar’s Citizens or Weimar’s Others?

The concept of ‘others’, the framing trope for this special issue, depends in any context
on one’s perspective, where one positions oneself within a dominant discourse. For
the four decades following the Second World War, art-historical scholarship on the
Weimar Republic almost exclusively celebrated its key male protagonists, George
Grosz and Otto Dix in particular. Indeed, female artists and designers such as Lotte
Laserstein and Anni Albers have only recently been re-discovered in the last few
years by major art galleries and museums in Europe and added to the ranks of other
key artists from the period.34 The gains of feminism, Jewish and queer studies in
rethinking Weimar scholarship through the lens of gender, ethnicity and sexuality
have been enormous, but art-historical research on inter-war Germany still has a
long way to go if it is to take seriously the imperatives of intersectional thinking. Such
an approach demands the ongoing interrogation of identity and its relationship to
all forms of power.35 One such area might also include a more holistic inclusion of
academic discourse on the histories and cultures of Black Germany, for example. This
field of enquiry has steadily blossomed since the 1980s, yet art history’s address to the
nexus of race, class, ableism and gender operational in art’s production before, during
and after the Weimar era remains infrequent and sporadic.36 Sara Lennox, Tobias
Nagl, Tina Campt and many others have pointed out how ‘research into the history
of the Black diaspora in Germany […] has always been confronted with a complex
epistemological framework of visibility and invisibility’.37 As Campt has observed,
being Afro-German or Black German is

at once a demand to question what constitutes Germanness and a desire to

express a relationship to blackness […] Black German identity provokes not
only a different conception of German cultural identity but, at the same time,
contests essential, phenotypical and nationalist definitions of race.38

And as Sara Lennox has commented, because the history of Black presence in Germany
is the history of individuals, ‘not a consequence of the violent mass dispersal of slavery’,
and ‘only to a lesser degree the result of the European colonization of Africa […] no

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comprehensive inclusive and continuous Black German history can as yet be written’.39
At present all that historians – and indeed art historians – can offer are Geschichtssplitter
(historical shards or fragments) pieced together from incomplete archives.40
Consequently, as Tobias Nagl has observed, it is mainly biographical accounts that
have been retrieved from official records, not in themselves without substantial
methodological problems:

There is no immediate access to a subaltern consciousness; forms of subaltern

articulation are neither transparent nor easily readable as expressions of a
logically presumed, self-identical subject of enunciation. Rather they flicker
between different poles of subjugation and subjectivation, split, highly
positioned, bearing traces of what W. E. B. Du Bois has described as the
‘peculiar sensation’ of a ‘double consciousness’.41

The archival fragments that reveal glimpses into the histories and subjectivities of
Weimar’s Black Germans offer scholars challenges but also opportunities to engage
in alternative methodological approaches. Although none of the essays collected
in this issue address Weimar culture from the perspective of post-colonialism, the
broken fragments of history inherent in the concept of Geschichtssplitter (resonant with
Warburg’s Bilderatlas) serve to remind us of the limits of our discipline. All but one of
the essays in this volume (that by Erin Sullivan Maynes) focuses on named individuals.
The narratives that unfold through the selected case studies on artists as disparate
as Kurt Schwitters, Heinrich Hoerle, Gela Forster, Jeanne Mammen, Elsa Haensgen-
Dingkuhn and Lotte Laserstein are the fragmentary narratives of only a tiny sample
of Weimar subjects caught up in the political maelstrom of the era. So, if one takes
MacGregor’s impressive curatorial project as an exemplary model of one version of
German history, as has been done here, and recalibrates aspects of it through the lens
of Black German scholarship, for example, what might Germany’s ‘memories of a
nation’ look like?
In the same year as the British Museum’s sweeping chronicle of the hegemonic
history of (white) Germany, Black German poet and activist Philipp Khabo Koepsell
and American-born, Berlin-based Asoka Esuruoso published a collection of poetry
and creative writing by black writers living in Germany. In their anthology Arriving
in the Future, Esuruoso, Khabo Koepsell and their collaborators put forward a series of
alternative experiences of home and exile that reclaim a presence for themselves and
their peers within national narratives of German identity. Esuruoso’s introductory
essay offers an incisive historical overview of the presence of people of African
descent in Germany, from black soldiers in the Imperial Roman armies to Audre
Lorde’s account of her seminal 1992 visit to Berlin, immediately after the fall of the
wall.42 Esuruoso’s opening gambit focuses on the narrative of St Maurice, a third-
century Nubian legionnaire who became central to the reign of the Holy Roman
Emperor, Otto I, from 962 to 973.43 The legend of the saint was first chronicled
between 443 and 450 by Eucherius, Bishop of Lyon.44 According to Eucherius’s
account, Mauritius (known today as Maurice) was a native of Thebes in Egypt. He
became a high-ranking officer in the Imperial Roman army, commanding a unit
of over six thousand soldiers composed entirely of Christians. Normally deployed
in the east, Maurice and his men were sent from Egypt to Europe to quell the Gauls
on the west bank of the Rhine. When Emperor Maximian (250–310) ordered
them to persecute Christians, they refused, and the entire unit was executed.45 In
tenth-century Germany, Emperor Otto decided to establish a cult around the saint,

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3 Lucas Cranach the Elder transferring his remains in 961 to the royal territories in Magdeburg, Saxony. There,
and workshop, St Maurice,
c. 1520–25. Oil on linden, he established a monastery, a church and an archiepiscopal residence around the
137.2 × 39.4 cm. New York:
Metropolitan Museum of Art.
relics.46 Maurice became the patron saint of the Holy Roman Empire. From the
mid-twelfth century until the sixteenth, ‘the emperor was anointed at the altar of
St Maurice in St Peter’s Basilica in Rome’.47 As Ainsworth, Hindriks and Terjanian have
commented in their analysis of Cranach’s 1520 painting of the saint (plate 3), ‘hailing
from a remote corner of the Roman Empire that was populated by blacks and also
representing the virtues of the perfect Christian warrior, Maurice was ideally suited
to epitomize the contemporary ambitions to expand Christian rule’.48 He became ‘one
of the most prominent saints in the Holy Roman Empire’, and his sword and spurs
‘would become part of the regalia used at coronations of Austro-Hungarian Emperors
right up until 1916’, the crowning of Charles I, the last Emperor of Austria.49 Whilst
early German depictions of Maurice, such as an anonymous sculptural rendition
(c. 1240) on the exterior of Madgeburg cathedral, the detailed painting of St Maurice
by Lucas Cranach and Matthias Grünewald’s Meeting of St Erasmus and St Maurice (1520–24)
in the Alte Pinakothek Munich unequivocally represent him as black African, by
the sixteenth century across most of Europe, in works such as Jacopo Pontormo’s
Martyrdom of St Maurice and the Theban Legion of 1528 (Palazzo Pitti, Florence) and El Greco’s
The Martyrdom of St Maurice of 1580–82 (Monasterio de El Escorial, Madrid), the saint had
been bleached. Esuruoso comments:

As the ancient sword and spurs of Saint Maurice proclaim, Black German
history did not spring from the wreckage of the First and Second World Wars,
or even German colonization, as it was once believed. Black history has been
here far longer and yet, like the body and face of Maurice, has been actively
whitened and negligently forgotten over time […].50

Indeed, Maurice was not the only medieval black saint in Germany; as Paul Kaplan
reminds us, ‘there were several lesser-known [ones], including St Gregor Maurus
of Cologne’ and the short-lived sister saint to Maurice, St Fidis.51 A buried lineage
of black saints in Germany notwithstanding, Maurice is significant to narratives of
German nationhood because of his centrality to the ceremonies of the Holy Roman
Empire (the Austro-Hungarian Empire after 1806) for almost seven centuries until
its dissolution in 1918 (and the inauguration of the Weimar Republic a year later).
Apart from saints, there were of course other historical exceptions, perhaps the most
notable of whom was the Ghanian Enlightenment philosopher, Nzima Antonius
Wilhelm Amo Afer (c. 1703 to c. 1753) who wrote a major thesis, On the Rights of Moors
in Europe (De Jure Maurorum in Europa), likely ‘the first defence of Black people written on
German soil’.52
Both Amo and Maurice are unusual examples of Black Germans whose fabled
life stories stand out within orthodox narratives of German history precisely because
of their exceptionalism. Nevertheless, they serve as important milestones in the
German national story. They prompt us to beware of the occlusions within historicist
narratives of nationhood. Indeed, the opening epigraph to this introduction is a timely
contemporary reminder by Philip Khabo Koepsell of the bloody histories of Germany’s
multi-faceted past that have nevertheless propelled him and his contemporary Afro-
Germans to ‘arrive in the future’.53 Yet, despite the archival evidence of many centuries
of individual black people arriving in the courts, universities and armies of Germany,
the birth of modern Black Germany can undoubtedly be traced back to the 1884 Berlin
West-Africa congress and its aftermath. This was the event that precipitated the

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so-called ‘scramble for Africa’ by the major European colonial

powers. As Robbie Aitken and Eve Rosenhaft have demonstrated,
young men ‘who hailed from Germany’s new African colonies
became the founding generation for a substantial black presence
in Germany’.54
The nation’s defeat in 1918 and the concomitant loss of its
colonial territories left many of this generation in limbo. As
Marcia Klotz observes, the Weimar Republic occupied a peculiar
place within Europe of the 1920s and 1930s as ‘a post-colonial
state in a still colonial world’.55 Whilst a number of male colonial
migrants had chosen to partner with white German women,
have children and raise families, they were not permitted to
gain German citizenship since once the colonies were lost they
became stateless and in limbo. Denied passports and facing
bureaucratic hindrances to securing identity papers, they were
also unable to leave Germany. From the outset, the myth of the
country’s Golden Twenties remained an elusive one for many of
Weimar’s post-colonial Black Germans who were forced into the
entertainment industry as exotic ‘extras’ for the amusement of
the indigenous population if they were to subsist in the devastated
post-war economy.56
Considerations of regionalism on one hand or Black Germans
during the Weimar era on the other are of course only partial
ways of thinking through who or what ‘others’ might encompass
in a methodological framework for the analysis of Weimar’s
modernity. The burgeoning scholarship in the areas of Jewish,
LGBTQ, gender, ethnicity, disability and critical race studies
(amongst others) pertaining to modern Germany is testament
to the ever-expanding field of research that this rich period of
history continues to yield for researchers, but what is its specific
value for art history?

Figuring ‘Difference’ in the Art of New Objectivity

In visual terms, the representation of difference in Weimar culture
is also inevitably contextually contingent. Ethnic identities as
diverse as Jewish, Roma, African, Indian, Arab, Mongolian and
Chinese were frequently conflated within visual representation of
the era to signal a trope of exoticized ‘other’ or tolerated ‘foreigner’.
As Katherine Tubb has observed, ‘in the Weimar period, to
depict a person of colour was to take a socio-political position on
modernity, on German-ness, and on the tensions between them’.57
Popular mass entertainment shows like Josephine Baker’s La Revue
Négre and those of The Chocolate Kiddies played up to Weimar
audiences’ nostalgia for their lost colonial pasts in dialogue with
their enthusiastic embrace of American jazz culture. Baker in
particular was a mass media sensation and the subject of numerous
visual representations in all media. Yet she was also an exception
in her carefully crafted visual presence as a deliberately staged
‘exotic outsider’ originally from the USA via France and performing
‘Africa’ in a post-colonial Germany nostalgia for its lost colonies.58

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Baker’s fame, socioeconomic status and performativity enabled her to come and go
within the country as she pleased, as someone popularly celebrated and desired.59 Her
situation and that of her African American peers, including The Chocolate Kiddies
and Duke Ellington, all of whom found huge success in Weimar Germany, differed
markedly from that of the numerous African, Indian, and Roma protagonists of
Weimar visual culture who were far less mobile, economically impoverished and,
within visual representations of the era, often anonymous. They are to be found
more readily in the margins of the leisure industry: the circus, the freak show, the
insalubrious nightclub and as one amongst many anonymous extras on the sets of the

4 Christian Schad, Agosta

the Winged Man and Rasha
the Black Dove [Agosta, der
Flügelmensch, und Rasha, die
schawarze Taube], 1929. Oil on
canvas, 120 × 80 cm. London:
Tate. © Christian Schad
Stiftung Aschaffenburg/VG
Bild-Kunst, Bonn/DACS,
London.

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Dorothy Price and Camilla Smith

era’s booming film industry. Amongst the most striking images that conform to this
type are August Sander’s photographs of circus workers at rest, during their time off
from Germany’s famous Circus Barum taken between 1926 and 1932 and Christian
Schad’s extraordinary double-portrait, Agosta the Winged Man and Rasha the Black Dove
(plate 4). Whilst limitations of space prevent us from considering Sander in any great
detail here, Tubb has provided a compelling in-depth analysis of Circus Workers in her
essay ‘Face to Face? An Ethical Encounter with Germany’s Dark Strangers in August
Sander’s People of the Twentieth Century’.60 Using a post-colonial framework borrowed
in part from Homi Bhabha, she considers the multivalent ways in which Sander’s
photograph might signify in an era in which ‘racial inclusiveness under the laws of a
German nation that determined citizenship by blood’ remained an impossibility.61
Christian Schad’s detailed attention to the ‘otherness’ of Agosta and Rasha
remains unparalleled within Weimar painting. Scholars have as yet not been able
to retrieve either of their surnames from the Geschichtsgesplitter of the archives; even
though Schad wrote about the work in retrospect almost fifty years later and hinted
that he learned much about them during their sittings for him, he failed to register
their full names. He did, however, comment that he had first seen Agosta and Rasha
at a side show in Onkel Pelle’s funfair in the Wedding district of northern Berlin
where he went with his friend, anthropologist and entomologist Felix Bryk, in search
of ‘everything that was somehow outside the norm’.62 Departing from his usual
practice of painting from memory, he invited both performers to model for him in
his studio. As he recalled:

Agosta, who lived in the city with his pretty wife and their children – he
was also paraded before the students in the teaching hospital as a medical
phenomenon – used to display his crippled upper body. Once he complained
to me that he was forever having to ward off explicit offers and attentions from
sensation-hungry women in whom he had no interest whatsoever because he
loved his wife. Rasha – she was born in Madagascar – performed with a huge
snake, turning round a few times before she would fling the heavy creature
around her own body. She lived with her German husband and their little son
in a caravan inside the wooden fence. Her husband, who used to lift weights
and other heavy objects by means of a hook inserted through a hole in his
tongue, performed in another side show. The Boa constrictor lived in a cage
under the ceiling of the caravan; underneath the caravan there were hens, and
sometimes Rasha would bring me fresh eggs when she came to my studio in
Hardenbergstrasse to sit for me.63

As was the norm for Schad’s portraits, particularly those from his Berlin Neue
Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) period after 1928, both sitters were painted in fully
frontal position, mouths closed, passive and staring directly at the viewer. Their
hierarchical arrangement on the canvas, however, departs from Schad’s other portraits
of this period. Rasha sits on the floor at Agosta’s feet, already encoding a gendered and
racial divide between them. Agosta’s discarded clothes reveal his torso as visible to
inspection but also indicate the possibility that he can ‘pass’ as non-deviant by simply
getting dressed. Albeit circumscribed, beyond this painting he has an element of
choice in how he appears in the world. Rasha’s difference, on the other hand, is written
on her skin, inescapably epidermalized. She is consciously exoticized by Schad through
the allusion to Africa in the glimpse of her red-dyed printed cotton dress. The cowry
shells which adorn its edging were a legal form of tender across several continents

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until well into the nineteenth century, in particular across Africa, South Asia and East
Asia. Yet they have especially disturbing connotations in West Africa where they were
traded by Dutch, English, Portuguese and French merchants from the seventeenth
century onwards in exchange for enslaved African people.64 Although Schad knew
that Rasha was born on the southern east-coast island of Madagascar, in his fictive
re-classification of her as an exoticized ‘other’, a black woman out of place in 1920s
Germany, he overrides the facts for sensationalist, albeit blunt, symbolism instead. The
composition recalls the pinned butterflies familiar to the entomological gaze of Bryk,
but the sitters are reconfigured as birds, trapped by Schad in an interracial pairing of
anthropological fascination for the artist (and by implication the complicit viewer).
The surgical precision in Schad’s depiction of the sumptuous textures – the damask
fabric of the throne-like chair on which Agosta is seated, his discarded cotton shirt
and rich velvet jacket, Rasha’s glistening pearl-drop earrings, and most of all the taut
rendition of the smooth, unblemished skin of both sitters – heightens the fetishism
of this dance-off between different tones of white and black, male and female, norms
and deviants, Apollonian and Dionysian in Warburgian terms. As Thomas Ratzka has
observed, Schad’s portraits ‘do not reveal an individual’s interior, but, through the
perfect smoothness of the surface, create a cool detachment from the beholder, as
though the sitters were almost uninvolved’.65 Kristen Schroeder (whose essay in this
volume focuses on the new objectivity qualities of Lotte Laserstein’s Evening over Potsdam),
has also remarked that:

Schad produced portraits of Weimar society outsiders for his middle-to-

upper class white European audience. In doing so, he adopted a strategy of
detachment and objectivity that resonates with the problematic enterprise of
ethnography. In Agosta the Winged Man and Rasha the Black Dove, Schad’s subjects
become visible as ethnographic objects – removed from social conditions and
placed in a decontextualized space – their otherness rendered in dazzling, yet
sachlich detail.66

The verism of the sachlich is exposed as fiction in portraits such as these. The
ethnographic impulse of Schad’s Neue Sachlichkeit vision, the cool detachment of his
observed scenarios in which objects and people are rendered of equal value, have
neutralized the agency of both subjects in one of Weimar’s most revealing portraits
of alterity. Disability and blackness are rendered as sites of exotic fascination within a
codified register of racial and gendered hierarchy.
Ernst Neuschul’s less familiar but equally remarkable Neue Sachlichkeit painting,
Black Mother (plate 5), departs from the viewing conventions established by Schad and
Sander and places his painting in a slightly different position in relation to its depicted
subject. It is a rare example within Weimar visual art of a black nursing mother in
fashionable contemporary dress and cloche hat, posed like an archetypal western
Madonna Lactans but seated on a red bench located in a setting painted to resemble an
outdoor environment such as a public park. It is one of a pair of paintings, the other
of which is missing, presumed destroyed after 1933 by the National Socialists and
which now only survives in the form of a monochrome photograph from Neuschul’s
studio (plate 6).67 The missing work depicts the mother seated in profile, looking in
front of her to the right of the canvas, a large baby on her knee with its head turned
towards us. The mother is flanked by a man behind her, presumably the father, and a
boy (son) in front, both posed frontally and staring directly at the artist/viewer. The
boy in particular looks wary and interested, whilst the mother and father remain stiffly

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5 Ernest Neuschul, Black

Mother, 1931. Oil on canvas,
100.5 × 65.5 cm. Leicester:
Leicester Museum and Art
Gallery. © Khalil (Neuschul)
Norland.

posed. The upright posture of the seated mother and the standing father suggests that
they were likely employed by Neuschul to model for him. The more naturalistic pose
of Black Mother, however, shows her as potentially caught by surprise whilst nursing her
infant. Both paintings were likely constructed in Neuschul’s Charlottenburg studio,
although the latter seems to be caught more deliberately in a fiction of spontaneous
action. As a member of the socialist Novembergruppe (November group) of artists in

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Berlin after 1926, Neuschul and his comrades were vigorous opponents of fascism.68
His interest in painting ethnically diverse subjects – outsiders – may have had its roots
in his own origins as the son of Sephardic Jewish parents, as well as the lengthy period
of time that he lived and performed (under the pseudonym Yoga-Taro) with Dutch-
Javanese German dancer Taka-Taka (in Prague, Paris, across Europe, America and
finally in Berlin). Black Mother and the companion painting of her family are a testament
to Neuschul’s interest in portraying Weimar Germany’s ‘underclass of Gypsies and
the unemployed’.69 In addition to traditional subject matter of portraits, self-portraits,
landscapes, male and female nudes, his oeuvre is replete with paintings produced in
the later 1920s bearing titles such as Jews, Gypsies, Mulatto Woman, and subject matter
ranging from Old Testament narratives to urban dives, nightclubs and bars.70 In 1935
Neuschul took Black Mother with him to the USSR and exhibited it in a one-man show
in Moscow, ‘where it was seen as a vivid representation of the kind of “revolutionary”

6 Ernest Neuschul, Studio

Photograph of ‘Black Family’,
1931 (missing or destroyed).
Photo: Courtesy of Khalil
(Neuschul) Norland.

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Dorothy Price and Camilla Smith

theme guaranteed to frighten the reactionary forces of German authoritarianism’.71

Whilst for Schad and Sander it was ethnographic impulses that dominated their vision,
for Neuschul the representation of ethnic difference was more likely a political stance
against the forces of fascism.
As already suggested, the concept of who or what ‘others’ might mean and how
they signify in the context of Weimar visual culture is contingent upon a spectrum
of potential attitudes in relation to dominant norms and political inflections. The
aesthetic of new objectivity registered a variety of subject positions at play in figuring
difference. Essays in this special issue position points of ‘otherness’ as located in the
gender, able-bodiedness and sexual preferences of the subjects under consideration
but also in the materiality of the objects being discussed and the regional inflections
of their content. What each of them reveals in common, though, is that ‘otherness’ is
always mobile, contingent and porous.

‘A Republic with No Instruction Manual’

The German writer Alfred Döblin (author of the landmark novel Berlin Alexanderplatz
published in 1929) observed that Weimar was ‘a republic with no instruction manual’,
signalling its potential as a period of radical experimentation and possibilities.72
Art and culture played a defining role in – and were central to – the popularization
of and continued fascination with the era’s social, cultural, economic and political
histories. The art-historical analysis of specific artworks, regions and contexts
highlighted in this special issue contributes to narratives that foreground the cultural
pluralities and complexities of the age. The Republic’s underlying federal structure
meant that there was no single artistic centre but rather multiple locations of cultural
production. Essays about artists, artworks and material culture produced in Hannover,
Bielefeld, Gera, Dresden, Cologne, Hamburg, Potsdam and other regions sit alongside
scholarship about urban minorities in Berlin, in order to foreground some of the
untold experiences of Weimar that are linked to both provincial communities and
urban centres.
Maria Makela’s essay, ‘Making Lemonade out of Lemons: Merz and Material
Poverty’, focuses on Kurt Schwitters within his Hannoverian context. Makela shows
how Schwitters’s collages and the aesthetic enterprise of Merz can be compellingly
contextualized in relation to the extreme material shortages within which the artist
was operating in Hannover during the early post-war years. Specifically, the liberal
use of textiles adorning the surfaces of his collages can be better understood within
the context of Germany’s Ersatzkultur (the culture of substitute materials), which saw
fruit pits, sunflowers and poppies used for fuel and acorns instead of coffee due to
widespread shortages after the First World War and during German inflation. Whilst
the lack of food and malnutrition has been well documented, the lack of other goods
such as textiles and its effect on German visual culture has been less thoroughly
considered. The model of modernity that Schwitters’s work represents is both rich
and paradoxical; the innovative method of collage signals the tenets of modernism,
yet the salvaging of detritus is a reminder of the basic level of survival that inter-war
modernity demanded. Moreover, Makela draws attention to the fact that the use of
hair as an Ersatz product and shortages in cloth dictated some of the trends for women
usually associated with the ‘modern’ fashionability of the Weimar period, such as the
page-boy haircut and the raised hemline. Both can be understood as consequences of
the exigencies of the time. Likewise, Erin Sullivan Maynes’ article, ‘Making Money:
Notgeld and the Material Experience of Inflation in Weimar Germany’, reveals how
inherently intertwined culture and socioeconomic crisis were by exploring the

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production of regional designs for Notgeld (emergency money) during the decade
of inflation between 1914 and 1924 when coinage was scarce. In the face of the
inflationary assault on the worthlessness of paper after 1919, some regions of Germany
took refuge instead in things with more concrete value. Sullivan Maynes’ study draws
much-needed art-historical attention to the complex and diverse designs of regional
banknotes issued on linen, leather, silk and even Meissen porcelain, as well as those
produced by artists on paper. These notes served as currency but also as collectors’
commodity with increased material value.73 Banknotes designed by artists such as
Olaf Gulbransson, Wenzel Hablik and Herbert Bayer satirized economic problems,
named and shamed political targets and adopted the aesthetic language of post-
war expressionism and Bauhaus design. The essay demonstrates the fundamental
importance of federalism as a constituent part of the republic’s richness and
complexity; Notgeld issuers relied upon local printers and paper manufacturers rather
than the centralized imperial bank.
Contributions by Nina Lübbren and Elinor Beaven consider the dialectics of
gender, regionalism and nationalism at play in the works of sculptor Gela Forster and
painter Elsa Haensgen-Dingkuhn respectively and in doing so, build on pioneering
work by scholars who have examined the gendered constraints of the Weimar
Republic.74 In ‘Regional Women Artists and the Artist as Mother’, Beaven explores
how Haensgen-Dingkuhn negotiated her complex position as an independent artist
and one half of a Künstlerehepaare (artist couple) – a common social situation for women
artists at the time. Contrary to popular accounts of the tensions between the ideals
of financially independent new womanhood and the realities of domestic duty
within marriage, the essay reveals how Haensgen-Dingkuhn was able to exploit her
multiple roles as artist, wife and mother to make her work an economic success. The
artist’s work can be usefully considered in line with the burgeoning women-oriented
cultural sphere or Frauenkultur that challenged the masculine cult of the artist-as-genius
and foregrounded conceptions of Mütterlichkeit (motherliness) to define feminine
creative practice.
In her essay ‘Gela Forster’s Radical New Sculpture: Feminism, War and
Revolution’, Lübbren demonstrates how Forster was at the forefront of unfolding
debates about formalism in Germany between 1915 and 1925. Forster’s artworks
encompass characteristics of the archaic-primordial and the modern. These features
were identified by contemporary theorists such as Carl Einstein and Wilhelm
Hausenstein as central to abstract autonomous form in modern sculpture which
made it distinct from antique precedents. Forster’s work was critically acclaimed
during her lifetime by leading art historians including Will Grohmann and Paul
Westheim. Her sculptures could be argued as engaging with conventional conceptions
of Mütterlichkeit (motherliness) through her choice of subject matter, which included
motherhood and pregnancy. Yet gendered assumptions about the artist’s oeuvre are
radically altered by her unusual attempt to engage with the masculine experience
of war through the veteran’s broken (and according to critics ‘sensual’) body in her
male nude sculpture. Seen together the pieces highlighted in Lübbren’s article – all
of which were completed in 1919 – signal the complex dialectics of ‘primitive’
wholeness and Western fragmentation at a time of acute political change and artistic
renewal. Forster’s identity as a woman artist who addresses masculine experiences of
the First World War through her sculptural practice places her firmly in the category
of Weimar’s ‘others’. She is a rare example of a regionally-based woman artist who
has been neglected by canonical accounts of the period. Her monumental sculptural
work addresses themes of both motherhood and masculinity that rupture the norms

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of contemporary critical discourse concerning women’s roles and that have left her
art-historically adrift until now.
Kristin Schroeder’s article, ‘An Ambivalent Elegy: Lotte Laserstein’s Evening Over
Potsdam (1930)’, offers a compelling examination of the artist’s realist, new objectivity
painting in temporal terms.75 Schroeder’s article draws attention to the situational
and material specificities of Neue Sachlichkeit in Laserstein’s work. She argues that the
painting signals a transitional moment between seasons and decades – an uneasy
dialectic between Berlin and its neighbouring Potsdam and between art’s histories in
an uncertain, political present.
Other contributions by Dorothy Price and Camilla Smith engage with the complex
and explicit graphic works of the Cologne-based erstwhile dadaist Heinrich Hoerle and
Berlin-based artist Jeanne Mammen in the context of the Gurlitt family of art dealers.
Price considers depictions of disabled war veterans in Hoerle’s oeuvre, in particular the
1920 series of prints known as Krüppelmappe (Cripple Portfolio) alongside discourses of
disability and rehabilitation in Weimar Germany. Smith analyses the visualization of
gay relationships in Mammen’s 1930–32 illustrations of Pierre Louÿs’ erotic poems, The
Songs of Bilitis (1894), both of which challenged fluctuating censorship laws throughout
the 1920s. Whilst the excoriating graphic works of Otto Dix and George Grosz have
become characteristic of the bitter aftermath of a lost war, with over four million
German soldiers left disabled, less attention has been given to Hoerle’s engagement
with the failing welfare systems for war veterans in Cologne. In ‘A “Prosthetic
Economy”: Representing the “Kriegskrüppel” in the Weimar Republic’, Price argues
that the body of the disabled war veteran was used by the leftist avant-garde as a visual
symptom for the diseased ‘body politic’. She contends that the artworks produced
by Heinrich Hoerle reveal more about the construction of ‘normalcy’ and the ‘ideal’
during this period, than they do about the disabled veterans they portray.
The recent ‘sexological turn’ within academic scholarship has generally focused on
intersections between the discipline of sexology and works of literature. Yet studies of
the mobilization of visual culture – specifically the use of art and artists to ‘legitimize’
the field, have been less forthcoming.76 Smith’s essay begins to address this by exploring
the role images played in erotic Sittengeschichten (Histories of Morals) and a deluxe
series of books such as Der Venuswagen (The Chariot of Venus), which attempted to
aestheticize sexual reform in a respectable manner for liberal Bildungsbürgertum (middle
class) bibliophiles. In ‘Sex Sells! Wolfgang Gurlitt, Erotic Print Culture and Women
Artists in the Weimar Republic’, Smith explores how Jeanne Mammen’s sensual work
deliberately engaged with a female audience, a demographic often overlooked in
discussions on erotica during this period, in which legislation did not acknowledge
that same-sex female relations even existed.77
The essays in this special issue chronologically explore work produced throughout
the fourteen years of the Republic – from its early unstable inception to its tumultuous
end. Gela Forster’s sculptures, Heinrich Hoerle’s prints and Wolfgang Gurlitt’s erotic
books and portfolios were produced in the immediate post-war years, characterized by
the context of revolutionary hope, hyperinflation and poverty. Schwitters’ assemblages
of paper and three-dimensional objects affixed to wood or cardboard, seen alongside
the innovative, diverse designs of Notgeld, signal both the material history of inflation
and improvisation, as well as German resilience and patriotism, even before things
began to improve in Germany under the Dawes Plan in 1924. Schroeder’s and Beaven’s
contributions explore how the work of Laserstein and Haensgen-Dingkuhn responded
to the global economic crisis and growing presence of fascism in Germany towards
the end of the Weimar era. Whereas Haensgen-Dingkuhn’s later representations of

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motherhood offer a non-confrontational image of feminine creative practice, Lotte

Laserstein’s painting Evening over Potsdam (1930) depicts a prophetic ‘Last Supper’ in
Potsdam as an ambivalent elegy – a farewell to the indulgence of the Golden Twenties.
Yet, we have deliberately not included dates in our special issue title, since presenting
a unified Zeitgeist of the Weimar period is not our underlying principle here.78 Rather,
we wish to demonstrate the many temporalities, regionalisms, multidisciplinary
character and diversity of subject positions within Weimar artistic production and
visual culture. Many of the essays challenge a neat Weimar telos, whether this be
through close analysis of Schwitters’s dialectical, de-totalizing collages that abandon
historical naturalism, or the designs for Notgeld showing the work of historic artists
such as Albrecht Dürer and landmark designs crucial to Germany’s rich, federal patina
of traditions. Together, all of the essays represent multiple modernities that draw on
different features and geographical dimensions that are not always synonymous with
modernism.

Conclusions
Jochen Hung has cogently argued that every generation of scholars and critics has
sought (whether intentionally or not) to represent and foreground elements of the
Weimar Republic that best represent and suit the contemporary context in which they
are writing.79 Thus, in the immediate post-Second World War era, Weimar’s fostering
of expressionist and abstract artists was explored in detail as a way of directing
attention away from the perceived political weaknesses of Weimar that led to the
‘inevitable’ rise of the right. Conversely, during the 1960s, when German youth began
asking questions and holding older generations to account for their recent past, the
radical politically socialist works of Bertolt Brecht, Erwin Piscator and the work of the
Frankfurt School and their circle were explored with renewed vigour to demonstrate
proof of active resistance to Nazism and the horrors of the Holocaust.80
If Weimar’s historiography is so telling, what does our approach in this issue signal
about today’s concerns? Many scholars have made compelling comparisons between
the contemporary political climate and the fascist Europe of the 1930s.81 Indeed, many
parallels can be drawn directly between the recent gains made by popular socially
motivated protest movements such as #Occupy and #BlackLivesMatter and the
radical political advancement of the socialists, Spartacists and communists of Weimar
Germany. The lines from Phillipp Khabo Koepsell’s ‘Fanfare for the Colonized’ in
the epigraph, for example, cement the links between post-colonial Weimar and the
lived experiences of contemporary Afro-Germans born from the ashes of Empire.
Perhaps more readily available comparisons though are to be drawn between the rise of
National Socialism in 1930s Germany and the current populist right-wing insurgencies
in the USA, the National Front in France, the Jobbik party in Hungary, the Alternative
für Deutschland in Germany and UKIP (United Kingdom Independence Party) in
Britain to name but a few. As Jochen Bittner, amongst others, has suggested, perhaps
this is indeed Europe’s ‘Weimar moment’ witnessed in the galvanization of populist
votes, swathes of poverty and unemployment, the invocation of anti-immigrant
sentiment and the regular circulation of damaging xenophobic rhetoric.82 Whilst the
frequent media analogies between Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler are, some would
argue, inappropriate, others suggest they are in fact hardly misplaced.83 Nathan Stoltzfus
reminds us that ‘as Weimar warns, constitutional protections can crumble in the face
of majorities amassed by a demagogue’.84 The democratic complexities of the Weimar
Republic – at once a period of liberal promise and uncertainty – continue to be an
urgent reminder of how dangerous mass popularity and political conservatism can be.

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Notes but on 12 December Fritz Saxl (1890–1948) and his partner Gertrud
The editors would like to offer particular thanks to Robbie Bing (1892–1964) rescued the KBW library (consisting of nearly 60,000
Aitken, Sam Bibby, Jeff Bowersox, Lucy Donkin, Philipp Khabo books and 25,000 photographs) from Hamburg and relocated it and
Koepsell, Deborah Lewer and Nina Lübbren for their invaluable themselves to London, where Saxl became the first Director of the
help and expertise during the writing of this introduction. Warburg Institute, succeeded at his death in 1948 by Bing. [https://
warburg.sas.ac.uk/library/library-aby-warburg]
1 Philipp Khabo Koepsell, ‘Fanfare for the Colonized’, in Asoka Esuruoso 12 Emily Levine, Dreamland of the Humanists, 3.
and Khabo Koepsell, Arriving in the Future: Stories of Home and Exile, Berlin, 13 For a trenchant account of anti-Semitism in Imperial Germany and
2014, 196–197. its ramifications in the visual arts see Peter Paret, ‘Modernism and
2 The era of National Socialism under Hitler after 1933 still receives a the “Alien Element” in German Art’, in German Encounters with Modernism
disproportionately high level of attention in both popular culture and 1840–1945, Cambridge, 2001, 60–91.
academic discourse and has done since its end in 1945, if not since its 14 For more information see Volker Berghahn, Imperial Germany, 1871–1914:
inception but what we are suggesting is that it is specifically since the Economy, Society, Culture, and Politics, Oxford, 1994, 102.
fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 that more sustained focus on and re- 15 Georges Didi-Huberman, ‘The Surviving Image: Aby Warburg and
evaluation of the Weimar era also ensued. Tylorian Anthropology’, Oxford Art Journal, 25: 1, 2002, 61–69.
3 For more on the concept of ‘crisis’ in relation to this period see Moritz 16 Margaret Iversen, ‘Retrieving Warburg’s Tradition’, Art History, 16: 4,
Föllmer and Rüdiger Graf, eds, Die ‘Krise’ der Weimarer Republik Zur Kritik December 1993, 541–553.
eines Deutungsmusters, Frankfurt, 2005. 17 Giorgio Agamben, ‘Aby Warburg and the Nameless Science’, in
4 Jochen Hung, Godela Weiss-Sussex, and Geoff Wilkes, eds, Beyond Glitter Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, ed. and trans. Daniel Heller-
and Doom. The Contingency of the Weimar Republic, London, 2012, 9. Roazen, Stanford, 1999, 90.
5 Gustav Frank, ‘Beyond the Republic? Post-expressionist Complexity in 18 Giorgio Agamben, ‘Aby Warburg and the Nameless Science’, 90.
the Arts’, in The Contingency of the Weimar Republic, ed. Jochen Hung et al., 19 Literature on the significance of Warburg to the discipline of art
48–49. history has grown considerably since the 1990s. In addition to Iversen,
6 Intersectionality is a term that refers to the complex and cumulative ‘Retrieving Warburg’s Tradition’, other accounts include Matthew
ways in which the effects of different forms of discrimination, Rampley, ‘From Symbol to Allegory: Aby Warburg’s Theory of Art’,
particularly against marginalized groups (racism, sexism, classicism, Art Bulletin, 79: 1, March 1997, 41–55; Georges Didi-Huberman, L’image
ableism, transphobia, homophobia) combine, overlap, intersect. It is an survivante: Histoire de l’art et temps des fantômes selon Aby Warburg, Paris, 2002
enormously productive term when thinking about social justice. As is (published in English as The Surviving Image: Phantoms of Time and Time
by now well rehearsed, the term ‘intersectional’ was coined by scholar of Phantoms, Pennsylvania, 2017); Colleen Becker, ‘Aby Warburg’s
and civil rights activist Kimberlé Crenshaw in her ground-breaking Pathosformel as Methodological Paradigm’, Journal of Historiography, 9,
article, ‘Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black December 2013, 1–25; and Griselda Pollock, ‘Whither Art History’,
Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory Art Bulletin, 96: 1, March 2014, 9–23. Essays on Warburg’s significance
and Antiracist Politics’, University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1, 1989, Article 8, to the disciplines of history and philosophy include Carlo Ginzburg,
139–167. http://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/uclf/vol1989/iss1/8 ‘From Aby Warburg to E. H. Gombrich: A Problem of Method’, in Clues,
The context for Crenshaw’s article was her realization that women Myths and the Historical Method, ed. John and Anne C. Tedeschi, Baltimore,
of colour were being ill-served by a justice system that dealt with 1986, 17–59; and Giorgio Agamben, ‘Aby Warburg and the Nameless
gender and race as separate categories; this meant that they were Science’, 89–103. For additional bibliographic sources, particularly
being doubly discriminated against within the US legal system. in German, see Claudia Wedepohl, ‘Aby Warburg’, Oxford Bibliographies
As Crenshaw has commented, ‘intersectionality is an analytic Online, Oxford, 2016. DOI: 10.1093/OBO/9780199920105-0087
sensibility, a way of thinking about identity and its relationship to 20 Iversen, ‘Retrieving Warburg’s Tradition’.
power. Originally articulated on behalf of black women, the term 21 Emily Levine, Dreamland of the Humanists, 8.
brought to light the invisibility of many constituents within groups 22 The painting was Willy von Beckerath’s Die Ewige Welle (The Eternal Wave)
that claim them as members but often fail to represent them.’ and it is still in situ.
Kimberlé Crenshaw, ‘Why Intersectionality Can’t Wait’, Washington 23 The Hanseatic League was a German trading association or guild
Post, 24 September 2015. Available at: https://www.washingtonpost. founded in northern Europe and active from the thirteenth to the
com/news/in-theory/wp/2015/09/24/why-intersectionality-cant- fifteenth centuries to protect German trading activities. For further
wait/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.455340357157 details see Ulf Christian Ewert and Stephan Selzer, Institutions of Hanseatic
7 Walter Gropius, ‘In this house the German people, through their Trade: Studies on the Political Economy of a Medieval Network Organisation, Oxford,
National Assembly, gave themselves the Weimar constitution of 11 2016.
August 1919’, cited in Neil McGregor, Germany Memories of a Nation, 24 The plethora of publications on Weimar Berlin are too numerous to
London, 2014, 355. The plaque still remains in the same location today. cite fully here, but key publications spanning the last two decades
8 This special issue originated in a session that Smith and Price co- include Charles Haxthausen and Heidrun Suhr, eds, Berlin: Culture and
convened for the Association for Art History’s annual conference at Metropolis, Minneapolis, 1992; Dorothy Rowe, Representing Berlin, London,
the University of East Anglia in April 2015. We would like to thank the 2003; Monica Black, Death in Berlin, Cambridge, 2010; David Frisby and
conference organizers Sarah Monks and David Peters Corbett for the Iain Boyd Whyte, Metropolis Berlin 1880–1940, Berkeley, 2012; Olaf Peters,
original platform, as well as all of our speakers and the loyal audience ed., Berlin Metropolis 1918–1933, New York, 2014; Jill Suzanne Smith, Berlin
we garnered, for their contributions to some stimulating conversations. Coquette, Ithaca, 2014; Frances Mossop, Mapping Berlin, Oxford, 2015,
9 The Hamburg School is a good example of Weimar Germany’s strong amongst others.
regionally-based triumphs before its enforced exile to London in 25 Hans Ostwald, ‘Dunkle Winkel in Berlin’, Die Großstadt Dokumente, Berlin,
1934 as the Warburg Institute. See Emily Levine, Dreamland of Humanists: 1905–08, 21–24.
Warburg, Cassirer, Panofsky and the Hamburg School, Chicago, 2013. 26 Karl Scheffler, Berlin: Ein Stadtschicksal, Berlin, 1910. For discussions of
10 Emily Levine, Dreamland of the Humanists, 2–3. this work see Rowe, Representing Berlin, 16–18; and Lothar Müller,
11 When the National Socialists seized power in 1933, the virulent anti- ‘The Beauty of the Metropolis’, in Haxthausen and Suhr, eds, Berlin, 49.
Semitism they promulgated forced Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945) to flee to 27 Georg Simmel, ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’ (1903), in Georg Simmel:
England, then to Sweden and eventually to New York where he settled On Individuality and Social Forms, ed. Donald Levine, Chicago, 1971; and
in a teaching post at Columbia University. Panofsky (1892–1968) had Tom Bottomore and David Frisby, eds, Georg Simmel: The Philosophy of Money
already begun dividing his time between New York and Hamburg in (first published in 1900), New York, 1990.
1931. When his post at Hamburg was terminated by the Nazis in 1933, 28 Christian Rogowski, ‘Black Voices on the “Black Horror on the Rhine”’,
he continued to teach at New York University before joining the Faculty in Remapping Black Germany, ed. Sara Lennox, 2016, 118.
of the Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton in 1935, where he 29 Louis Brody, ‘Die deutschen Neger und die ‘schwarze Schmach’, Berliner
spent the rest of his career. By 1933 Warburg had been dead for 4 years Zeitung am Mittag, 44: 118, 24 May 1921.

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Art History, Alterity and Regionalism in Inter-War Germany

30 Charles S. Maier, ‘Between Taylorism and Technocracy: European 1250–1914, ed. Mischa Honek, Martin Klimke, and Anne Kuhlemann,
Ideologies and the Vision of Industrial Productivity in the 1920s’, Journal New York and Oxford, 2013, 21.
of Contemporary History, 5: 2, 1970, 27–61. 52 Lennox, ‘Introduction’, Remapping Black Germany, 13. There are a variety of
31 For more on the celebratory aspects of the Weimar Republic see Eric D. available accounts about the existence and achievements of Amo Afer,
Weitz, Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy, Princeton, 2007. some of which vary slightly in historical detail but all of which follow
32 Annemarie Sammartino, ‘Citizenship Policy in the Early Weimar the same basic account. See, for example, Burchard Brentjes, ‘Anton
Republic’, in Weimar Publics/ Weimar Subjects: Rethinking the Political Culture of Wilhelm Amo, First African Philosopher in European Universities’,
Germany in the 1920s, ed. Kathleen Canning et al., Oxford, 2010, 324–325. Current Anthropology, 16: 3, September 1975, 443–444; Reginald Bess,
33 Annemarie Sammartino, ‘Citizenship Policy’, 325. ‘A.W.Amo: First Great Black Man of Letters’, Journal of Black Studies, 19: 4,
34 Recent relevant exhibitions include Daniel F. Herrmann and Dawn June 1989, 387–393; Marilyn Sephocle, ‘Anton Wilhelm Amo’, Journal of
Ades, eds, Hannah Höch, London: Whitechapel, 2014; Roxana Marcoci Black Studies, 23: 2, Special Issue: The Image of Africa in German Society,
and Sarah Meister, eds, From Bauhaus to Buenos Aires: Grete Stern and Horacio December 1992, 182–187; and more recently Jacob Emmanuel Mabe,
Coppola, New York: MoMA, 2015; Ingrid Pfeiffer, ed., Splendour and Misery Anton Wilhelm Amo interkutlurell gelesen, Nordhausen, 2007.
in the Weimar Republic, Frankfurt: Schirn Kunsthalle 2017; Alexander 53 Khabo Koepsell, ‘Fanfare for the Colonized’, 196–197.
Eiling and Elena Schroll, eds, Lotte Laserstein: Face to Face, Frankfurt: 54 Robbie Aitken and Eve Rosenhaft, Black Germany: The Making and Unmaking
Städl Museum, 2018; and Ann Coxon and Bryony Fer, eds, Anni Albers, of a Diaspora Community, 1884–1960, Cambridge, 2013, 2.
London: Tate Modern, 2018. 55 Marcia Klotz, ‘The Weimar Republic: A Postcolonial State in a Still-
35 For more on intersectionality, see note 6. colonial World’, in Germany’s Colonial Pasts, ed. Eric Ames, Marcia Klotz,
36 Studies of German modernism in terms of race have been largely and Lora Wildenthal, Nebraska 2005, 135–147.
focused on the aesthetics of primitivism and/or negrophilia, 56 The term ‘Golden Twenties’ is generally applied to the temporary
particularly in relation to the cultural products of expressionism; period of economic stability in the Weimar Republic between 1924
for example, Jill Lloyd, German Expressionism: Primitivism and Modernity, and 1929 when American loans to Germany, in the form of the Dawes
London, 1991, and those in terms of gender, most often in relation to Plan, helped to quell hyper-inflation. However, with the Wall Street
white women; for example, Helen Boak, Women in the Weimar Republic, crash in 1929 American banks immediately withdrew their loans and
Manchester, 2013. Intersectional studies of German modernism demanded repayments with interest. The German economy spiralled
remain rare. into collapse once more and the era of the Great Depression began.
37 Tobias Nagl, ‘Counterfeit Money/Counterfeit Discourse: A Black 57 Katherine Tubb, ‘Face to Face? An Ethical Encounter with Germany’s
German Trickster’s Tale’, in Lennox (ed.) Remapping Black Germany, 105. Dark Strangers in August Sander’s People of the Twentieth Century’, Tate Papers,
38 Tina Campt, ‘Reading the Black German Experience: An Introduction’, 19, Spring 2013. https://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-
Callaloo, 26: 2, Spring 2003, 290. papers/19/face-to-face-an-ethical-encounter-with-germany-dark-
39 Sara Lennox, ‘Introduction’, in Remapping Black Germany, 11–12. strangers-in-august-sanders-people-of-the-twentieth-century
40 The term Geschichtssplitter (historical shards or fragments) is cited 58 For more on Weimar nostalgia for its colonial pasts see Jared Poley,
in Lennox, Remapping Black Germany. She borrows it from Kien Nghi Decolonization in Germany: Weimar Narratives of Colonial Loss and Foreign
Ha, Nicola Lauré al-Samarai, and Sheila Mysorekar, eds, re/visionen: Occupation, Oxford, 2005. See also Brett van Hoesen, ‘Postcolonial
Postkoloniale Perspektiven von People of Color auf Rassismus, Kulturpolitik und Cosmopolitanism: Constructing the Weimar New Woman out of
Widerstand in Deutschland, Münster, 2007, 111. a Colonial Imaginary’, in The New Woman International: Representations in
41 Tobias Nagl, ‘Counterfeit Money/Counterfeit Discourse: A Black Photography and Film from the 1870s through the 1960s, ed. Elizabeth Otto and
German Trickster’s Tale’, in Remapping Black Germany, ed. Lennox, 106. Vanessa Rocco, Michigan, 2011, 95–114.
42 Esuruoso, ‘Historical Overview’, in Arriving in the Future, 14–35. 59 For more on Josephine Baker see Petrine Archer Straw, Negrophilia: Avant-
43 Esuruoso, ‘Historical Overview’, 15. garde Paris and Black Culture in the 1920s, London, 2000. For more on the
44 Eucherius, ‘Passio Acaunensium Martyrum’, Monumenta Germaniae German context see Christian Weikop, ‘Afrophilia and Afrophobia in
Historica: Scriptorum Rerum Merovingicarum, Vol. III, Hannover, 1896, 32–40. Switzerland and Germany (1916–1938)’, in The Image of the Black in Western
Available to read online at: https://www.dmgh.de/de/fs1/object/ Art, ed. David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates Jr., Vol. V, Part 1, The
display/bsb00000750_00028.html?sortIndex=010%3A020%3A0003%3 Twentieth Century: The Impact of Africa, Cambridge, MA, 2014, 153–174.
A010%3A00%3A00&zoom=0.75 60 Katherine Tubb, ‘Face to Face?’ See note 45 for URL.
For further information about the historiography of Eucherius’ 61 Katherine Tubb, ‘Face to Face?’
account, see Jeff Bowersox, ‘The Legend of St Maurice (ca.434–450)’, 62 Christian Schad, ‘Felix Bryk’ in Bildlegenden 1976–77, in Christian Schad and
at:https://blackcentraleurope.com/sources/1000-1500/the-legend-of-- the Neue Sachlichkeit, ed. Jill Lloyd and Michael Peppiatt, New York, 2003,
st-maurice-ca-434-450/ 232.
45 However, as many scholars have since suggested, the veracity of 63 Christian Schad, ‘Agosta, the Winged Man, and Rasha, the Black Dove,
Eucherius’ account is uncertain. For more information see David Berlin 1929’, in Lloyd and Peppiatt, eds, Christian Schad, 234.
Woods, ‘The Origin of the Legend of Maurice and the Theban Legion’, 64 Jan Hogendorn and Marion Johnson, The Shell Money of the Slave Trade,
Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 45, 1994, 385–395; and Jean Devisse, ‘A Cambridge, 1986.
Sanctified Black: Maurice’, in The Image of the Black in Western Art, ed. David 65 Thomas Ratzka, ‘“The Human Being is the Most Important and the
Bindman and Henry Louis Gates Jr., vol. 2, From the Early Christian Era to the Most Mysterious” – Christian Schad’s Artistic Development to 1945’,
‘Age of Discovery’, revised second edition, London, 2010, 139–269. in Christian Schad 1894–1982 Retrospective, ed. Michael Fuhr, Vienna 2008,
46 Maryan Ainsworth, Sandra Hindriks, and Pierre Terjanian, ‘Lucas 19–20.
Cranach’s “Saint Maurice”’, Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, 72: 4, 66 Kristen Schroeder, ‘From Sideshow to Portrait: Looking at Agosta, the
Spring 2015, 7. Pigeon-Chested Man and Rasha, the Black Dove’, unpublished paper kindly
47 Ainsworth et al., ‘Lucas Cranach’s “Saint Maurice”’, 7. shared with the editors, College Art Association, February 2018, 2.
48 Ainsworth et al., ‘Lucas Cranach’s “Saint Maurice”’, 7. 67 The editors would like to thank Simon Lake from New Walk Art
49 Esuruoso, ‘Historical Overview’, 15. Amongst the relics designated Gallery, Leicestershire Museums Service and Tyl (Khalil) Norland,
with cult status by Otto, Maurice’s Holy Lance or the Longinus Lance Neuschul’s son, for furnishing us with details of the lost painting.
was believed to have inflicted Christ’s mortal wound and as part of the Email correspondence between Lake and Price and Norland and Price 6
establishment of the cult of the saint, was declared by Otto as Maurice’s December and 12 December 2018.
personal weapon. See Ainsworth et al., ‘Lucas Cranach’s “Saint 68 The Novembergruppe were formed in the aftermath of the November
Maurice”’, 7, for more information. Revolution and held shared socialist values. Prominent members included
50 Esuruoso, ‘Historical Overview’, 16. Max Pechstein and Ludwig Meidner. For more details see Joan Weinstein,
51 Paul H. D. Kaplan, ‘The Calenberg Altarpiece: Black African Christians The End of Expressionism: Art and the November Revolution, Chicago, 1990.
in Renaissance Germany’, in Germany and the Black Diaspora: Points of Contact, 69 Weikop, ‘Afrophilia and Afrophobia’, 168.

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Dorothy Price and Camilla Smith

70 For further examples see Julia Collieu, ed., Ernest Neuschul 1895–1968,
Leicester, Leicestershire Museum and Art Gallery, 1988. In email
correspondence dated 12 December 2018 between Neuschul’s son Tyl
Norland and Price, Tyl suggested that many of these works are now
either lost, destroyed or dispersed in private collections in the former
Eastern bloc.
71 Barry Herbert, ‘Ernest Neuschul 1895–1968’, in Expressionism and Beyond:
Fourteen Paintings from the German Art Collection at New Walk Museum and Art
Gallery, Leicester, ed. Adrienne Avery-Gray, Leicester, 2002, 61.
72 Helmut Lethen, Cool Conduct, Berkeley, 2002, 42.
73 The British Museum exhibition ‘Germany: Memories of a Nation’
also displayed examples of banknotes and drew attention to the
fundamental importance of their design.
74 Some of notable studies include Marsha Meskimmon and Shearer West,
eds, Visions of the ‘Neue Frau’: Women and the Visual Arts in Weimar Germany,
Aldershot, 1995; Marsha Meskimmon, We Weren’t Modern Enough: Women
Artists and the Limits of German Modernism, London, 1999; Katharina von
Ankum, ed., Women in the Metropolis, Berkeley, 1997; Vibeke Rützou
Petersen, Women and Modernity in Weimar Germany: Reality and Representation
in Popular Fiction, Oxford, 2001; Christane Schönfeld, Practicing Modernity:
Female Creativity in the Weimar Republic, Würzburg, 2006; Julia Roos, Weimar
Through the Lens of Gender, Ann Arbor, 2010; Katie Sutton, The Masculine
Woman in Weimar Germany, Oxford, 2011; Helen Boak, Women in the Weimar
Republic, Manchester, 2013 and many others.
75 Ernst Bloch, Heritage of Our Times, trans. Neville and Stephen Plaice,
Cambridge, 1991; and Frederic J. Schwartz, Blind Spots: Critical Theory and
the History of Art in Twentieth-century Germany, New Haven, 2005, 103–136.
76 The 2014–15 exhibition, ‘The Institute of Sexology’ held at the
Wellcome Collection in London seemed like a missed opportunity in
its lack of engagement with the visual culture of the discipline.
77 Exceptions include Clare Rogan, ‘Desiring Women: Constructing
the Lesbian and Female Homoeroticism in German Art and Visual
Culture, 1900–1933’, PhD dissertation, Brown University, 2005 and
Rogan’s compelling discussion of Germaine Krull’s erotic photographs
in ‘Acting the Lesbian: Les Amies by Germaine Krull’, in The New Woman
International: Representations in Photography and Film from the 1870s through the
1960s, ed. Elizabeth Otto and Vanessa Rocco, Ann Arbor, 2011, 134–151.
78 In doing so, this collection of essays takes its lead from Peter E. Gordon
and John P. McCormick’s Weimar Thought: A Contested Legacy, Princeton,
2013, 4.
79 Jochen Hung et al., eds, The Contingency of the Weimar Republic, 2.
80 Frankfurt School members and their circle included György Lukács,
Herbert Marcuse, Max Horkheimer, Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin,
Siegfried Kracauer, Theodor Adorno and Ernst Bloch.
81 Comparisons between Weimar Germany and the present day have
been debated by many prominent historians including Edward Ross
Dickinson, Jochen Hung, Laurie Marhoefer, and Julia Roos, ‘A Backlash
against Liberalism? What the Weimar Republic Can Teach Us about
Today’s Politics’, International Journal for History, Culture and Modernity, 5: 1,
91–107. Available at: https://www.history-culture-modernity.org/
articles/10.18352/hcm.533/
82 Jochen Bittner, ‘Is this the West’s Weimar Moment?’, New York Times, 31
May 2016.
83 Many recent comparisons between Weimar Germany and the present
day political swings to the right across Europe and America have been
drawn over the last few years. Examples include Eric D. Weitz, ‘Weimar
Germany and Donald Trump’, Tablet, 18 July 2016; Daniel Bessin and
Udi Greenberg, ‘The Weimar Analogy’, Jacobin, 17 December 2016 and
many others. An up-to-date record is kept by Jochen Hung’s Weimar
Studies Network available at: https://wsn.hypotheses.org/
84 Nathan Stoltzfus, ‘Trump Versus Hitler: What We Can Learn From
Weimar Germany’, Daily Beast, ‘Common Ground’, 31 June 2016.
Available at: https://weimarstudies.wordpress.com/2016/12/04/
trump-and-weimar-germany/

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