Frenetic surfaces - Reviews - book about German design in the 1920s - Book Review

Janet Ward. Weimar Surfaces: Urban Visual Culture in 1920s Germany.

Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. 374 pp., 63 b/w ills. $50, $19.95 paper.

Alfred Doblin's landmark novel Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) begins with its main character's release from prison. Working his way back to the big city center, Franz Biberkopf climbs aboard a tram and falls into endless observation:

Crowds, what a swarm of people! How they hustle and bustle! My brain needs oiling, it's probably dried up. What was all this? Shoe stores, hat stores, incandescent lamps, saloons. People got to have shoes to run around so much; didn't we have a cobbler's shop out there, let's bear that in mind! Hundreds of polished window-panes, let them blaze away, are they going to make you afraid or something, why, you can smash them, they're polished clean, that's all.

Free from confinement, Biberkopf finds himself thrown from a life of sensory deprivation into Europe's most vibrantly "on" city, the Berlin of Germany's short-lived Weimar Republic. Like many of the era's Neue Sachlichkeit artists, he consumes the capital's overwhelming culture of display as an unprocessed torrent of stimuli. And also like these artists, he vomits his response in an anxious swirling vision la George Grosz or Karl Hubbuch. For many experiencing Weimar's urban culture, its stimuli did indeed generate discomfort, but for those same people and many more, it also engendered the deep fascination worthy of a world city. Janet Ward's book Weimar Surfaces: Urban Visual Culture in 1920s Germany painstakingly documents she components of this urban culture and demonstrates that in its complexity and excess, it offered exactly what modernity had promised since the mid-nineteenth century. No longer would the aesthetic experience be found only in the ecstasy of a Beethoven concert or the thrill of this year 's academic painting salon. Instead, a stride down Berlin's boulevards, past the surfaces of department stores, electrical displays, and cinemas, outpaced anything high culture could offer. "Germany of the 1920s, writes Ward, "offers us a stunning moment in modernity when surface values first ascended to become determinates of taste, activity, and occupation--a scene of functioning that shows us that there was in fact a time when the new was not yet old, modernity was still modern, and spectacle was still spectacular" (2). Where Baudelaire once defined modern life as the new subject of painting, Ward now sees Weimar's high modernity itself as the most significant art of its time, one that any flaneur or flaneuse might experience and enjoy. Yet, her even-handed study also addresses the underside of this display culture, which was located in a country where unemployment and poverty often limited consumption precisely to the surfaces on which its stimuli were so heavily concentrated. Weimar saw the exciting orig ins of a shock culture toward which we have since grown ambivalent, Ward suggests. But Weimar also evinced the pitfalls of a culture whose basis in consumption produced ambivalence from its very inception.

Weimar Surfaces is one of the latest publications in the University of California s Weimar and Now: German Cultural Criticism series, an essential collection of studies of, and translations from, the period. (2) Like Steven Aschheim's 1994 Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, Bernd Widdig's 2001 Culture and Inflation in Weimar Germany, and Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg's 1994 Weimar Republic Sourcebook, all previous volumes in this series, Ward's book will prove helpful to anyone interested in twentieth-century cultural studies as a whole. Her approach offers a model for this field, integrating studies as diverse as the histories of art, architecture, cinema, and advertising into a clearly focused inquiry In fact, one of the book's greatest contributions is its expansive combination of exhaustive archival work and keen theoretical observation. This merging of substantive and interpretive approaches has been the growing tendency in cultural studies, but Ward achieves it with particular aplomb.

In addition to its general and even model appeal, Ward's study will also prove helpful to those specifically interested in Germany's fleeting interwar republic. Her effort, for example, to "reenact the surface terrain of Weimar Germany as one of the most dazzling examples of the modern period and reassess it according to its own merits" (2) reaffirms the excitement that brought many of us to study this period in the first place. At the same time, her critical discussion of the economic, social, and visual factors animating these surfaces keeps nostalgia at bay Ward begins her book with an introduction to the commentators who have critiqued Weimar's popular culture, including those writing in retrospect. The entire cast of characters one might expect is here: Friedrich Nietzsche, Georg Simmel, Max Weber, Siegfried Krakauer, Walter Benjamin, Georg Lukacs, members of the Frankfurt School such as Theodor Adorno, and more recent, postmodern critics. Rather than argue with these writers, Ward reviews their work for the mixed evaluations that express the ambivalence toward Weimar popular culture. In Simmel's work, for example, she sees an update of Marx's condemnation of commodity culture, reading it instead as "an oscillating ride with both reifying and liberating experiences--at least for those who are permitted to participate" (26). In Benjamin's writing, she sees Weimar as a total, arcadelike artwork "that highlights, rather than veils over, its origins of production and processes of technique" (29). Ward reserves her sharpest analysis for Krakauer, whose fascination with Weimar consumer culture implies what she sees as his fundamentally positive evaluation of it. Only with Adorno and the Frankfurt School does she take issue, although her argument is around, rather than against, their points. But it's in this positioning that her project's goal moves clearly into view: