| Description |
Summary:
Germany of the 1920s offers a stunning moment in modernity, a time when surface values first became determinants of taste, activity, and occupation: modernity was still modern, spectacle was still spectacular. Janet Ward's luminous study revisits Weimar Germany via the lens of metropolitan visual culture, analyzing the power that 1920s Germany holds for today's visual codes of consumerism.
Review:
"This outstanding book has retrieved all the luminous qualities of its subject matter to produce an astonishing revelation of gleaming appearances on splendid display. It is unrivalled by any previous study." - Marcus Bullock, coeditor of Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings 1913-26 "Weimar Surfaces creates provocative new connections between the historical constellations that found a privileged expression in Weimar Berlin and the more contemporary debates on the legacies of modernism and modernity. A compelling study." - Sabine Hake, author of The Cinema's Third Machine "Janet Ward's study of Weimar architecture and design is the most comprehensive and integrated study of the surface of Weimar experience yet written.... A first-rate and stimulating book." - Sander L. Gilman, coauthor of Hysteria Beyond Freud"
Biography:
Janet Ward is Associate Professor of German Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She is the coeditor of Agonistics: Arenas of Creative Contest (1997), co-editor of the forthcoming German Studies in the Post-Holocaust Age: The Politics of Memory, Identity, and Ethnicity (2001) and is currently writing a book on post-Wall architecture in Berlin |