Weimar Surfaces Urban Visual Culture in 1920s Germany [Paperback]

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.

Janet Wardis Associate Professor of German Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She is the coeditor ofAgonistics: Arenas of Creative Contest(1997), co-editor of the forthcomingGerman 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

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 ofWalter Benjamin: Selected Writings 1913-26

Weimar Surfacescreates 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 ofThe 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 ofHysteria Beyond Freud

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction. Modern Surface and Postmodern Simulation: A Retrospective Retrieval
Agendas of Surface and Simulacrum
Weimar Surfaces Now
Tactility in the City
Exhibiting Superficies
Philosophies of Counterfeit
Resistances to Weimar Surface
Surface, Acadel3%