This eclectic interdisciplinary collection effectively maps out the interdisciplinary possibilities of visual culture. By including discussions on a wide-ranging spectrum of German cultural artifacts such as dance, cartography, print advertising, painting, television, architecture, television, theater, film, photography, and cabaret performance, this volume spotlights the resonances of the media in terms of aesthetics, politics, gender, and sexuality. Furthermore, it successfully addresses the question of how German studies can make the transition to German cultural studies.Departing from Guy Debord’s definition of “spectacle,” Finney allows the term to denote everything that is “presented to sight” (p. 2). She situates her approach as a continuation of visual studies’ sociohistorical orientation and interdisciplinarity, but positions it against the view, held by W. J. T. Mitchell and others, that visual culture studies should focus on the second half of the twentieth century and in particular on postmodernism. She argues in favor of a “cohesive conception of the entire century as the visual age” (pp. 4-5). Focusing exclusively on German linguistic tradition, the temporal spectrum of the discussed material ranges from 1905-99. Overall, Finney achieves her goal of presenting a collection of studies that can be read thematically, chronologically, or synchronically. The first section of this volume deals with “Questions of Methodology and Aesthetics,” the second section includes contributions on “Gender and Sexuality,” and the final section addresses “Political Dimensions” of German visual culture.

In her introduction, Finney provides a brief discourse history of visual culture as an interdisciplinary field. She draws on Walter Benjamin’s project of discerning the creative potential of modern media in order to outline some of the field’s most defining questions: what effects do modern techniques of reproduction have on art? Within the age of mass production of works of art for mass consumption, how are visual materials and experiences used to create, perpetuate, and question cultural structures and discourse? The most remarkable achievement of the collection is the repeated attention to the mutual influences of gender patterns and visual culture and their relation to socioeconomic realities. The representation of gender provides some of the contributors with a site of critique that realizes the collection’s overall aim to produce critical analyses that are “not textual but contextual” (p. 7). In the discussion of the visual representations of gender, the political and aesthetic discourses intersect which constitute early-twentieth-century German visual culture.

“Questions of Methodology in Visual Studies” by Nora M. Alter, the collection’s first contribution, sets the tone for the following essays and can be read as an extension to Finney’s introduction. Alter delivers methodological suggestions on how to practice the study of visual culture while underlining the need for collaborative work within the field of German studies. In order to avoid being reduced to language service, the task of German studies scholars is to produce “responsible texts based on rigorous scholarship that is knowledgeable about and respectful of the complexities of the relevant fields involved” (p. 21). According to Alter, “textually trained and oriented scholars” experience specific difficulties when they try to adapt the diachronic perspective necessary to critique the particular idiosyncrasies of texts that frequently display a self-reflexive critique against visuality. The subsequent essays realize this perspective. I have chosen to highlight five of the seventeen contributions that critically investigate visual material in an especially effective manner.

In “The Interarts Experiment in Early German Film,” Ingeborg Hoesterey examines the hybridity of visual artifacts. She analyzes the intermedia aesthetics of expressionist film by focusing on its characteristics as a discursive event. Taking Robert Wiene’s Caligari (1919) as an example, she demonstrates how the visual semiotics produced by the symbiosis of painting and film serves to illuminate the nature and effect of intermediality in general. Highlighting the pragmatics of Caligari’s production situation, she discerns the film’s design as an expressionist painting in motion. Hoesterey briefly addresses the cultural dependence of aesthetic priorities, paralleling early German film’s intermedial experiments with the symbiosis of the arts pursued by German Romanticism.

Dagmar von Hoff’s article “From Dance to Film: The Cinematic Art of Leni Riefenstahl and Dorothy Arzner” explores the aesthetic potential of incorporating one mode of artistic expression into another. Arzner and Riefenstahl, von Hoff demonstrates, draw upon dance traditions to point to the problematic relationship between gender and the gaze, while at the same time seeking their own artistic expression in the medium of film. She demonstrates that although both directors stage femininity, Arzner establishes a gender-critical discourse, while Riefenstahl binds her female character to the forces of nature, making her inferior to male rationality. Von Hoff’s comparison between the directors’ varying methods of incorporating dance proves effective: she demonstrates how specific staging techniques and the narrative context award to dance the capability to perpetuate or subvert emancipatory advances.

David James Prickett’s “Magnus Hirschfeld and the Photographic (Re)Invention of the ‘Third Sex’” analyzes medical photographs of people whose primary markers of sex are ambiguous. In the photographic images of Hirschfeld’s Geschlechts-Übergänge, Prickett detects vivid markers of gendered narration: in one series of images, the person depicted has male genitalia, but his body-posture is staged in such a way that feminine behavior is suggested, which is further underlined by Hirschfeld’s own analysis of the supposed hermaphroditic performance of gender roles. Prickett lays out the methods with which the subversive potential of photography is achieved. The camera, he explains, becomes for Hirschfeld an essential tool as an aesthete, doctor, and political activist. Photographs are used to authenticate a “textual and visual normative message, intended to guarantee those of ‘abnormal’ gender performance, sex, and/or sexual orientation the same legal rights as those in ‘normal’ society enjoyed” (p. 116).

In “Cartographic Claims: Colonial Mappings of Poland in German Territorial Revisionism,” Kristin Kopp investigates the representational power of cartography. Her focus is on what she calls “persuasive maps,” maps that use non-cartographic images to impart connotative meaning to the area displayed. In map material published in 1938, Nazi Germany’s project of Ostkolonisation was depicted so as to include much of Poland’s territory as a landscape created and defined by German cultural practice. Kopp outlines the methods of constructing the “map as socially constructed, argumentative text” that overcomes the limitations of static representation and gains the momentum of narration to shape the collective spatial imagination of Germans (p. 200). As the maps discussed are temporally ambiguous and include arrows and other markers that indicate change over time, the viewer or map-reader was invited to read the colonization of Poland as a cultural and historical necessity. Kopp effectively demonstrates the various manipulative intermedial formal features of these persuasive maps and traces their delivery of a strong political message. Furthermore, her essay shows, using maps as an example, how the visual image and linguistic text interact in an intermedial Medientext while mutually enhancing their rhetorical power.

Lutz Koepnick’s “Face/Off: Hitler and Weimar Political Photography” discusses Heinrich Hoffmann’s photographs of Adolf Hitler as an emblematic event of cultural production which settled into “Weimar discourses on total mobilization and photographic reproduction, discourses in which the image of modern warfare served as a blueprint for new perceptual realities and modes of cultural address” (p. 217). Koepnick argues that Hoffmann’s 1927 Hitler photographs created a metaphorical system intended to restructure the political as a self-referential space. He explains the ways in which desensitized forms of looking structured the political as image space. Furthermore, Koepnick’s approach demonstrates how the photographic camera can be used, as it was by Hoffmann, to liberate the photographic image from its association with “death, memory, melancholia, and thereby erase given binarisms of value (public/private; aesthetics/politics; face/mask; emotion/expression; community/society; photography/film)” (p. 232).

In addition to these essays, the volume also includes contributions by Blake Stimson, Jan Mieszkowski, Janet Ward, Barbara Kosta, Patrick Greaney, Thomas D. Armbrecht, Dagmar C. G. Lorenz, Peter Arnds, Michele Ricci, and Eric Kligerman. From a variety of different perspectives, Finney’s collection argues for a denial of the passive encounter of the spectator with visual representations and maps out an encounter with the interpretative and representational limits of visual material. This collection of articles therefore makes valuable contributions to the scholarship on German visual culture. Most of the articles touch on the relationship between visual productions and their sociohistorical background. The picture that emerges from these articles of the interplay between representation and interpretation is complex and nuanced, and adds much to our understanding of early-twentieth-century German visual culture. Many historians and literary scholars will find the volume useful, especially if they are searching for new insights into visual productions with a specific link to German history and politics.

Citation: Heike Polster. “Review of Gail Finney, ed, Visual Culture in Twentieth-Century Germany: Text as Spectacle,” H-German, H-Net Reviews, May, 2007. URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=184141183908860.