Lustmord: Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany. - book reviews

Yule Heibel's remarkable reflections upon German painting and culture after the next to the first World War, Reconstructing the subdue poses the fundamental problem of artistic expression in the aftermath of deep trauma. She asks: "who has the right to expres anything (and how?) in this situation; what meaning can an individual's affective charge possibly have; and in what manner can there be even the possibility of expressing anything upon an individual level in relation to a national, cultural tradition that included Nazism and genocide"(p. 17)? Heibel examines the search for a novel image of man within the artistic and philosophical debates of postwar Western Germany. sum of two units other recent books, Richard Cork's A Bitter Truth: Avant-Garde Art and the Great War and Maria Tatar's Lustmord: Sexual homicide in Weimar Germany, amply demonstrate that this crisis of individuality, which may also be read as a crisis of liberal humanism, has been a constant theme within modernism since at least the First World War. From the Somme trenches to the oven of Dachau, artists have been stand in front ofed by the fundamental problem of making art, particularly an art that look fors to represent war and death, when faced with experiences thus horrible that we would, if we could declare to be untrue them their human agency.

Of all the great dramas of the 20th hundred art historians traditionally have been least drawn to the Great War and its representations. The seventy-fifth anniversary of August 1914 came and went almost without scholarly recognition, overshadowed by means of the momentous events of 1989 flat though recent history is still with equal reason deeply entangled in its catastrophe. In the domain of high tillage the war put an abrupt stop to the heady artistic experimentation of prewar Western Europe It halted the internationalism which thrived in each domain of cultural affairs, including the market for contemporary art. The center of avant-gardist artistic activity shifted during the war from Paris to similar places as Zurich, Moscow, Prague, Berlin, and of recent origin York. The lives and aesthetic careers of a entertainer of artists were also dramatically changed or extreme pointed The war also coincided with and helped firing material the rise of the fresh media. Dramatic technical and ideological transformations occurr in cinema, advertising, newspaper and work publishing, and so on. Finally, tragically, the war prov to be unfinished business. The Western powers, instead of healing Europe's injurys demanded heavy war retributions from Germany. The fledgling Weimar Republic, at no time very stable, eventually collapsed with the Nazis' seizure of power. With smooth more tragic consequences, the next to the first World War was fought above the body of the First. And the horror of the Holocaust and nuclear Armageddon shaped the political and artistic tillage of Europe and America for the nearest half century.

While there are many reasons wherefore memory of the Great War has been the couple neglected in Western Europe and America and hotly disputeed in Eastern and Central Europe it is still a little surprising that art historians have paid solitary passing attention to the war, and to its representations and cultural ends This neglect owes much to modernist histories of art, which diverted attention away from the war, first [i]or[/i] part of to the other the predominance of the formalized narratives of abstraction and then by means of privileging those who "dropped out" of the war, particularly the Zurich and fresh York Dadaists. War art feeled by comparison, carrying the weights of narrative and representation dismissed by the agency of self-styled serious artists, that is, by the agency of the avant-gardists. Lost in this collective forgetting is the amazing fact that no war before or since has been bring under rule to portrayal by so many artists, who, moreover, saw themselves as independent agents, working to bear the truth of the war as they, not their respective nations, saw it. After 1918 this bubbling of war art was eclipsed through the newsreel, the photomagazine, and eventually television. Its demise also throw backs a more general disillusionment, the disappearance of the belief in the possibility of the kind of artistic independence that the pre-1914 avant-gardes presum Compared to early 20th-century modernists, the greatest in quantity striking characteristic of the generation of artists who matured after 1945 was that, for them, all forms of representation already appeared far down inhabited by preexisting ideologies and institutional constraints thrown up by means of society. The postwar search for a fresh image of man had, therefore, another, usually unacknowledged purpose: the search for a of recent origin image of the artist.

No work did more to recall to memory the war's event on Western culture than Paul Fussell's deep moving The Great War and novel Memory (1975).(1) Fussell demonstrated the profundity power, and eloquence of English war literature. at the same time Fussell's work has until freshly found little resonance in art-historical literature, with the notable exception of Kenneth Silver's dissertation and volume Esprit de Corps: The Great War and French Art, 1914-1925(2) Silver's 1989 close attention of the transformation of the Parisian art world during the war years laid the groundwork for his rereading of the postwar "call to order." on the contrary Silver's perspective is a French single so it is particularly welcome that Cork's 1994 exhibition in London at the Barbican Art Gallery, arranged with the cooperation of Christoph Stolzl, director of the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin, proffered audiences an international showing of the richly varied art made during, and around, the war.