Encountering Others: Degeneration, Distortion, and Disability in Interwar German Visual Culture, 1918-1933
Abstract
This thesis project examines the interrelationships of Weimar Körperkultur (“body culture”), interwar photographic practices broadly known as “Neues Sehen,” and Verist “Neue Sachlichkeit” painting to interrogate visual representations of bodily difference in Weimar media and art. Through close analysis of select case studies in Weimar film, photography, and painting, I argue that the lines between aesthetic, sociopolitical, and bodily deviance are blurred by many artists of the period. Such focus on the body as the site of an intermedial, interdisciplinary debate about aesthetic, social, political, and national “values” has historically been overlooked by scholars. I ultimately argue that certain “reactionary” figures (namely Franz Roh, Christian Schad, Otto Dix, and others associated with "mimetic" forms of interwar art) used non-normate embodiments to radically contest Körperkultur norms, the visual language of physiognomy, and the proto-Fascist eugenic legacies from which they emerged.