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Weimar Culture RevisitedRevolution and the Weimar Avant-Garde: Contesting the Politics of Art, 1919–1924

Weimar Culture Revisited: Revolution and the Weimar Avant-Garde: Contesting the Politics of Art,... [“The revolution has brought us the freedom to express and to realize desires held for years…The call ‘Art for the People!’ is no empty cry.”1These were the words of the Expressionist painter Max Pechstein, writing in the November Group pamphlet An alle Künstler (To All Artists) in 1919. His declaration, based more on hope than actuality, caught the tenor of the age. In the wake of the collapse of the monarchy and the end of the First World War in November 1918, many avant-garde writers and artists engaged intensively with the prospect of revolution. In countless manifestos, poems, plays, articles, proclamations, and images infused with the “spirit of November,” they articulated a sense of both subjective, individual liberation and objective, collective purpose. However, there were also conflicts within the already deeply factionalized German avant-garde. Focusing on late Expressionism and aspects of Berlin Dada’s anti-Expressionist polemics, this chapter addresses some of the key debates surrounding art and politics in the period 1918–1924. It examines, in particular, these disparate groupings’ visual iconography of political agitation. In so doing, it seeks to shed new light on some of these conflicts, as a well as to provide a more meaningful context for the common motif of the agitator than that of a nebulous “spirit of revolution.”2] http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png

Weimar Culture RevisitedRevolution and the Weimar Avant-Garde: Contesting the Politics of Art, 1919–1924

Part of the Studies in European Culture and History Book Series
Editors: Williams, John Alexander
Lewer, Debbie
Weimar Culture Revisited — Oct 17, 2015
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20 pages

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Publisher
Palgrave Macmillan US
Copyright
© Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Nature America Inc. 2011
ISBN
978-1-349-29215-8
Pages
1 –21
DOI
10.1057/9780230117259_1
Publisher site
See Chapter on Publisher Site

Abstract

[“The revolution has brought us the freedom to express and to realize desires held for years…The call ‘Art for the People!’ is no empty cry.”1These were the words of the Expressionist painter Max Pechstein, writing in the November Group pamphlet An alle Künstler (To All Artists) in 1919. His declaration, based more on hope than actuality, caught the tenor of the age. In the wake of the collapse of the monarchy and the end of the First World War in November 1918, many avant-garde writers and artists engaged intensively with the prospect of revolution. In countless manifestos, poems, plays, articles, proclamations, and images infused with the “spirit of November,” they articulated a sense of both subjective, individual liberation and objective, collective purpose. However, there were also conflicts within the already deeply factionalized German avant-garde. Focusing on late Expressionism and aspects of Berlin Dada’s anti-Expressionist polemics, this chapter addresses some of the key debates surrounding art and politics in the period 1918–1924. It examines, in particular, these disparate groupings’ visual iconography of political agitation. In so doing, it seeks to shed new light on some of these conflicts, as a well as to provide a more meaningful context for the common motif of the agitator than that of a nebulous “spirit of revolution.”2]

Published: Oct 17, 2015

Keywords: Class Struggle; Expressionist Writer; Social Democratic Party; Weimar Republic; Bourgeois Culture

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