Quiet Rebellion: Emmy Hennings and the Politics of Subversion

Author(s):  
Charles Terry Marcrum II

Amidst the clamor and upheaval of World War I, Zurich proved to be fertile ground for a blossoming literary and artistic movement dedicated to the eradication of the social, political, and creative norms which allowed the war to come about, through a campaign of abstraction and reduction into Nichtigkeit (Nothingness). This was Dada. The means by which this campaign was made operational were varied, as were the many artists and writers who placed themselves on the front lines. One such artist, Emmy Hennings, has, in recent years, become the subject of increased examination and debate, due to her problematic and twice-marginalized position as both a woman and a liberated avant-garde within a still-repressive Wilhelmine society. Under intense scrutiny is the question of whether Hennings served as a leader of the Zurich Dada movement, or as a passive follower, operating under her husband’s able direction; whether she used the Dada movement as a platform on which to voice her contrary opinions or simply as an outlet for politically and socially indifferent self-expression, as some modern scholars contend.

Tempo ◽  
1993 ◽  
pp. 15-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raymond Head

The subject of modernism in early 20th-century British music is rarely examined: partly because it is often thought that British composers were not interested in the Modern Movement before World War I, and partly because in discussing Modernism (a convenient umbrella term for the whole cultural avant-garde whose components included Expressionism, Futurism, Primitivism and Surrealism) one must be prepared to engage subjects which, in this country, are normally considered Verboten. There is no doubt, for instance, that the development of the Modern Movement on the Continent was partly inspired by a widespread awareness of Theosophy, and the interest, which it encouraged, in such esoteric areas as Indian philosophy and astrology. In this article I want to look at this aspect of Modernism in relation to Gustav Hoist, and especially in The Planets (1914–16): his, and British music's, first striking testament to the Modernist outlook. The very bases of this work are Hoist's understanding of astrology, his friendships of the time, and his Theosophical upbringing.


2015 ◽  
pp. 188-211
Author(s):  
Joanna Niewiarowska

The article summarizes and compares the two biographical texts by writers who are difficult to compare in terms of aesthetics and political-ideological dimension − fragments of journals by Karol Irzykowski devoted to illness, death and remembrance of his daughter Basia and biographical memory of the dead of tuberculosis son Adam by Stefan Żeromski. The comparative perspective of both narratives of loss is present in their reflection on Polishness, increased in the circumstances of World War I. The analysis and interpretation shows that bearing witness to such a difficult personal existential experience paradoxically involves the necessity of re-positioning in and to Polishness. The memory of Adam Żeromski is subordinated to the social perspective, frame of collective memory, which makes it understandable why in Żeromski’s story he is the ‛little Poleʼ, and Basia is the subject to psychological and individual memory, collected memory, so she can be called the great Poland. In this sense, both texts are the media of culture of remembrance, which inherently clarifies and determines the experience of the Great War that seems to confirm the researchers’ diagnosis of a breakthrough significance of the period 1914–1918, also in the perspective of Polish identity.


Author(s):  
Kevin B. Johnson

This chapter examines the delayed but still strong and lasting impression that Pearl White left on Czechoslovakia's critics, viewers, and avant-garde movement. Drawing on a series of articles in Czech periodicals from the late 1910s to the 1930s, it considers the issues presented by White and the American serial films regarding the international market, the need to come to terms with Hollywood's global reach, and the impact of glocalized Americana for local production. The chapter first looks at the sudden influx of American films in Czechoslovakia after World War I before discussing how America was perceived as a model of democracy and cultural modernity in the early years of the First Czechoslovak Republic. It then explores how White fueled the fantasies of the Czech populace as well as the ways that she was appropriated and re-imagined in the service of various discourses that spoke for the mental and physical well-being of the nation. It also analyzes White's Czech career within the context of larger issues related to spectatorship, film aesthetics, and the creation of star mythology.


Author(s):  
Fionna Barber

Modernism in Ireland was bound up with major social and political factors during the first part of the twentieth century, especially the effects of independence and Partition in 1922 and the role of the visual within national identity. This is an important context for Irish artists’ engagement with the wider development of European modernism; Cubism and Expressionism were particularly significant and, to a lesser extent, Surrealism. In 1910 the painters Paul and Grace Henry traveled from Dublin to Achill Island on Ireland’s Western Seaboard, where they remained until the end of World War I. This move, to some degree, emulated the earlier example of European avant-garde artists—such as Paul Gauguin in abandoning Paris for initially Brittany and then Tahiti—but it was also a sign of the fascination with the West that became an important cultural focus for an independent Ireland. The rural West, Catholic and Gaelic speaking, in many ways embodied the ideologies of the new Irish Free State. In addition to being the subject of Henry’s pastel-toned landscapes it became a major focus for both realist artists such as Seán Keating and modernist painters including Jack B. Yeats and Patrick Collins.


2015 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Friedemann J. Weidauer

Coming-of-Age films have in common that they must address the social contradictions an adolescent experiences as he or she joins the world of adults. At the same time they have to come to a resolution of these contradictions that is acceptable to the audiences as well as the direct or indirect mechanisms of censorship of the movie industry. In the aftermath of World War II,  a number of social paradigms had been upset (as for example gender roles, intergenerational relations, representations of state and paternal authority).The 1950s were thus a time when the contradictions experienced by all generations of adolescents were even more acutely brought to the foreground and thus represent a particularly fertile ground for this genre. The Coming-of Age films of this period played a crucial role in reintroducing established social paradigms by way of offering “false closures” that temporarily offered resolutions to the contradictions experienced by this particular generation of young adults.


Author(s):  
Brent A. R. Hege

AbstractAs dialectical theology rose to prominence in the years following World War I, the new theologians sought to distance themselves from liberalism in a number of ways, an important one being a rejection of Schleiermacher’s methods and conclusions. In reading the history of Weimar-era theology as it has been written in the twentieth century one would be forgiven for assuming that Schleiermacher found no defenders during this time, as liberal theology quietly faded into the twilight. However, a closer examination of this period reveals a different story. The last generation of liberal theologians consistently appealed to Schleiermacher for support and inspiration, perhaps none more so than Georg Wobbermin, whom B. A. Gerrish has called a “captain of the liberal rearguard.” Wobbermin sought to construct a religio-psychological method on the basis of Schleiermacher’s definition of religion and on his “Copernican turn” toward the subject and resolutely defended such a method against the new dialectical theology long after liberal theology’s supposed demise. A consideration of Wobbermin’s appeals to Schleiermacher in his defense of the liberal program reveals a more complex picture of the state of theology in the Weimar period and of Schleiermacher’s legacy in German Protestant thought.


1996 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 371-376
Author(s):  
Andrew Ludanyi

The fate of Hungarian minorities in East Central Europe has been one of the most neglected subjects in the Western scholarly world. For the past fifty years the subject—at least prior to the late 1980s—was taboo in the successor states (except Yugoslavia), while in Hungary itself relatively few scholars dared to publish anything about this issue till the early 1980s. In the West, it was just not faddish, since most East European and Russian Area studies centers at American, French and English universities tended to think of the territorial status quo as “politically correct.” The Hungarian minorities, on the other hand, were a frustrating reminder that indeed the Entente after World War I, and the Allies after World War II, made major mistakes and significantly contributed to the pain and anguish of the peoples living in this region of the “shatter zone.”


Belleten ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 76 (276) ◽  
pp. 631-646
Author(s):  
Bülent Özdemi̇r

In the 20th century Assyrians living in Diaspora have increased their search of identity because of the social and political conditions of their present countries. In doing so, they utilize the history by picking up certain events which are still kept fresh in the collective memory of the Assyrian society. World War I, which caused a large segment of the Assyrians to emigrate from the Middle East, has been considered as the milestone event of their history. They preferred to use and evaluate the circumstances during WW I in terms of a genocidal attack of the Ottomans against their nation. This political definition dwarfs the promises which were not kept given by their Western allies during the war for an independent Assyrian state. The aspects of Assyrian civilization existed thousands of years ago as one of the real pillars of their identity suffer from the artificially developed political unification around the aspects of their doom in WWI presented as a genocidal case. Additionally, this plays an efficient role in removal of existing religious and sectarian differences for centuries among Assyrians. This paper aims at showing in the framework of primary sources how Assyrian genocidal claims are being used pragmatically in the formation of national consciousness in a very effective way. Not the Assyrian civilization but their constructed history in WWI is used for the formation of their nation definition.


PEDIATRICS ◽  
1963 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 737-741
Author(s):  
D. B. Dill

THE STUDY of work performance as related to age began in this country when Sid Robinson joined the group at the Fatigue Laboratory of the Harvard School of Business Administration. In the winter of 1936-7, he persuaded five champion milers who were in Boston for indoor meets to run on the Laboratory's treadmill on week-ends. Simultaneously, he was chiefly engaged in studying treadmill performance as related to age. This was the subject of his doctorate thesis published later under the title: "Experimental Studies of Physical Fitness as Related to Age". The 91 subjects ranged in age from boys 6 years of age to one man of 91. There were eight 6-year-olds, 10 between 8 and 13 and 20 between 48 and 76. Robinson's background as an Olympic middle-distance runner and as an assistant track coach at Indiana University gave him skill in dealing with the many diverse problems that confronted him. Often he was faced with sociological-psychological problems more difficult to solve than the physiological problems. Indicative of his success is the fact that the subjects were volunteers—no money was offered as an inducement to come to the laboratory. Also worthy of note is that there was no untoward incident throughout the study. Robinson's plan included respiratory, circulatory and metabolic observations in the basal state and in two grades of exercise. He describes the work experiments as follows: (pp. 251-3, reference 2) "After the above observations were completed, the subject performed two grades of work on a motor-driven treadmill, set at an angle of 8.6% in all experiments. Each subject below 73 years of age first walked at 5.6 km per hour for 15 minutes; this raises the oxygen consumption 7 or 8 times the basal level. After resting 10 minutes, he ran or in some cases, walked, at a rate which exhausted him in 2 to 5 minutes.


Author(s):  
Thomas Mergel

Both dictatorship and democracy were essentially new concepts of political rule in Germany after World War I. It was true that suffrage had been increasingly extended after the revolution of 1848–1849, and more citizens (male citizens, that is) were entitled to vote in Imperial Germany than, for instance, in Great Britain. Dictatorship, too, was a new form of political control, at least in Germany. The term ‘people’ was to become a standard formula for the self-understanding of German politics after 1918. In its shades of meaning, it saw the people as a social organism, rather than as an ethnic community. ‘People’ referred to the many. It described the social commitment with which a good community was supposed to be built. An inquiry into Reichstag, and the German parliament and incidents and rebellions surrounding it concludes this article.


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