Interwar Culture.

HIS 102 Western Civilization IIKara Heitz

Roaring 20s

Roaring 20s

Inter-War Culture

• Reaction to horrors WWI

• Roaring 20s v. Anxious 20s?

• “Dancing on the edge of a volcano”

• Berlin during Weimar Republic (1919-1933)

Klee’s “Angelus Novus” (1920)

Benjamin, Angel of History, from “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940)

“A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”

Flappers

Bauhaus

Clockwise from top left: 1) Bauhaus School in Dessau, Germany, (1925); 2) Chair by Mies van Der Rohe for the Bauhaus (1927); 3) Tea infuser and strainer by Marianne Brandt (1924); 4) Typewriter Olivetti Studio 42 designed by the Bauhaus-alumnus Alexander Schawinsky (1936)

New Objectivity

Otto Dix, “Stormtroopers Advancing Under Gas” (1924)

Otto Dix, “Metropolis” (1927-1928)

Marcel Duchamp, “Fountain” (1917)

Dada

Hannah Hoch, “Cut the Dada kitchen knife through the last Weimar beer-belly cultural epoch in Germany” (1919)