German Cities and Bourgeois Modernism, 1890-1924

German Cities and Bourgeois Modernism, 1890-1924 PDF Author: Maiken Umbach
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191570893
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
This is a study of a distinctive brand of modernism that first emerged in late nineteenth-century Germany and remained influential throughout the inter-war years and beyond. Its supporters saw themselves as a new elite, ideally placed to tackle the many challenges facing the young and rapidly industrializing German nation-state. They defined themselves as bourgeois, and acted as self-appointed champions of a modern consciousness. Focusing on figures such as Hermann Muthesius, Fritz Schumacher, and Karl-Ernst Osthaus, and the activities of the Deutscher Werkbund and other networks of bourgeois designers, writers, and 'experts', this book shows how bourgeois modernism shaped the infrastructure of social and political life in early twentieth-century Germany. Bourgeois modernism exercised its power not so much in the realm of ideas, but by transforming the physical environment of German cities, from domestic interiors, via consumer objects, to urban and regional planning. Drawing on a detailed analysis of key material sites of bourgeois modernism, and interpreting them in conjunction with written sources, this study offers new insights into the history of the bourgeois mindset and its operations in the private and public realms. Thematic chapters examine leitmotifs such as the sense of locality and place, the sense of history and time, and the sense of nature and culture. Yet for all its self-conscious progressivism, German bourgeois modernism was not an inevitable precursor of neo-liberal global capitalism. It remained a hotly contested historical construct, which was constantly re-defined in different geographical and political settings.

German Cities and Bourgeois Modernism, 1890-1924

German Cities and Bourgeois Modernism, 1890-1924 PDF Author: Maiken Umbach
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191570893
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272

Get Book Here

Book Description
This is a study of a distinctive brand of modernism that first emerged in late nineteenth-century Germany and remained influential throughout the inter-war years and beyond. Its supporters saw themselves as a new elite, ideally placed to tackle the many challenges facing the young and rapidly industrializing German nation-state. They defined themselves as bourgeois, and acted as self-appointed champions of a modern consciousness. Focusing on figures such as Hermann Muthesius, Fritz Schumacher, and Karl-Ernst Osthaus, and the activities of the Deutscher Werkbund and other networks of bourgeois designers, writers, and 'experts', this book shows how bourgeois modernism shaped the infrastructure of social and political life in early twentieth-century Germany. Bourgeois modernism exercised its power not so much in the realm of ideas, but by transforming the physical environment of German cities, from domestic interiors, via consumer objects, to urban and regional planning. Drawing on a detailed analysis of key material sites of bourgeois modernism, and interpreting them in conjunction with written sources, this study offers new insights into the history of the bourgeois mindset and its operations in the private and public realms. Thematic chapters examine leitmotifs such as the sense of locality and place, the sense of history and time, and the sense of nature and culture. Yet for all its self-conscious progressivism, German bourgeois modernism was not an inevitable precursor of neo-liberal global capitalism. It remained a hotly contested historical construct, which was constantly re-defined in different geographical and political settings.

Making Prussians, Raising Germans

Making Prussians, Raising Germans PDF Author: Jasper Heinzen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108191258
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 387

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Book Description
Reframing the German War of 1866 as a civil war, Making Prussians, Raising Germans offers a new understanding of critical aspects of Prussian state-building and German nation-building in the nineteenth century, and investigates the long-term ramifications of civil war in emerging nations. Drawing transnational comparisons with Switzerland, Italy and the United States, it asks why compatriots were driven to take up arms against each other and what the underlying conflicts reveal about the course of German state-building. By addressing key areas of patriotic activity such as the military, cultural memory, the media, the mass education system, female charity and political culture, this book elucidates the ways in which political violence was either contained in or expressed through centre-periphery interactions. Although the culmination of Prusso-German state-building in the Nazi dictatorship represented an exceptionally destructive outcome, the solutions developed previously established Prussian-led Germany as one of the most successful states in recovering from civil war.

Big Business and the Crisis of German Democracy

Big Business and the Crisis of German Democracy PDF Author: Adam Bisno
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 100902759X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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Book Description
Explains why the liberalism of a group of elites, the owners of Berlin's grand hotels, gave way to a more aggressive nationalism and conservatism after World War I – a shift which contributed directly to Hitler's rise to power. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.

Max Liebermann

Max Liebermann PDF Author: MarionF. Deshmukh
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351558781
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 625

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Book Description
Max Liebermann: Modern Art and Modern Germany is the first English-language examination of this German impressionist painter whose long life and career spanned nine decades. Through a close reading of key paintings and by a discussion of his many cultural networks across Germany and throughout Europe, this study by Marion Deshmukh illuminates Liebermann?s importance as a pioneer of German modernism. Critics and admirers alike saw his art as representing aesthetic European modernism at its best. His subjects included dispassionate depictions of the rural Dutch countryside, his colorful garden at the Wannsee, and his many portraits of Germany?s cultural, political, and military elites. Liebermann was the largest collector of French Impressionism in Germany - and his cosmopolitan outlook and his art created strong antipathies towards both by political and cultural conservatives throughout his life.

Luxury and Modernism

Luxury and Modernism PDF Author: Robin Schuldenfrei
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400890489
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 329

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Book Description
While modernism was publicized as a fusion of technology, new materials, and rational aesthetics to improve the lives of ordinary people, it was often out of reach to the very masses it purportedly served. Luxury and Modernism shows how luxury was present in bold, literal forms in modern designs—from lavish materials and costly technologies to deluxe buildings and household objects—and in subtler ways as well, such as social milieus and modes of living. In a period of social unrest and extreme wealth disparity between the common worker and those at the helm of capitalist enterprises generating immense profits, architects envisioned modern designs providing solutions for a more equitable future. Robin Schuldenfrei exposes the disconnect between modernism's utopian discourse and its luxury objects and elite architectural commissions. Despite the movement's egalitarian rhetoric, many modern designs addressed the desires of the privileged individual. Yet as Schuldenfrei demonstrates, luxury was integral not only to how modern buildings and objects were designed, manufactured, and sold, but has contributed to modernism's appeal to this day. This beautifully illustrated book provides a new interpretation of modern architecture and design in Germany during the heyday of the Bauhaus and the Werkbund, tracing modernism's lasting allure to its many manifestations of luxury. Schuldenfrei casts the work of legendary figures such as Peter Behrens, Walter Gropius, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in an entirely different light, revealing the complexities and contradictions inherent to modernism's promotion and consumption.

Private Life and Privacy in Nazi Germany

Private Life and Privacy in Nazi Germany PDF Author: Elizabeth Harvey
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108484980
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 411

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Book Description
Highlights the surprising ways in which the Nazi regime permitted or even fostered aspirations of privacy.

European Cities in the Modern Era, 1850-1914

European Cities in the Modern Era, 1850-1914 PDF Author: Friedrich Lenger
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004233385
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
In 'European Cities in the Modern Era, 1850/80-1914', Friedrich Lenger offers an account of Europe's major cities in a period crucial for the development of much of their present shape and infrastructure.

Skiing into Modernity

Skiing into Modernity PDF Author: Andrew Denning
Publisher: University of California Press
ISBN: 0520284283
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
Skiing into Modernity is the story of how skiing moved from Europe’s Scandinavian periphery to the mountains of central Europe, where it came to define the modern Alps and set the standard for skiing across the world. Denning offers a fresh, sophisticated, and engaging cultural and environmental history of skiing that alters our understanding of the sport and reveals how leisure practices evolve in unison with our changing relationship to nature. Denning probes the modernist self-definition of Alpine skiers and the sport’s historical appeal for individuals who sought to escape city strictures while achieving mastery of mountain environments through technology and speed—two central features distinguishing early twentieth-century cultures. Skiing into Modernity surpasses existing literature on the history of skiing to explore intersections between work, tourism, leisure, development, environmental destruction, urbanism, and more.

Space and Spatiality in Modern German-Jewish History

Space and Spatiality in Modern German-Jewish History PDF Author: Simone Lässig
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1785335545
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 339

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Book Description
What makes a space Jewish? This wide-ranging volume revisits literal as well as metaphorical spaces in modern German history to examine the ways in which Jewishness has been attributed to them both within and outside of Jewish communities, and what the implications have been across different eras and social contexts. Working from an expansive concept of “the spatial,” these contributions look not only at physical sites but at professional, political, institutional, and imaginative realms, as well as historical Jewish experiences of spacelessness. Together, they encompass spaces as varied as early modern print shops and Weimar cinema, always pointing to the complex intertwining of German and Jewish identity.

Business Rhetoric in German Novels

Business Rhetoric in German Novels PDF Author: Ernest Schonfield
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1571139834
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 309

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Book Description
Argues on the evidence of nine major German novels that literature and business have in common a reliance on language, understood in a creative, performative, and rhetorical sense.