Visual Culture in Twentieth-Century Germany: Text as Spectacle (review)

Gail Finney's collection of essays on visual culture concentrates specifically on the position of German Studies following what some have dubbed the "visual turn," but also addresses the tasks facing the field in general. In making an argument for directing critical energies toward the visual, many a can of methodological and disciplinary worms can be opened and, luckily, they are.

To take the subtitle and implicit premise of the collection, "text as spectacle" seriously is to question the boundaries between image and language, viewing and reading. It is to the editor's credit that she makes this no easy task. The essays range from examinations of film and architecture to advertising and cabaret. Linking them is a challenge put forth most clearly in Norma M. Alter's provocative essay on methodology: "If Germanists are to play a significant role in visual culture, which I think we should, then we will need to produce responsible texts based on rigorous scholarship that is knowledgeable about and respectful of the complexities of all the relevant fields involved" (21).

Posing this challenge is itself a reflection of the collection's awareness of debates within visual culture. Most crucially, it addresses many of the issues raised in James Elkins's recent work Visual Studies: A Skeptical Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2003), in which the author laments that in many of its current incarnations "visual studies is too easy to learn, too easy to practice, too easy on itself" (65). He argues for greater theoretical range, heightened awareness of work in other disciplines, and an increased self-awareness of the field's own history and position within the academy.

In investigating the reciprocal relations of German Studies and visual culture, each essay in this collection is implicitly engaging in just such an act of disciplinary and methodological self-reflection. The most illuminating contributions demonstrate just how promising, and complex, this relationship can be. Kristin Kopp's essay on cartography, for example, is an insightful analysis of the way in which numerous visual representational strategies came to bear in the creation of maps after World War I that served to persuade Germans of the supposed illegitimacy of its new borders. Reading the cartographer's choice of scale, shading, perspective etc. as "textual strategies," Kopp makes a convincing case that these maps were strongly persuasive political texts, made all the more so by their putative objectivity and rationality. Mappings of the body are at the center of David James Prickett's illuminating analysis on the use of photography in Magnus Hirschfeld's study of the "third sex" and of Barbara Kosta's study of the image of women in Weimar-era cigarette advertising. Both essays speak to the complex relations between authenticity and performance, be it as the object or consumer of the visual, or both at once.

Indeed, breaking down such distinctions and placing the logic of these dichotomies into question is the subject of one of the collection's most fascinating studies, Lutz Koepnick's analysis of a famous 1927 series of photographs of Hitler taken by Heinrich Hoffmann. In examining the way in which these six shots of Hitler in rhetorical poses helped to further his political agenda, Koepnick finds himself engaging with the nature of photography itself and its complex relationship to the political. He argues that the "whole ambition was to obliterate the very possibility of the ridiculous" in undoing legacies of bourgeois culture and debate in order to create the political realm as a space of surface designs, self-referentiality, and desensitized viewing. Hoffmann's camera, he argues, "sought nothing less than to eliminate the structuring binarisms of bourgeois life, such as interiority versus exteriority, authenticity versus dissimulation, truth versus lie" (216). Koepnick's argument is ambitious, but it is convincingly supported by brilliant, close, and careful readings of the images, along with thought-provoking analyses of the importance of that which is absent from the photographs...