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A postscript, new to this reissue ofthe book, assures us that the big questions asked in die first edition of die book are still topical. The question of guilt, for example, debated during the war by people like Brecht and the theologian Paul Tillich, Einstein, Hans Morgenthau, and Thomas Mann, continues today; most recently there is the question ofJewish wealth in Swiss banks and French complicity in Nazi racial policy. As the influence of the political left has declined in this country, the views ofthe conservative German émigré Leo Strauss (a man who "identified" with heroes, the Great Men ofthe West) have found new life through the prominence ofhis "disciples" today, who, according to Heilbut, include Irving and William Kristol, Robert Bork, andJustice Antonin Scalia. True, the influence ofHerbert Marcuse on students today has subsided (in comparison with the "revolutionary" students and hippie culture of the 1960s), just as the "boom" during die 1980s ofthe Frankfurt School in American universities has also begun to fade. Hannah Arendt's influence on scholars is no longer so obvious, and Thomas Mann's stature has been diminished by the publication ofhis diaries and by recent biographies. But on the other hand, the music of Kurt Weill and Hanns Eisler is still performed, John Heartfield's montage technique is still imitated by illustrators, the "social purpose" of the Bauhaus style continues to inspire some contemporary architects, and Arnold Schoenberg remains "the century's most influential composer" (493). Another contribution that the German refugee artists and intellectuals made to American culture, one that has only become evident since 1983, is in the area ofgay consciousness; the author cites not only the "gender -bending" image ofperformers like Marlene Dietrich, but, more importantly, the Marxist-Freudian writings of Herbert Marcuse and the diaries of Thomas Mann. * Karl Gemot Kuehn. Caught: TheArt ofPhotography in the German Democratic Republic. Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 1997. 304p. Gerald A. Fetz University of Montana The author ofthis fascinating and highly informative study, Karl Gemot Kuehn, is an internationally known photographer and scholar who teaches history of photography at California State Northridge and UCLA. The topic of this richly illustrated book, photography in the GDR, is one artistic medium that most literary scholars ofthings German, even those who have worked extensively in GDR cultural history, know relatively little about. Kuehn's study will certainly remove any excuse for such a lacuna. The author is obviously intimately familiar not only FALL 1999 Hr ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW * 101 with the extensive and unique range ofGDR photography, but with many ofthe major photographers, their journals and exhibits, as well as the various photographic "schools" or "groups." Extremely impressive for this reviewer is Kuehn's knowledge of the conditions under which these photographers worked and created , that is, the political, cultural, and social context ofartists in the GDR. Consequently , he is able to provide a necessary framework for understanding the photographers he discusses, their work, the conditions for that work, and its public reception and impact. Consequently, even those of us well-versed in GDR cultural and literary studies are introduced to the connections between the medium ofphotography and the artistic genres — literature, theater, film — about which we know much. Furthermore, Kuehn's discussion and reproductions of the photos he writes about give the reader a very rich sense ofthe developments in GDR photography from the end ofWorld War II right up to and even beyond the fall ofthe Berlin Wall in November 1989, and the subsequent unification ofthe two Germanys less than a year later. This most welcome study shows clearevidenceofextensive and careful research. Kuehn utilized archives, libraries, exhibit catalogues, interviews, photo books and journals, studies ofGDR culture and history, as well as literary works as sources and resources for his analyses. He frequently cites both the photographers themselves and the "official" critics to illuminate the political, cultural, and aesthetic or artistic tensions which affected both the trends in GDR photography as well as the personal and professional lives ofthese artists. Throughout, Kuehn's writing is admirably and remarkably clear, lively, and jargon-free, thus inviting the uninitiated reader into and informing us even about some ofthe sophisticated aesthetic dimensions ofphotography. I suspect that even those...

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