Schund und Schonheit: Populare Kultur um 1900 (review)

This volume brings together fifteen papers, plus an introduction, on aspects of popular culture, its production, and its critique, from the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century. Although the primary focus is on German material, the claims raised can be employed comparatively. Maase and his collaborators pursue the complex task of historically localizing and circumscribing "popular culture" in an effort to correct the connotations of class specificity and timelessness often associated with "the popular."

Schund is German for trash, and the title Trash and Beauty: Popular Culture around 1900 characterizes the opposing elements evident in the goods and entertainment under study here—namely, whereas the goal to enhance everyday life aesthetically would seem a positive one, mass production cheapens the effect. In the period under investigation, cultural critique sought to combat the mushrooming of cheap leisure literature, visual entertainment, and music on moral, as well as aesthetic, grounds, and much of this critique remains to this day in the general assumption that "beautiful trash" is a lower-class phenomenon from which those of upper-class sensibilities know to keep their distance. The goal of this volume is to counter precisely this assumption: popular culture was not and is not bound to the lower classes.

The effort to beautify everyday life is defined here as "the need and habit to arrange the objects and practices of normal living in a 'beautiful' manner, that is sensually attractive and emotionally appealing, and loaded with symbolic messages which add broader dimensions to existence" (p. 19). Maase formulates three theses in his introduction, which are documented and fleshed out in different ways by the volume's contributors. First, if "popular" is defined as a type of expression that is consciously differentiated from "serious" or high culture and also appeals to a large segment of the population, it must be recognized that popular culture emerged already in the late eighteenth century as an element of bourgeois ways of life, for the bourgeoisie not only controlled the rising production and aesthetic contours of popular culture, but also, despite increasing critique from its own ranks, increasingly participated in its consumption. Second, popular culture around 1900 was the result of the encounter and crisscrossing of types of entertainment in social class extremes, "the 'vulgar' subproletariate and the 'distinguished' upper class" (p. 24). In other words, it was not simply the product of a selective, borrowing voyeurism on the part of the latter, but rather, states the third thesis, the result of a privileging of the body in raw, sensual, and aggressive ways in both of these socioeconomic extremes (pp. 25-7).

In an essay delineating the shaping of popular culture between 1850 and World War I, Hermann Bausinger documents how and why, in the emergence of popular culture, delineations of class-bound cultures were claimed in public discourse and negated in actual practice. In the second half of the nineteenth century, "efforts to attain political influence generally failed, and cultural capital was thus accorded special weight" (p. 33). This is a "culture wars" situation that United States readers might usefully draw from for the present. Bausinger juxtaposes public debates regarding quality literature versus literary products for the masses with documents on the reading habits in noble and burgher houses. Here, "trash" borrowed from the library was read by the family first before servants and staff got their hands on it, and erotic and trivial literatures were locked away, along with strong liquor, but read by all nonetheless. Drawing examples from debates within musical production, travel, and leisure, Bausinger argues that "mass" as a negative label was frequently attached not to phenomena enjoyed by actual masses of people, but instead in contexts where a minority seeking to establish a cohesive, artistic...