Erkenne Dich selbst! Strategien der Sichtbarmachung des Körpers im 20. Jahrhundert ed. by Sybilla Nikolow (review)

This volume on twentieth-century approaches to visualizing and disseminating knowledge of the body is the kind of collection whose whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Taking shape out of an eponymous VolkswagenStiftung "Forschung in Museen" project, the volume's core contributions present new research related to the Deutsches Hygiene-Museum Dresden from a variety of intellectual-historical, medical-historical, museum studies, and media studies approaches. Through these various lenses, the history of this important institution is rethought, illuminated, and valorized in ways that will help North American scholars better understand why this museum deserves far greater attention than it has tended to receive outside of Germany, and for reasons that are by no means limited to questions of racial hygiene and biopolitics, as important as these are. As this volume's contributions show, the Hygiene-Museum represents one of the earliest and most compelling "Museen der Zukunft" (29–30), an innovative museum type born out of the exigencies and contradictions of industrial modernity. On this terrain, the generation of lay knowledge of the body proved to be a surprisingly enduring concern with strategies that, the volume underscores, continue to need scholarly study.

This overall result is achieved in no small part due to Sybilla Nikolow's thoughtful organization of the volume. Particularly notable in this regard is the inclusion of essays by scholars such as Helmuth Trischler, Ludmilla Jordanova, Anna Maerker, and Nick Hopwood, whose work on separate but related European phenomena creates mutually reinforcing points of reference with respect to the Hygiene-Museum. These pieces on the emergence of modern technology and medical exhibition traditions (Trischler and Jordanova, respectively), developments in anatomical modeling before 1900 (Maerker), and the rise of embryology's specimens (Hopwood) not only help to situate the Hygiene-Museum within larger institutional, commercial, medical, and sociohistorical parameters, their narrower cases are also enhanced by work focused on business practices (Thomas Steller), collecting practices (Susanne Roeßiger), educational materials (Sandra Mühlenbrand), and the post-Wende reinvention (Lioba Thaut) of the Hygiene-Museum. All the contributions likewise benefit from their careful arrangement in four sections: venues of display ("Orte"); exhibition practices focused on medical models designed for popular display ("Praktiken I"); approaches to measuring physiological performance for sports, biopolitical, insurance, and economic reasons ("Praktiken II"); and exhibitory media such as sex education films, guidebooks made to accompany hygiene exhibitions, and health-related advertising posters ("Medien"). Within these sections, articles are arranged chronologically and thematically to generate a sense of development over time that is remarkable in that individual articles typically focus on a specific issue or case that initially appears unrelated to surrounding topics. The rigorous framing of the respective cases with respect to the volume's subtitle, "Strategien der Sichtbarmachung des Körpers im 20. Jahrhundert," also greatly contributes to the volume's coherence.

As the volume unfolds, the interconnection among the articles comes to the fore and outweighs the weaknesses coming from a few of the individual articles. Claudia Stein and Roger Cooter's article on health-related advertising posters stands out more than it otherwise might for its seeming disconnection to the volume's central concern. Other pieces such as Max Stadler's study on artificial lighting around 1930 and Anna-Gesa Leuthardt's treatment of installations and the relationships between post-World War II exhibitions and guidebooks as "Medienensemble" engage their topics in rather limited fashion, with Stadler ignoring debates on the place of artificial light in contemporary hygiene and sex education exhibitions, and Leuthardt neglecting the pursuit of similar ensembles already present in the 1910s and 1920s. Even though Michael Tymkiw's fascinating essay on the Nazi exhibition, Das Wunder des Lebens, and its US afterlives should have probably appeared in the section on venues of display, his chapter nevertheless resonates powerfully with many contributions in the volume that illuminate facets of the Nazi era (M...