Body Modern: Fritz Kahn, Scientific Illustration, and the Homuncular Subject by Michael Sappol (review)

The images created by physician and journalist Fritz Kahn (1888–1968) are very different from the anatomical drawings of Andreas Vesalius (1514–1564). Vesalius's attempts to record the body's natural structure produced accomplished, but nonetheless uncanny cadavers, often suspended somewhere between life and death. Conversely, Kahn's works are conceptual scientific drawings visualizing expressly how the body works through its chemical and physiological processes. He used technological metaphors, configuring bodies as automobiles, telephones, X-rays, engines, and factories in which scores of homunculi operate controls, stock shelves, and drive machinery—as in his most famous image, Der Mensch als Industriepalast (1926). Michael Sappol argues that Kahn embarked on a type of medical and scientific "showmanship" (xiv), not as a researcher or scientist, but through his seductive representations of the modern body, in an attempt to attract a mass readership during a period in Germany recognized for its "compulsive visuality" (xv). And he was largely successful. Using profile cutaways, synoptic pictures, and photomontages, his richly illustrated publications combined text, data, and diagrams, the artfulness of which has lapsed into obscurity since the 1970s.

Sappol's fascinating investigation of Kahn contributes to a growing number of works exploring modernism and the body in Germany, such as those by Matthew Biro (2010), Michael Hau (2003), and Erik N. Jensen (2010). But Sappol advances what he calls a "biomorphic" modernism (7), examining not only the body in modernity, but also modernity in the body. Kahn's images allowed viewers to see themselves seeing, revealing just how self-consciously ocularcentric this period was. More than this, Sappol's analysis of visual metaphor and how it operates—training the viewer through patterns of inference—links to recent scholarship, notably by Michael Cowan (2013) and Daniel H. Magilow (2015), that explores how magazines, photo essays, films, and scientific diagrams adopted innovative techniques such as montage, cross-sections, and nonsequential narrative to capture the rapid pace of modern Germany. To consider Kahn is to foreground a wider set of sociopsychological questions crucial to Weimar intellectual debates about mass culture and how it was understood.

Readers wanting a cohesive biography of Kahn and his oeuvre may be disappointed. Moreover, Sappol's study does not relate Kahn's images in any great depth to wider contextual issues of health that the reader might expect to find in the study of a country that sustained intense preoccupations with body image after the profound (physical) effects of disastrous military defeat. Instead, through analysis of a characteristic sample of Kahn's multivolume publications from the 1920s and late 1930s, Sappol provides close readings of the form and function of Kahn's imagery. Connections to historic sources such as Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie, and the lesser-known American series Pictured Knowledge: The New Method of Visual Instruction Applied to All School Subjects (1916), are persuasively presented. Kahn's endeavors are linked to pedagogical reformers and the historical developments of illustrated textbooks, part of a "new-picture pedagogy" (49), in which visual metaphor constituted an important form of experiential learning in Germany.

Sappol reveals the complex stylistic features of Kahn's work through the rich use of visual material throughout this study. Kahn's approach is described as "iconophilic" (xv); his scientific illustrations include a "hodgepodge" (59) of references from Dada to Bauhaus and Art Deco. Visual similarities to the photomontages of John Heartfield are identified. Kahn was not a modernist, but he was certainly modern (59). Sappol's enthusiasm to recognize such modernist tendencies straightjackets Kahn's work unnecessarily. Like in so many popular (pseudo)scientific publications of the interwar period, such as the richly illustrated Sittengeschichten, relationships between text and image are often unstable. Images exceed text as "visual poetry" (69) in Kahn's publications, just as they perhaps should elide stylistic labeling here. Kahn's images have far-reaching impact. Through meticulous research, Sappol uncovers a...