Art and Resistance in Germany ed. by Deborah Ascher Barnstone and Elizabeth Otto (review)

This volume explores the interrelation of art and resistance in twentieth- and twenty-first-century German visual art and architecture from a state of urgency in contemporary politics. The underlying ambition of the various contributions is to activate a resistant potential in artworks through collective scholarly work. Rather than defining the concept of resistance and applying it in different aesthetic contexts, a resistant potential is deduced from the specific productive and receptive practices that the authors discuss. One major focus of the volume is on the practices of collage and montage and their capacity to juxtapose contradictory or, at least, disparate elements of visual and textual representations. As such, several authors identify a critical and subversive function in these techniques that could inspire resistant aesthetics in the contemporary.

Patrizia McBride's analysis of Hannah Höch's visualization of the political debates within and around the Berlin Dada group suggests an epistemology of cross-section as "cutting through" or disentangling established ideologies, such as the alternative between a Marxist revolution and a Nietzschean principle of creative destruction. Cutting through photographic material is also at the center of Sabine Kriebel's investigation of photomontage in the historic avant-garde and contemporary internet memes. In her comparison of John Heartfield's Hitler montages and a number of circulating anti-Trump memes, she emphasizes the difference between structural subversion and simple mockery. Without an ideological framework and a political concept of resistance, social media contributions cannot inherit the critical function of Heartfield's montages.

Peter Chametzky focuses on the line that distinguishes online mockery from political opposition and resistance in terms of existential risk, aesthetic form, and political commitment. He illustrates various intermedia strategies that either openly criticize the Nazi regime or subtly ridicule it, while sketching out different degrees of resistance in their works. John Heartfield, whose Alle Fäuste zu einer geballt (1934) appears on the cover of this volume, is also the point of reference in Verena Krieger's investigation of montage as a contemporary form of resistant aesthetics in the works of Marcel Odenbach and Thomas Hirschhorn. Krieger works with a Benjaminian concept of montage as a dialectic at a standstill, in which the juxtaposition of disparate elements constitutes a third image that refuses to be synthesized and instead holds the visual conflict open. Tracing contemporary montage back to Heartfield, Krieger shows that resistance must be an aesthetic quality if art is to be effective in its political ventures.

James van Dyke interprets Otto Dix's silverpoint drawings from the 1930s as a subtle opposition to the racial politics and antisemitism of the Nazis. In a formal retreat to realist conventions, Dix implemented a topical critique that effectively undermined the antisemitic stereotypes promoted by Nazi propaganda, which, as van Dyke concludes, should not be reinterpreted as an act of resistance or even opposition, but nevertheless marks a subtle individual dissent.

Barbara McCloskey investigates the critical pedagogy in Hermynia zur Mühlen's Was Peterchens Freunde erzählen (1924) (containing illustrations by George Grosz) and how it reflected the political shifts in the Weimar Republic. Questioning authorities, both right-wing nationalist and orthodox Marxist ones, McCloskey interprets the various editions of this children's book as a radical utopian vision, which nevertheless failed in the face of fascism. The unlikely location of resistance in architecture is explored by essays on Walter Gropius's Dammerstock housing estate and the museum Topography of Terror in Berlin. Kevin Berry shows how Gropius's rationalization of social housing was intended to resist the irrational injustices of capitalism and against Gropius's intentions into a means to further oppression of the workers through their housing structure. However, the conflation of the term resistance with concepts like reform, social change, progress, and utopia contributes to the fuzzy notion of resistance that hovers over several essays in this collection.

When Kathleen James-Chakraborty asks how architecture commemorates resistance, the historic resistance...