Zoom Session – “Stop Reading! Look!” Law, Politics, and Popular Visual Culture in Weimar Germany
April 30 @ 12:00 pm – 1:30 pm
The period of the Weimar Republic represents a vital chapter in the history of visual culture. The “watchword of the times” was, according to film critic Erich Burger, “the picture: the still picture, the moving picture, the picture in every guise”. In his aptly titled essay of 1928, “Stop Reading! Look!”, artist Johannes Molzahn captured not only the growing importance of images in everyday life but also the emergence of Weimar culture’s new imperative to look and to see. As part of the ‘cultural turn’ in Weimar historiography, recent scholarship has done much to reveal how visual practices and representations were implicated in contemporary politics. Yet only scant attention has been given to the articulations between law and the visual, and how these relate to the broader political context(s) of the time. In this session, Steven Howe, Laura Petersen and Nicole Schraner (all University of Lucerne) will introduce aspects of their current project that addresses this gap in the literature, and which aims to explore some of the many ways in which the legal, political and visual cultures of the era intersect and interact.
The session will feature short presentations on cinema (Howe), visual art (Petersen) and photography (Schraner), followed by a Q&A.