The article discusses interrelations between working-class performance culture and the German avant-gardist film "Kuhle Wampe or Who owns the World?" (1932). Co-produced by Slatan Dudow, Bertolt Brecht, Hanns Eisler, and Ernst Ottwalt, "Kuhle Wampe" contributed to the left-wing projects of producing a cinematic counter-hegemony to commercial film and creating alternative images of the proletarian masses. The film did so, the article argues, by appropriating the aesthetics of working-class performances and reimagining them through the editing techniques of modernist cinema. Contributing to the new modernist studies, the article understands the film as a form of labor movement modernism that articulated modernist aesthetics to imagine modernity from the standpoint of proletarian collectives and represented a particular emergent way of relating to and transforming modernity in the 1920s and 1930s.

Located at the intersections of new modernism, urban, and minority studies, Weimar Contact Zones examines the interplay between modernism, urban imaginaries, and the cultural production of the workers’ movement. While the Weimar Republic has long occupied a paradigmatic place in discussions of modernity and modernism in literary and cultural studies, proletarian literature and the analytical category of class have played only a marginal role. Bringing canonical Weimar literature together with the marginalized tradition of workers’ movement literature, film, and performance, the dissertation demonstrates that urban spaces functioned as contact zones where different groups interacted across lines of class and where hybridizations across boundaries of high and low culture occurred. The cultural production of the workers’ movement becomes visible as a tradition that articulated and appropriated modernist aesthetics to catalyze and represent, from the standpoint of proletarian collectives, social transformation. Understood from this perspective, modernism is not limited to high modernism or the historical avant-garde, but includes alternative cultural forms that articulate modern experiences of the lower classes. Weimar Contact Zones in this way also challenges the opposition between modernism and realism, which typically aligns workers’ movement literature with realism. The dissertation analyzes literary works by Anna Seghers, Franz Jung, Klaus Neukrantz, Kurt Kläber, Karl Grünberg, and the movie "Kuhle Wampe, Or Who Owns the World?", among others.

In the last years, recurring mass demonstrations have occupied the streets of the capitals all over the world. 1 Political commentators have been taken by surprise: on the one hand, these movements took place at a time when public opinion seemed to be dominated by inertia and a general disinterest in (not to say disgust with) politics, and, on the other, the movements were not organized by political parties but by communities created on the sites of new media. These phenomena also contravene the diagnosis set up by many political theorists concerning the disappearance of physical crowds. For example, Peter Sloterdijk 2 announces the demise of the masses, at least in the form of a legitimate subjectivity envisioned by modern democracy. According to Sloterdijk, Western modernity should face the fact that the project of transforming the crowds into a political subject has failed. Nothing could be more symptomatic of this failure than the lack of people's need to assemble , and to represent themselves. The common motif of the current wave of protests , however, consists precisely in a crisis of political representation, and a demand for the actual political agency of the masses. Public and political discussions following the recurring protests in Budapest 3 have concentrated on the power of immediate actions taking people out to the streets in what seemed a general mobilization. Yet, some of the commentators

This article provides a new look at Weimar Germany's Conservative Revolution by exploring its suspicion of conceptual and discursive language. It argues that Conservative Revolutionaries not only disdained intellectualism and public discourse; they also extolled their presumed opposites-instinct, intuition, self-evidence-as crucial ingredients in an "ineffable nationalism" which held that a true nation is based on unexpressed or difficult-to-articulate feelings and values. The origins of this ideology are found in a modernist crisis of representation and in sociological accounts of traditional "organic" communities. These themes were politicized by World War I, whose seeming incommunicability magnified the problem of representation and made the unspoken harmony of wartime comradeship an attractive model for a revitalized national community. The article's final section examines the early writings of Ernst Jünger in order to show in detail how these issues came together to create the Conservative Revolutionary mind.

To answer whether there is such a thing as a “fascist aesthetic”, we can turn to the clearest manifestations highlighted by Walter Benjamin, such as the totalitarian symptoms of an aestheticisation of politics, or the mechanised rituals of a “Mass Ornament” that organise a multiplicity of fragments under the image of a homogenized mass reflecting the cult of rationalist efficiency (Kracauer 1995, 75-88). As is frequently stated in the literature, these aesthetic ideas were materialised in mass entertainment and on the stage and ultimately became the defining symbol of dictatorial regimes. However, these forms of “mass reproduction” cannot be ascribed exclusively to fascist ideological rituals of affirmation. Mass expression also forms part of contemporary rituals of national affirmation, such as the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games, military parades in democratic nations, or the Dionysian immersion of a Rammstein concert (a band often criticised for its flirtations with neo-Nazi aesthetics). Slavoj Zizek (2010, 373-386) examines this aestheticisation of mass joy as a ritual in which the jouissance is expressed as a neutral substance and only in a second instance is it instrumentalised for political purposes, leaving behind the pleasure in itself. The fascist imaginary not only fuelled the cult of efficiency derived from a rationalist modern mass society but also alluded to the primitive joy of belonging. It is here that we find the link between the fascist aesthetic tradition and the irrationalist tendencies of nineteenth-century Romanticism and the fin-de-siècle imaginary. The affirmative aesthetic of belonging, though shared with ideologies other than the radical right, was easily transferred between the different ideological factions of the early twentieth century thanks to its powerful criticism of the excesses of rationalism. In this sense, considering that anti-liberalism was not a “parenthesis in European history” (Benedetto Croce 1943) but a common parameter in ideologies critical of the failure of modernity (Mazower 2001; Sternhell, Sznajder and Asheri 1994), we will analyse the genealogy of the fascist aesthetic through the German case and the reworking of the community myth. This study will attempt to chart the continuity between various periods of German history, built around a belief in aesthetic and artistic redemption and the notion of culture as a political project. To analyse the network of discourses that construct the concept of community as a pre-rational impulse, we explore those discourses that are crystallised in artistic and cultural expressions close to the Romantic programme and its preoccupations with the return to the lost community and the refounding of unifying myths (Nietzsche, Böcklin). Through this analysis we establish links with the later neo-pagan and regenerative ideals of völkish movements (Fidus) and the mysticism of the Konservative Revolution. Ultimately, we highlight the inherent contradictions in the underlying notion of modernity in European fascism. Consequently, leaving to one side the question of whether there is such a thing as a purely fascist aesthetic, the aim of this study is to determine how some of the aesthetic ideas assimilated and refined by the Third Reich were configured, focusing on their belonging to a tradition forged in the late eighteenth century as a critical response to the Enlightenment. In our analysis we shall endeavour to shed light on the inherent contradictions within those processes that, as in any totalitarian regime, establish relationships of affirmation-rejection and exaltation-regression with Modernity.

While Spain is crucial to discussions of fascism and the thirties, this chapter demonstrates that Robert Capa’s legendary Spanish war photographs are crucial to understanding how photography’s relationship to politics and history has been narrated at different moments in the twentieth century. Between 1936 and 1939, Capa’s photographs of the civil war in Spain circulated widely, informing American and European magazine readers about the conflict and earning Capa international fame as a war photographer and documentarian of anti-fascism in Europe. In a range of print contexts, Capa became especially known for his images of refugees, frozen amid rubble or fleeing from fascist violence. By the 1960s, those pictures became canonized as humanist imagery devoid of ideology. Looking beyond the mythologies of Robert Capa as the “Greatest War Photographer” and the founder of “Concerned” photography, this chapter asks, how have Capa’s photographs shaped memories and analyses of 1930s Spain, and what can this history teach us about using iconic images as historical documents? And what role have iconic images and legendary photographers played in perpetuating the idea that the rise of fascism was a European, rather than a global, phenomenon?