German Visual Culture

This book is a cutting-edge, interdisciplinary collection of essays by some of today’s most forward-thinking scholars. The contributors explore the ways in which the prefix «trans» erupts German ident

Art history traditionally concentrates on the visual. Sound has either been ignored or has been appreciated in a highly selective manner within a different discipline: music. This book is about recent attempts by artists trained in (West) Germany to provoke listening experiences to awaken the senses. Their work is revolutionary in artistic terms and in what it reveals about human relations, especially concerning issues of gender. The main focus of the book is to explore a gendered reading of the unity between the visual and the aural, a strand most prominently expressed within sound art in the period from the beginning of the 1960s to the 1980s. The book juxtaposes sources that have not been considered in conjunction with each other before and questions sound art's premise: is it a separate field or a novel way of understanding art? The study also opens up sound art to gender considerations, asking if the genre possesses the capacity to disrupt conventional, gendered role models and fa

War and trauma are fundamental human experiences and central to German history, especially in the twentieth century. Since the First World War, which some Germans celebrated as the chance to annihilat

Features essays that explore the phenomenon of the double in multiple aspects of German visual culture, from traditional art forms like painting and classical ballet to more contemporary ones like fil

How does the visual nature of spectacle inform the citizenry, destabilize the political, challenge aesthetic convention and celebrate cultural creativity? What are the limits – aesthetic, political, s

Who is «German»? What defines «Germanness»? These questions about national identity have continued to confound both Germans and foreign observers in light of Germany’s complex history: its changing bo