In German Encounters with Modernism, Peter Paret traces the reception of modern art, from the 1840s through the Nazi era, through the lens of social and political developments in Germany. Addressing broad cultural topics, such as the early history of Expressionism, the role of anti-Semitism in German reactions to modernism, and the impact of World War I on the arts, he also includes new interpretations of the work of artists such as the sculptor Ernst Barlach. Based on new archival discoveries, this study combines a strong narrative approach with interdisciplinary analysis.

The novels of Imperial Berlin, a rich repository of social discourse about the simultaneous experiences of nationhood and modernity in Imperial Germany, reveal distinct historical and cultural obstacles impeding authors' attempts to envision a humane, modern German identity.

In this volume the author explores the relationships between music and early modernism in the Austro-German sphere.

The exhibition Art in Battle at KODE – Art Museums of Bergen portrays the battles over art initiated by Nazi policies for their European conquests. It examines propaganda exhibitions in occupied Norway as well as hitherto unseen art by soldiers stationed in Norway. This exceptional catalog documents this ground-breaking show and assembles leading experts on the history and ideology of Nazi cultural campaigns in both Germany and Norway to initiate a fresh discussion of the relationships between center and periphery within the art worlds of the Third Reich outside the overfamiliar dichotomy of “Degenerate“ versus “Great German“ art. Beyond historical re-assessment, this project also asks more pressingly: How do we encounter these battles over art today?

The conflict between National Socialism and Ernst Barlach, one of the important sculptors of the twentieth century, is an unusual episode in the history of Hitler's efforts to rid Germany of 'international modernism'. Barlach did not passively accept the destruction of his sculptures. He protested the injustice, and continued his work. The author's discussion of Barlach's art and struggle over creative freedom, are joined to an analysis of Barlach's opponents. Peter Paret's fine study of an artist in a time of crisis seamlessly combines the history of modern Germany and the history of modern art.

Revolutionary Beauty offers the first sustained study of the German artist John Heartfield's groundbreaking political photomontages, published in the left-wing weekly Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung (AIZ) during the 1930s. Sabine T. Kriebel foregrounds the critical artistic practices with which Heartfield directly confronted the turbulent, ideologically charged currents of interwar Europe, exposing the cultural politics of the crucial historical moment that witnessed the consolidation of National Socialism. In this period of radicalization and mass mobilization, the medium of photomontage—the cut-and-paste assemblage of photograph and text—offered a way to deconstruct the visual world and galvanize beholders on a mass scale. Kriebel transforms our understandings of montage as a quintessentially modern practice. Central to that reconceptualization is suture, a concept integral to film theory but recruited in this book to explore the psychic operations of Heartfield’s seamlessly welded AIZ photomontages. Revolutionary Beauty proposes that the language of sutured illusionism constitutes one of the most important and overlooked critiques of modern media, wherein a radical reassessment resides in suture. Scholars of photography, modern and contemporary art history, media studies, and European history will doubtlessly embrace this book.

In this study Erika L. Briesacher argues that festivals in Lübeck, Germany spanning 1920 to 1960 demonstrate interlocking economic, social, and cultural factors that contribute to local, national, and international identity formation. Focusing on institutional records as well as public discourse and material artifacts, the author traces the mobilization of “Nordic” as a distinctly German in-group during the Weimar, Nazi, and early Cold War eras, highlighting particular ways participants included and excluded racial, religious, and other cultural identities in their own “imagined community.” Focusing on the festival as both a site of participation and consumption, the author assesses two postwar periods as well as the legacy of the Holocaust in a northwest German town.