Session 7: Media and Change
in Central Europe
Chair: Timothy Walters
Brett Marie
Van Hoesen - Critiquing Visual Tropes of the Rhineland Controversy:
The Intersection of Popular Press Caricature and Berlin Avant-Garde
Photomontage in Weimar Germany
Department of Art History, University of Iowa, and DAAD Fellowship Recipient
2002-03, Humboldt Universitaet, Germany
This paper seeks to establish the idea of cross communication
between select publications of the German popular press and specific
members of the Berlin avant-garde working during the 1920s, who collectively
critiqued the human rights atrocities associated with the tenuous historical
and political boundary between Germany’s colonial and post-colonial
period. Artists such as Hannah Hoech and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, working
with the medium of photomontage, and the satirical cartoons and illustrated
periodical covers of the Munich-based publication Simplicissimus, aggressively
criticized the German neo-colonialist attitudes and policies that sprung
from the Rhineland Controversy in connection with France’s re-occupation
of the Ruhr Valley with colonial North African troops in the early to
mid 1920s. Propagandistically authored by the German military and select
politicians as Die schwarze Schmach, “The Black Disgrace,”
the Rhineland conflict fuelled the practice and justification of overt
racial discrimination through the written and visual employment of grotesque
stereotypes. These linguistic and visual tropes were in turn critiqued
by individuals like Hoech and Moholy-Nagy, as well as select publications
such as Simplicissimus, which satirized not only the philosophical premises
of the tropes themselves but, their predominant usage and success in
light of contemporary political aims at re-establishing Germany as a
colonial power.
This paper will explore the intersection between the artistic avant-garde
and the popular press over this issue, and will suggest that their critique
of the Rhineland Controversy could be read as an overt criticism, perhaps
even protest against the German government’s attempts to reinsert
itself as a colonial power in the 1920s. After losing its colonial territories
as a result of World War I and the Treaty of Versailles, Germany’s
neo-colonialist aspirations, albeit failed, reinforced nationalist agendas,
which ultimately served as precursors
to the policies and practices of National Socialism. This paper will
question how the visual culture of the Rhineland Controversy functioned
within the history of human rights policy-making of the 1920s and early
1930s.
Edith
Sheffer - Boundaries of Change: East and West Germany in the
Borderland
Department of History, University of California at Berkeley, USA
How did an administrative partition imposed by external
forces in 1945 become an enduring societal boundary? Cold War transformations
were far more than the sum of diplomatic treaties and tensions; they
were also products of the fluid relationship between global dynamics
and local processes. The case study of neighbouring towns Sonneberg
and Neustadt bei Coburg demonstrates how divergence was not a linear
progression, but was rather a dynamic interaction in which occupiers
and Germans mutually negotiated, manipulated, and defined Germany’s
division on the ground.
Twin cities Sonneberg and Neustadt were remarkably similar and intertwined
before 1945, when they fell under Soviet and American occupation, respectively.
Amidst postwar turmoil, authorities on both sides increasingly considered
the permeable border between them destabilizing, and relations became
rapidly strained. Lax enforcement led both East and West to dread deluges
of refugees, transient workers, black-marketers, pilfering children,
political agitators, and saboteurs. The problems of partial partition
are well known for East Germany, culminating in the construction of
the Berlin Wall in 1961. Perhaps more surprising is the consensus in
the West that the open border was problematical; Neustadt’s Mayor
often complained about “the economic disadvantages of the ‘holes
in the border’” and lamented they were not “hermetically
sealed.” In short, it appears the leaky border itself contributed
to divergence, as it continually created new problems which precipitated
increasingly divisive solutions.
Ironically, this early phase of Germany’s division is (mis)remembered
and commemorated in Sonneberg and Neustadt as a period of unyielding
solidarity. This nostalgic image stands in stark contrast to the messy
reality of East-West relations – then and now -- and is further
revealing of the community strategies underlying boundary construction
and dissolution.
In the past six decades, Germany has undergone several rapid transformations.
This story of division and reunification in one community can help shed
light on some of the local parameters of change.