Sabine Hake

Politische Satire im Kalten Krieg

Beginnen mochte ich mit dem Ende, genauer gesagt mit den Schlusssequenzen von zwei einander uberraschend ahnlichen Filmen aus den 1950er Jahren. Einer entstand in der DDR, der andere in der BRD. Beide Filme spielen in einem Gerichtssaal – einem haufig am Ende einer Erzahlung und zur ideologischen Interpellation verwendeten Szenario, um die Dreiecksbeziehung von Wahrheit, Macht und Gerechtigkeit nach dem ‚Dritten Reich’ darzustellen.

Visualising the urban masses: modern architecture and architectural photography in Weimar Berlin

Bertolt Brecht once famously said ‘that the “simple reproduction of reality” says less than ever about that reality. A photograph of the Krupp works or of the AEG yields almost nothing about these institutions. Reality as such has slipped into the domain of the functional.’ And in a critical review of New Vision photography, Walter Benjamin asserted that photography ‘can no longer record a tenement block or a refuse heap without transfiguring it. Needless to say, photography is unable to convey anything about a power station or a cable factory other than, “What a beautiful world!”’ Having identified the false claims on the real made in the name of photography, Brecht and Benjamin probably would have said the same about any photograph of Mossehaus, the headquarters of the Mosse publishing company and one of Erich Mendelsohn’s most famous buildings. In the visual archives of Weimar Berlin, such individual images—of famous buildings, streets, and squares—have come to serve as conduits to an urban culture romanticised in the myth of ‘the golden twenties’, theorised in reflections on urban subjectivity and Weimar flânerie, and scrutinised in numerous studies on German mass culture and modernity. But how can we move beyond the indeterminacy of the image, as diagnosed by Brecht, and gain access to its meanings within a specific social and cultural context? How can we avoid the aestheticising effects observed by Benjamin and consider formal qualities as part of a broader cultural shift towards vision and visuality? And in what ways must we link the profound changes in the organisation of urban life and the structure of class society to the new cult of surfaces associated with modern entertainment and consumer culture and the surrender to visual spectacle brought about by new visual mass media like photography and film? Addressing some of these issues, the following case study of Mossehaus illustrates how the photographic representation of one particular building can be used to gain access to the historical process through which the meaning of photographs was established and continuously revised. During the 1920s, the streamlined façade of Mossehaus emerged as one of the most recognisable icons of Weimar modernism, a symbol of the new spirit of mobility, functionality and adaptability, and hence a key site in the visual imaginary of an emerging white-collar society. Photographed for tourist guides and photograph-albums, discussed in architectural surveys and cultural magazines, and adopted as a trademark by the company’s advertising business, Mossehaus became the only building chosen to represent the New Berlin in all three popular books of photography about Weimar Berlin: Mario von Bucovich’s Berlin (1928), Sasha Stone’s Berlin in Bildern (1929), and Laszlo Willinger’s 100 x Berlin (1929). But why did Mossehaus play such an overdetermined role in Weimar debates about architecture and mass society? A first clue can be found in the historical events that made the façade renovation necessary in the first place. Located on the 523

The new German cinema: Problems of historiography

Thomas Elsaesser, New German Cinema. A History. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989. 430 pp., over 200 ills.

German National Cinema

14.95 paper. Eric Rentschler (ed.), West German Filmmakers on Film: Visions and Voices. New York: Holmes & Meier, 1988. 262 pp.

The films of Fritz Lang : allegories of vision and modernity

22.50 paper.