Todd Presner

Digital Geographies: Berlin in the Ages of New Media

In the 1920s, Weimar era intellectuals such as Walter Benjamin, Alfred Döblin, and Franz Hessel spent a significant amount of time reflecting on the relationship between new media technologies, especially film, and the embodied experiences of the urban flâneur in the modern metropolis. City films such as those by Walter Ruttmann and Dziga Vertov allowed for a new aesthetic experience of the simultaneity of the city space and generated a new discourse of cultural criticism. With the advent of digital technologies, we are on the edge of another watershed moment in the perception, experience, and representation of space. This essay explores the complex ways in which city spaces, particularly Berlin, have been “remediated” in the contemporary world of geospatial media technologies such as Google Earth and ask what these technologies may offer for extending and reworking some of the key concepts of cultural criticism and urban theory that emerged in the Weimar period. I will use some of the results of my own work on a project called HyperCities to address these questions.

Muscle Jews and Airplanes: Modernist Mythologies, the Great War, and the Politics of Regeneration

Todd Presner is Assistant professor of Germanic Languages and Jewish studies at the University of California Los Angeles. This article comes from his forthcoming book, Muscular Judaism: The Jewish Body and the Politics of Regeneration (routledge, 2007). He is also the author of Mobile Modernity: Germans, Jews, Trains (Columbia University press, 2007). modernism / modernity volume thirteen, number four, pp 701–728.

Review of Exhibition: “Art of Two Germanys/Cold War Cultures”

W hile at first blush it may seem strange that the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) organized a massive exhibition on the “Art of Two Germanys,” one need only recall that Los Angeles was the home to a huge influx of émigré artists, authors, and intellectuals who fled Nazi Germany and that Los Angeles itself—the site of what many see as the new internationalism in art since the 1980s—has played a critical role in decentering the history of modernism, which has been told largely as a story of artists moving between Paris and New York. In fact, the Berlin–Los Angeles trajectory not only situates German modernism squarely in the canon of twentieth-century visual arts but, perhaps more tellingly, places the dialectic of culture and barbarism—as emblematically articulated by Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Thomas Mann while in their Los Angeles exile—at the forefront of any analysis of modernism and modernity. As Andreas Huyssen cogently argues in his contribution to the exhibition catalog, it was in southern California that “the umbilical chord that tied modernism itself to the dark side of modernity” (225) was most pointedly articulated. Modern mythologies of progress, freedom, and enlightened rationality also contained the seeds for barbaric regression, disciplinary power, and the administered society. It should come as no surprise, then, that the Los Angeles County Museum of Art would stage an exhibit on nearly fifty years of painting, sculpture, photography, video, and other multimedia work produced in East and