1) French Culture in the 1920s
We will begin this part of the course by looking at the cultural experiments of pre-1914 French artists such as painter Henri Rousseau, composer Eric Satie, and writer Alfred Jarry, and we will consider some of the broader social forces that contributed to the development of avant garde culture in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. We will then turn to the manner in which this earlier cultural ferment was radicalized by the experience of the First World War to produce the Dada movement, which sought to destroy all art as it as existed since the beginning of Western culture. From here we will move to the attempts of the Surrealists to find a new reality in dreams, the unconscious, and chance and to the efforts of Antonin Artaud to recreate theater by dredging up dark primal forces from his own madness.
2) The Culture of Berlin in the Years of the Weimar Republic
In the period between the end of the First World War and the beginning of Hitler's Reich Berlin was torn by conflicting cultural movements, as the political right and left fought to win the soul of Germany by dominating its culture. We will consider the radicalization of German young people by the experience of the war, the efforts of Expressionist artists to project the world of internal conflicts directly on canvas and movie screens, and the attempts of the architects and designers of the Bauhaus to create a new vision for the buildings and daily objects of a new age. And we will see the battle between radical writers and artists like George Grosz, Otto Dix, John Heartfield, Kurt Tucholsky, and Bertolt Brecht, who sought to expose what they saw as the hypocrisy and oppression of their era, and Nazi cultural figures, who sought to return German art to an idealized past.
