Why Do I Still Enjoy Teaching This Course?

  I first offered "Paris and Berlin in the 1920s" as a small seminar in the fall of 1977, and it has played a important role in my life ever since.  On the one hand there is a sense of familiarity, each time I move through the intellectuals and artists we cover in the course, I feel I am meeting old "friends" (like the lady in the painting on the right).  From the Satie-Rousseau slide-tape program to Henry Miller's proclamation that  "I have no money, resources, no hopes.  I am the happiest man alive" I never get tired of the works we cover, and there are special moments that I wait for each year, such as the moment in Entr'acte where one of the mourners begins to eat the flowers on the funeral cortege, a French editor's description of Ernest Hemingway as "veery (h)airy," or Gertrude Stein's marvelously minimalist story of a man and his son collecting butterflies.

     Yet there is also the sense in which the course is always new for me.  This material is so rich that, as the world and I myself have changed, it has always taken on new meanings. When I began the course a few of the figures that we study, such as Henry Miller and Virgil Thompson were still alive; now they all seem to be part of a long passed era. But I never cease to learn about myself and the world around me from going back over this material.  In part this arises from the fact that the generation of creative artists who came into their own in the 1920s were dealing for the first time with many of the issues that continue to face us today.  They were bringing fresh eyes to the world of mass culture, consumerism, culture wars, and the "postmodern" jumbling together of cultural elements drawn from diverse sources. Thus figures as diverse as Bertolt Brecht, Walter Gropius, John Dos Passos, and Gertrude Stein all continue to have things to teach me about living in an ever more confusing culture.

     Perhaps most important, however, is the enormous life energy that is encapsulated in the material covered in this course.  Henri Rousseau's steadfast refusal to abandon the clarity of childhood, André Breton's fascination with the marvelous, the burning intensity of Artaud's madness, the "in-your-face" offensiveness of George Grosz's paintings, Henry Miller's "kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty," and the works of dozens of other artists and intellectuals covered in the course have a vitality that continues to bring me energy and inspiration semester after semester.

     I hope that you will share some of these experiences.