The Female in German Modernisms

Based on scholarly familiarity with the history and study of international modernisms, the book takes the case of Germany, where it is most clearly identified as Expressionism. The analyses here that examine borrowings across the arts – painting, film, and literature – suggest that Expressionism alone is insufficient for an explanation of German modernism. Instead, the book proposes that we should think of modernism as a hydra headed aesthetic phenomenon that includes realism to compose an incomplete modernism. The interarts study focuses on how new modernist visualities, conceived more expansively to include silent film and scripts, locate women in modernity. The readings of silent film in conjunction with the art of Die Brücke find that the figure of the female, and the perspectives used by the artists are influenced by the techniques of silent cinema. The book shows that with each of the twenty texts under consideration, borrowings from other arts influence the woman’s inclusion into the modern world. Detailed analyses of texts, using this intermedial approach, include Kokoschka’s play Murderer, Hope of Women, Urban Gad’s film The Abyss, E.L. Kirchner’s woodcuts and Street Scenes, Elsa Lasker-Schüler’s film script Plum-Pascha, and Döblin’s novel Berlin Alexanderplatz.