Intersexes and Mixed Races: Visuality, Narrative, and ‘Bastard’ Identity in Early Twentieth-Century Germany

1he founding of the German Empire in 1871, and the resulting constellation of intra-European and colonial conflicts, generated a wide range of new concerns about rhe characteristics and determinants of Germanness. Scholars, politicians, medical authorities, legal professionals, and artists explored and debated standards of inclusion and exclusion as they propagated both intellectual and institutional ways to develop and mainrain standards for what qualified as German. \VolfLepenies argues char rhe result was a tenuous relationship between the newly scare-defined German political sphere and the other fluid means of establishing rhe Germanness of those who inhabited rhe new state. At rimes, it ... seemed as if the German stare was a stare without politics, rhar is, a state with vassals bur without citizens. Yet it never aimed at being a state wirhour culture. 2 Ir rhus often appeared that any self-defined German identity cook a back sear to a range of intellectuall

Sex on the brain: The rise and fall of German sexual science

Throughout the nineteenth century, German medical, scientific and legal scholars found themselves puzzled and engaged by the diverse forms of human sexuality. Psychiatrists like Richard von Krafft-Ebing who were interested in explaining deviance encountered scientifically trained advocates for emancipation like Magnus Hirschfeld, and the result was the new – if unstable – discipline of sexual science. Because they based arguments for social intervention on knowledge of nature and the body, the field\u27s proponents – like the advocates of eugenics and racial hygiene – argued that they were biologists. After 1900, this mutual biological engagement of sexual science and eugenics revealed itself in overlapping debates between the proponents of both fields

Today, Tomorrow, and In-Between: Straub/Huillet, the Schoenbergs, and the Gendered Micropolitics of Operatic Performance in Von heute auf morgen

Artists who have confronted the politics of collaborative theater have been both drawn to and repelled by opera, intrigued by its aesthetic possibilities, its suspect politics, and its economic entanglements. Central to opera’s fascination has also been its complex and manifestly gendered production of texts, voices, and performances. This essay explores the 1929 one-act opera Von heute auf morgen by the librettist-composer team of Gertrud and Arnold Schoenberg, and a collaborative filmic performance of it in the 1996 film of the same name by the directorial-production team of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub (musical direction by Michael Gielen). These two documents of operatic collaboration, along with the paired intertexts made up of the Straub/Huillet – Gielen film version of Arnold Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron (1974-75), interrogate the complex field of attention to reveal its links to the aesthetics of gender, performance, and agency. Thus emerges an essential performative micropolitics embodying potential resistance to the opera’s political economy of gendered domination

The Performance of Racialized Bodies and Brecht’s Operatic Anthropology

Taxonomic tropes and themes, particularly gender and class, but also race, function together in Brecht’s plays to create overdetermined characterizations. Parallel to these characterizations, he developed a multilayered theory of performance that emphasizes how those who enact text should approach the representation of diverse human types and groups. His encounter with Chinese acting established foundational elements in this theory. In parallel to his theoretical thinking about performance and race in the mid-1930s, Brecht was developing his stance toward operatic representation. While these two conceptual spheres, race and opera, might appear far apart in their content, they parallel each other closely in their theoretical stakes. The work of Joy Calico reveals that the way the voice becomes fungible through operatic performance both repelled and fascinated Brecht, such that this voice-object of opera accompanied his work as a kind of dialectical foil throughout his career. When read through the lens of race, this insight can be extended to reveal how the acting body itself becomes a fungible object, one that Brecht’s theories of estrangement and gestus strive, however inadequately, to make aesthetically and politically productive

Per Scientiam ad Justitiam: Magnus Hirschfeld\u27s Episteme of Biological Publicity

Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science was founded in Berlin in 1919 as a place of research, political advocacy, counseling, and public education. Inspired by the world’s first gay rights organizations, it was closely allied with other groups fighting for sexual reform and women’s rights, and was destroyed in 1933 as the first target of the Nazi book burnings. Not Straight from Germany examines the legacy of that history, combining essays and a lavish array of visual materials. Scholarly essays investigate the ways in which sex became public in early 20th-century Germany, contributing to a growing awareness of Hirschfeld’s influence on histories of sexuality while also widening the perspective beyond the lens of identity politics. Two visual sourcebooks and catalog essays on an exhibition of contemporary artists’ responses to the Hirschfeld historical materials interrogate the modes of visual representation that Hirschfeld employed by re-imagining the public visibility of his institute from a contemporary perspective. The archival material includes stunning, never-before-published images from Hirschfeld’s institute that challenge many received ideas, while the scholarly and art catalog essays explore collaboration and dialogue as methods of research and activism that resonate beyond the academy to pressing issues of public concern

The Performance of Racialized Bodies and Brecht’s Operatic Anthropology

Taxonomic tropes and themes, particularly gender and class, but also race, function together in Brecht’s plays to create overdetermined characterizations. Parallel to these characterizations, he developed a multilayered theory of performance that emphasizes how those who enact text should approach the representation of diverse human types and groups. His encounter with Chinese acting established foundational elements in this theory. In parallel to his theoretical thinking about performance and race in the mid-1930s, Brecht was developing his stance toward operatic representation. While these two conceptual spheres, race and opera, might appear far apart in their content, they parallel each other closely in their theoretical stakes. The work of Joy Calico reveals that the way the voice becomes fungible through operatic performance both repelled and fascinated Brecht, such that this voice-object of opera accompanied his work as a kind of dialectical foil throughout his career. When read through the lens of race, this insight can be extended to reveal how the acting body itself becomes a fungible object, one that Brecht’s theories of estrangement and gestus strive, however inadequately, to make aesthetically and politically productive

Intersexes and Mixed Races: Visuality, Narrative, and Bastard Identity in Early Twentieth-Century Germany\u27

Intersexes and Mixed Races: Visuality, Narrative, and Bastard Identity in Early Twentieth-Century Germany\u2

“Diesmal fehlt die Biologie!” Max Horkheimer, Richard Thurnwald, and the Biological Prehistory of German Sozialforschung

In his early writings Max Horkheimer explored the issues surrounding biological explanation in Kantian and neo-Kantian philosophy. After he became director of the Institut für Sozialforschung in 1930, he continued to explore the relationships between biology, materialism, philosophy, and social theory. This interest was reflected both in his editorial policy for the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung and in his own scholarly development that led to the development of critical theory in the later 1930s and the anti-Semitism research of the 1940s. Horkheimer\u27s interests and ambitions also generated resistance from other social scientists. The Berlin ethnologist Richard Thurnwald, along with his student and colleague Wilhelm Emil Mühlmann, came into direct conflict with Horkheimer—and with each other—over the significance of biology for social research. This conflict with Horkheimer further ignited a vigorous debate between Thurnwald and Mühlmann about a concept that also became a central issue in Horkheimer\u27s thought and editorial practice: race. Thurnwald had begun his career as a founder of the German Society for Racial Hygiene, but by the 1920s he had developed into a vocal critic of what he saw as the reductive pseudo-Darwinism of racial hygiene and eugenics

Afterword: Gesamtkunstwerk as Epistemic Space

For two centuries, Gesamtkunstwerk—the ideal of the “total work of art”—has exerted a powerful influence over artistic discourse and practice, spurring new forms of collaboration and provoking debates over the political instrumentalization of art. Despite its popular conflation with the work of Richard Wagner, Gesamtkunstwerk’s lineage and legacies extend well beyond German Romanticism, as this wide-ranging collection demonstrates. In eleven compact chapters, scholars from a variety of disciplines trace the idea’s evolution in German-speaking Europe, from its foundations in the early nineteenth century to its manifold articulations and reimaginings in the twentieth century and beyond, providing an uncommonly broad perspective on a distinctly modern cultural form

The Visible Hand and the New American Biology: Toward an Integrated Historiography of Railroad-Supported Agricultural Research

In the early twentieth century, American railroad companies faced new challenges. The railroad network had developed fully, broad political opposition was gaining teeth in new, enforceable federal legislation, and financial markets-first established to support railroad expansion- had begun to move beyond railroads. Railroad companies answered with a wide range of new managerial and scientific practices. Recent scholarship that goes beyond the traditional disciplinary separation of technological, political, managerial, economic, and scientific concerns has enabled historians to recognize that agricultural research pursued in concert with other institutions empowered railroads to address all of these challenges in the period between 1900 and 1930