Modernist Magazines and the Social Ideal

Tim Satterthwaite

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501341618
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Fotografia

The new photo-illustrated magazines of the 1920s traded in images of an ideal modernity, promising motorised leisure, scientific progress, and social and sexual emancipation. Modernist Magazines and the Social Ideal is a pioneering history of these periodicals, focusing on two of the leading European titles: the German monthly UHU, and the French news weekly VU, taken as representative of the broad class of popular titles launched in the 1920s. The book is the first major study of UHU, and the first scholarly work on VU in English. Modernist Magazines explores, in particular, the striking use of regularity and repetition in photographs of modernity, reading these repetitious images as symbolic of modernist ideals of social order in the aftermath of the First World War. Introducing a novel methodology, pattern theory, the book argues for a critical return to the Gestalt tradition in visual studies. Alongside the UHU and VU case studies, Modernist Magazines offers an essential primer to interwar magazine culture in Europe. Accounts of rival titles are woven into the book's thematic chapters, which trace the evolution of the two magazines' photography and graphic design in the tumultuous years up to 1933.

Part I

Social Modernism

1

The Idea of the Whole

We are convinced that this flood will never disperse. … We live in it – not like fish in water, but like the seafarer on the ocean who knows the treachery of the sea.

Paul Renner, ‘Das Lichtbild’ (The Photograph), 1930

The European popular magazines of the 1920s and early 1930s built their appeal on visions of a youthful, harmonious modernity, characterised by outdoor leisure, communality, and the peaceful application of modern technology. Whilst the components of this ideal varied from title to title, and evolved over time within individual magazines, its common principle was one of tolerance: the reconciliation, or mutual coexistence, of opposing forces, ideologies, and traditions. The defining question, inflected in the utopian imagery of German popular monthlies, and addressed with explicit urgency in the 1930s editorials of VU magazine, concerned the nature of modern society: how could individuals, and nations, learn to live together, and avoid a return to civil unrest and the catastrophe of war.

From this general perspective, the idealist visual culture of interwar magazines relates to broader societal hopes and fears, regarding the nature of technological modernity. Images of the natural world and traditional life published in Weimar monthlies, alongside photos of film stars and modern interiors, added picturesque variety to the magazines’ photo-pages. Such juxtapositions also, however, speak to the profound historical dilemmas in German society and cultural life in the era of mass industrialisation: the dichotomy between traditional and modern ideals, the values of an urbanised, technological present and a rural, agrarian past. Progressive French magazines, in their turn, refracted the acute societal tensions of interwar France, concerning economic modernisation, the role of women, Americanisation, the future of the built environment.

In their different ways, the magazines explored in this book resolved these tensions in favour of modernism, embracing the new cultural forms and modes of being that emerged from the experience of modernity. As the evolving content of these magazines reveals, however, the nature and degree of this engagement was not predetermined: in the early postwar years, in particular, the mythic ideals and visual language of popular modernism appear fluid and contingent, reflecting the play of dialectical forces that shaped its evolution. In the broadest terms, the popular magazines present a dialogue between alternative modernisms: a modernism of the machine, embracing technological and technocratic systems, and visually embodied in the geometric aesthetic; a modernism of the body, favouring the free expression of subjectivity and a renewed, spiritual connection with the natural world.

The resolution of this dichotomy, in favour of the technological ideal and machine modernism, played out in the pages of Weimar magazines in the years before the Great Depression. The values of an alternative, organic modernism, and the cultural impulse to reconcile this ideal with the prerogatives of the machine age, were symbolised in photographs of natural forms and the unclothed human body, and inflected in the wider imagery of social groupings and regularities in the manmade and organic world.

Yearning for unity

The force and currency of Weimar’s modernist dialectic can be glimpsed in the editorials of two magazines from the mid-1920s. For the popular science and technology monthly Die Koralle (Coral) the dilemma has an existential primacy, laid out in the editorial of the opening issue, of April 1925:

Through our age runs a deep yearning to escape from the monotony and haste of our daily lives into the limitless space and freedom of mother nature. Die Koralle will lead the way. It will show how to discern the thousand forms in which the mysterious creativity of nature is expressed, and provide information in words and pictures on all the great and small, wonderful and unknown [creations] that surround us. … But Die Koralle also wants to make nature harnessed by the human spirit, the wonders of technology, accessible to the reader’s understanding.¹

The striking ambivalence towards technological modernity, in a magazine aimed explicitly at a ‘cultivated, critical readership, interested in technology’, is expressed through a mythic trope, in which nature serves as compensatory palliative to the dehumanising effects of modern life.²

Modernity and the natural world are paired, more ambiguously, in the general-interest magazine Revue des Monats (Revue of the Month), in a pithy satirical poem from the September 1928 issue. ‘Wer liest was?’ (Who reads what?), by Max Kolpe and Billie Wilder, describes the bewildering array of reading matter offered by a Berlin newsagent, including a stereotypical revue magazine,³ defined in terms of its topical interests: modern art and metropolitan glamour, the sexual revolution – ‘Man is Woman! Woman is Man! Love complexes: the erotic becomes a pastime!’ – equated, in the following line, with a modish embrace of the natural: ‘Zurück zur Natur!’ (Return to nature!).⁴ The connection is not self-evident: whilst erotic emancipation was, indeed, one idealist element of Weimar Freikörperkultur (nudism), this was highly contested even within the movement itself;⁵ in the context of ‘Wer liest was?’, the appeal to nature is simple shorthand, evoking the heterodoxy and fluidity of modern life. As the exclamation marks peppering the rhyme seem to suggest, the magazines that played out and sought to reconcile these contrasting ideals expressed the paradoxes at the heart of 1920s modernism.

The historiography of the Weimar era has, traditionally, equated the progressive movement in German art and visual culture with the machine aesthetic. In part, this reflects the historical importance of the Bauhaus, and the fact that, as Walter Laqueur notes, Weimar modernism’s impact on international culture was felt most strongly in the fields of architecture and design.⁶ It speaks also to a tendency, handed down from the first generation of historians after the Second World War, to construct a binary opposition between modernism (rationalist, technophiliac, progressive) and Nazism (irrationalist, atavistic, reactionary).⁷ In this construct, the Weimar period becomes a Manichean struggle between dark and light, past and future, dictatorship and democracy. John Willett, for example, talks of a ‘contest between the modern movement in the arts and the primitive-conservative resentments with which it has long had to contend’ – a battle which the forces of progress were destined to lose. As recent historiography has underlined, this binary elides the tensions on both sides of the equation: the ambivalence of many liberal modernists towards technological modernity; the embrace of technology by some on the German right. What Willett terms ‘one of the world’s decisive battles’ was a more complex and contradictory engagement than this metaphor allows.⁸ Only in the crisis of the early 1930s, as the Weimar Republic neared its final collapse, did such ideological and aesthetic alignments begin to emerge. In the relatively stable years before the Great Depression, the new visual culture was shaped by the subtler potentialities and conflicts playing out within modernism itself.

The present book connects to a more recent, revisionist strand in Weimar historiography. Building on pivotal studies such as Jeffrey Herf’s Reactionary Modernism (1984), critical histories have explored the ambivalence of Weimar progressives, and their opponents, on the central question of technological modernity. In its classical formulation, this is the debate over Kultur and Technik, the values of Germanic culture versus technology/rationalisation, defined as historical and philosophical antitheses. For Modris Eksteins, the terms encapsulate the fundamental dichotomy in German responses to industrial modernity after 1871: remorseless industrial expansion and rationalisation, on the one hand; the cultural reaction to this, decrying the destruction of traditional life and the urbanisation of German society, on the other. In Eksteins’s synoptic account, the euphoric response to the outbreak of war in 1914 represents the cathartic endpoint of this Drang nach vorne (push forward), a momentary reconciliation of societal tensions: ‘Technological innovation and industrial progress would, in a grand synthesis, combine with a spirit of pastoral simplicity. Society and culture would no longer be conflicting realms but an indissoluble whole.’⁹ The legacy of the war, from this perspective, was a profound disenchantment, with the social-cultural divide now experienced as traumatic loss. As Friedrich Meinecke wrote, in the early 1920s, of his contemporaries: ‘The deep yearning for the inner unity and harmony of all laws of life and events in life remains a powerful force in the German spirit.’¹⁰ More than a simple clash of progressives and traditionalists, Weimar’s ‘spiritual yearning’ describes a crisis within these movements, reflecting the disjunction of postwar ideals and the fragmentation of subjectivity.

The paradoxical reconciliations of Kultur and Technik, on the part of Weimar’s right-wing ideologues, are described in Herf’s Reactionary Modernism. In this account, an important strand within conservative and subsequent Nazi ideology sought to combine a völkisch romanticism, invoking a myth of return to an idealised rural past, with an embrace of the material aspects of technological modernity. The ‘reactionary modernists’ wanted Germany ‘to be more rather than less industrialized, to have more rather than fewer radios, trains, highways, cars, and planes’; their complaint was with bourgeois capitalism, and parliamentary democracy, which prevented the proper application of this technology to the task of German military and nationalistic revival.¹¹ As Herf notes, the synthesis proposed by Ernst Jünger, and by Joseph ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Social Modernism
• Part II The Beautiful World: UHU Magazine, 1924–30
• Part III The Crisis of Modernity: VU Magazine, 1930–3
• Epilogue: Modern Pages
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright