The End Has No End: The Cold Gaze at the Louisiana Museum
Why Weimar, and why now? Neither question is so easily answered at The Cold Gaze: Germany in the 1920s, the enormous Weimar era exhibition at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art outside Copenhagen. The exhibition first drew crowds at Centre Pompidou under the rather more prescriptive title Germany / 1920s / New Objectivity / August Sander, and it has continued to do so in its second location.
This isn’t unexpected. Fascination with (and borderline fetishization of) the Weimar period among the art-museum-going demographic is arguably at an all-time high for reasons political and personal, what with the West currently embroiled in a moral and existential panic over the staying power of liberalism and democracy — questions most thought largely settled, however rightly or wrongly, before, you know, Trump and Brexit and Covid-19 and Ukraine and the rest of it.
Western liberalism and culture in the ongoing post-Trump and post-Brexit moment is characterized by anxiety and an ever-narrowing interpretation of political self- and group-identity. In order to function, the former demands an outlet and seeks reassurance. The latter requires something to position itself against. The historical prism of Weimar Germany provides both, however perversely. If we are to accept the premise that we are indeed in a pre-fascist moment, then Weimar reveals how this all ends (read: badly). Seeing as a large population of people — namely urban, under-65, middle class, hashtag resist, infographic-as-activism people — have indeed accepted this pre-fascist premise, they now seek to legitimize the supposed fascist threat we all face by comparing it to the Ultimate Bad Guys. The organized, Reichstag-fire-plotting Nazis of the Weimar era are a far more threatening enemy than the dough-faced chronically online QAnon-ers we’ve got, and this group knows it. Maybe every democracy ultimately gets the capitol-storming mob it deserves. That ours is this online, unimaginative, and poorly dressed reflects rather poorly on the rest of us, and that simply cannot be allowed to happen. Hence the equivocating.
There’s a flipside too. Like 1890s Paris and 1960s London, 1920s Berlin was one of art history’s lucky rolls of the time-and-place dice. No location-based scene today possesses the Weimar period’s sheer concentration, ambition, and creative output. You may attribute that to our position at the end of history and the transformation of artistic and critical production over the last century, or you may think the end of history argument is self-aggrandizing bullshit, but either way we’re not punching at Weimar levels. But wouldn’t it be great if we were?! Wouldn’t it be great to live in a moment of furious creativity and have non-cringe enemies? The Weimar era, viewed in hindsight and with no real skin in the game, feels sexy and dangerous. In a moment as tacky and impotent as ours — looking at you, Nigel Farage and the QAnon shaman and Marjorie Taylor-Greene — Weimar feels potent.
Our backwards-looking fascination with the Weimar era is not without its casual irony. The actual artists and writers of the Weimar period were obsessed with the future, with the obliteration of the past, and with the creation of a new modernity — a case The Cold Gaze makes remarkably well. It contends this urge stemmed from the trauma of the First World War and the post-war economic devastation wrought by the Treaty of Versailles. Like the British Modernists, Weimar artists (particularly those associated with New Objectivity) sought a total break with the society of the past that led Europe to slaughter. This desire for separation naturally evolved into the urge to build a new modernity on its own terms, one suffused with society-wide liberating potential.
Even among the most fervent believers in its liberating potential, this new modernity was not always viewed as a net positive. Its engines, namely urban industrialization and accelerating capitalism, were meat-grinders of their own, a concern the exhibition airs in a section titled “The Downside.” It follows that Weimar modernity, suspended among lived trauma and desired liberation and capitalist reality, is as thrilling as it is grotesque. It reverberates with terror and promise.
The Cold Gaze arrives at this terror and promise immediately, simultaneously projecting all five acts of Walter Ruttman’s 1927 Die Sinfonie der Großstadt across the wall of the exhibition entrance. It’s a sweeping curatorial overture and a dizzying portrayal of Berlin as the new flash-bang city. The choice to screen its acts simultaneously and in a tight row also sets the tone for the flash-bang, more-is-more curation that follows. Immediately around the corner (if shunted off to a small side room) is all the context that’s fit to print: a floor-to-ceiling-to-wall-to-wall-to-wall timeline of the Weimar period’s political, social, and artistic events, accompanied by journalistic images of German children using worthless marks as building blocks and Hindenburg telling Hitler to put ‘er there on Potsdam Day. While this room’s setup is not particularly conducive to the inevitable crowding, it’s nice to drill through the cold, hard, Nazi-related facts all at once and right up front. The Nazis are always breathing down Weimar’s retrospective neck, and the curators have taken pains to not cede more spotlight than necessary.
The Cold Gaze opens with the hits, which is to say Otto Dix’s iconic portrait of the journalist Sylvia Von Harden and surveys of New Objectivity portraiture and die Neue Frau, who is presented not only as a severe and unconventional object of desire but a sexual and creative being in her own right. Here, the New Woman is the quintessential and most enduring Weimar archetype, multiplying within Karl Hubbuch’s “Twice Hilde” diptych and splashed across women’s magazine covers nearby.
But The Cold Gaze’s New Women aren’t solely the women artists and intelligentsia captured in oil by their male lovers and friends. Sisters are doing it for themselves, even the ones not married to Hubbuch. Nowhere is this affirmed better than in the pairing of Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky’s Frankfurt kitchen and Paul Wolff’s accompanying film on how this particular kitchen design will set the New Woman free by streamlining the dish-washing process. It’s a simultaneously practical and utopian approach to proto-feminist design, and it’s revelatory. It’s here that the aspired-to liberation through modernity feels within reach.
That said, The Cold Gaze never gives itself over to optimism. It’s steeped in the discomfort and upheaval of its moment. Its portraits are replete with the disjointed proportions, off-kilter compositions, and distant stares characteristic of New Objectivity. After two palatable enough portraits of children by Georg Schrimpf and Issai Kulvianski, the miserably wilted girl of George Grosz’s 1927 “Junge Spanieren” lands with a thud. Purveyors of modernity and sexually liberated they perhaps were, but comfortable in their moment and with the old trappings of family life they were not.
No time, no time. Onward to dissections and critiques of the industrialization of life and the body under the new capitalism — illustrated best by Fritz Kahn’s “Der Mensch als Industriepalast,” delightful to examine despite its latent anxiety. Onward to debabelization through a new universal standard of typography and symbology in Otto Neurath’s Isotype project. Neurath’s project is smartly displayed next to Gerd Arntz’s “12 Häuser der Zeit,” a series of black-and-white and highly graphic (in every sense of the word) woodcuts. Arntz’s flat and angular cross-sections of urban life are choked with class anxiety and sexual deviance, aesthetically aligned but fundamentally disconnected from Neurath’s optimism.
Did I mention there’s also an entire August Sander retrospective within the larger exhibition? It’s not small. Hundreds of Sander’s portraits are printed and framed in uniformly and thematically arranged grids: students, clergy members, sculptors, National Socialists, mothers and children. Situated on tables in the middle are self-portraits taken by regular people using the newly invented photo booths that sprouted up across Berlin during the period. These self-portraits wrest back a bit of democratic control and offer a more intimate view of the new modern man and woman, conceived by those men and women themselves beyond the purview of Sander’s pictorially disciplined and periodically conservative eye.
But we’re not done yet. There are Bauhaus chairs, collages, public housing plans, early films exploring lesbianism and intersexuality, anonymous photos of zeppelins, planning sketches for staging Ernst Krenek’s “Jonny spielt auf” — by the time you’re faced with English and Danish translations of Erich Kästner’s poetry, your eyes are starting to glaze over. The curators, no doubt sensing this, bring the curtain down with looped period music in a room with an ocean view and lined with couches. The impulse to just sit down for eine verdammte Sekunde is irresistible.
The Cold Gaze, while certainly overwhelming and ambitious, does not attempt to be overly instructive. It is only tangentially mournful, mentioning in a wall text the shared fate of most of Sander’s Jewish sitters (and labeling their corresponding portrait grid “The Persecuted”). It doesn’t play like an overwrought moral warning, but is correctly determined to position the era’s creative explosion as a result of trauma than as a precursor to it. This is perhaps the opposite impulse of the contemporary audience now fascinated by it. Weimar is not the calm before the storm. It is its own storm, and it was drowning people while the Anschluss and Auschwitz were still but glimmers in a nameless Austrian tramp’s eye.
By the exhibition’s end, slumped in a couch and half-watching the North Sea, one perceives our present moment as growing further from the Weimar period, not closer to it. Contemporary culture, for starters, abhors objectivity. In an era so beholden to identity politicking, the furious pursuit of objectivity and steely-eyed realism is considered virtually impossible if not outright suspect. Local “scenes” have given way to cross-national digital ones (which, by extension, means no one is sleeping with everyone else, which the data seems to back up). The working classes are being driven out of the cities, not into them, and the barrier for entry into the arts has never been more economically restrictive. Self-portraiture is the prevailing mode of amateur image-making in our era, not a novel and democratizing alternative to sitting for a portrait. Ours is an age of ambient anxiety sustained by cascading and increasingly indecipherable systemic crises, as opposed to an age of sharply-focused anxiety rooted in a shared and singular nationwide trauma and its aftermath.
The directionless, disposable churn and character of contemporary culture is why we keep coming back to Weimar. Weimar looks just similar enough — the inflation, the conservative judiciary up to no good, the failure of the center-left and left to act decisively and persuasively, the insurgent right wing militia — while also being a dazzling explosion of art and culture and innovation. But then what? Particularly if we accept the centrist handwringing evaluation of our era as pre-fascist, as a Weimar of its own, then where exactly does this leave us? Thinking that we could have the good parts of Weimar too, if only we got off our phones? Gott helfe uns allen.
For more on this exhibition, I recommend reading Jamie Aylward’s evaluation of the Centre Pompidou show published in Dispatches Magazine last June. I’ve also written about the interwar period in Germany through the lens of Babylon Berlin as part of my series on German TV, which you can read here.
