front cover of Bauhaus Culture
Bauhaus Culture
From Weimar To The Cold War
Kathleen James-Chakraborty
University of Minnesota Press, 2006
Offering the first comprehensive training in the visual arts grounded in abstraction, the Bauhaus was the site of a dazzling range of influential experiments in painting, architecture, photography, industrial design, and even artistic education itself. Three-quarters of a century later, the “look” of the new remains indebted to the Bauhaus and its equation of technology with modernism. Central to discussions of the relationships between art, industrialization, and politics in the twentieth century, much of the school’s later impact was derived in part from its status as one of the foremost cultural symbols of Germany’s first democracy and its public reputation as a “cathedral of socialism.”

In this book, editor Kathleen James-Chakraborty and seven other scholars analyze the accomplishments and dispel the myths of the Bauhaus, placing it firmly in a historical context from before the formation of the Weimar Republic through Nazi ascendancy and World War II into the cold war. Together, they investigate its professors’ and students’ interactions with mass culture; establish the complexity of its relationship with Wilhelmine, Nazi, and postwar German politics; and challenge the claim that its architects greatly influenced American architecture in the 1930s.

Their most explosive conclusions address the degree to which some aspects of Bauhaus design continued to flourish during the Third Reich before becoming one of the cold war’s most enduring emblems of artistic freedom. In doing so, Bauhaus Culture calls into question the degree to which this influential school should continue to symbolize an uncomplicated relationship between art, modern technology, and progressive politics.

Contributors: Greg Castillo, Juliet Koss, Rose-Carol Washton Long, John V. Maciuika, Wallis Miller, Winifried Nerdinger, Frederic J. Schwartz.

Kathleen James-Chakraborty is associate professor of architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of German Architecture for a Mass Audience and Erich Mendelsohn and the Architecture of German Modernism.
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front cover of Constitutional Failure
Constitutional Failure
Carl Schmitt in Weimar
Ellen Kennedy
Duke University Press, 2004
Constitutional Failure is a major contribution to studies of the German political philosopher Carl Schmitt (1888–1985), the Weimar Republic, and the relationship of constitutionalism, political economy, and democracy. An internationally renowned scholar of Weimar legal theory, Ellen Kennedy brought Schmitt’s neglected work to the attention of English-speaking readers with her highly regarded translations of his work and studies of its place in twentieth-century political theory. In this eagerly awaited book, she tracks Schmitt’s contribution to the canon of Western political philosophy during its most difficult and dangerous moment—the time of Weimar Germany and the Third Reich—demonstrating the centrality of his thought to understandings of the modern constitutional state and its precarious economic and social foundations.

Kennedy reveals how Schmitt’s argument for a strong but neutral state supported the maximization of market freedom at the cost of the political constitution. She argues that the major fault lines of Weimar liberalism—emergency powers, the courts as “defenders of the constitution,” mass mobilization of anti-liberal politics, ethnic-identity politics, a culture of resentment and contested legitimacy—are not exceptions within the liberal-democratic orders of the West, but central to them. Contending that Schmitt’s thought remains vital today because liberal norms are inadequate to the political challenges facing constitutional systems as diverse as those of Eastern Europe and the United States, Kennedy develops a compelling, rigorous argument that unsettles many assumptions about liberalism, democracy, and dictatorship.

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