Werkbund, and the Aesthetics of Culture in the Wilhelmine Period
The Kunstgewerbe, the Werkbund, and the Aesthetics of Culture in the Wilhelmine Period MARK JARZOMBEK Cornell University Joseph Goebbels'famous claim about the connection between politics and that concept back to its nonreactionary, Wilhelmine roots.1 This paper, art in his letter to Wilhelm Furtwdngler in 1933 epitomizes Nazi theories which looks at the discourse on cultural aesthetics as it emerged in the first concerning the cultural benefits of art. In it he attempts both to legitimize decade of the twentieth century, also challenges some received notions about and cunningly obscure an underlying reactionary agenda: the Werkbund, an organization of artists, architects, and industrialists founded in 1907. With the Werkbund, the utopian potential of cultural We who are giving form to modern German politics, see aesthetics that emerged in the context of liberal bourgeois theory long before it ourselves as artists to whom has been assigned the great was co-opted by the right wing revealed itself for the first time as a powerful responsibility of forming, from out of the brute mass, the instrument of cultural definition. This paper will also discuss some of the solid and full image of the people. early formulators of Wilhelmine cultural aesthetics in various disciplines, Though there are many studies of post-World War I cultural aesthetics, Karl Scheffier (art critic), Heinrich Waentig (economist), Hermann especially in the context of Hitler'sfinal solution, little has been done to trace Muthesius (architect), and Georg Fuchs (playwright), among others. BY THE TURN OF THE TWENTIETH century, the German This article forms part of a larger work that analyzes the full spectrum Kunstgewerbe began to champion a full spectrum of aesthetic, of related political and economic issues in this period.
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