Table of Contents

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction. Modern Surface and Postmodern Simulation: A Retrospective Retrieval Agendas of Surface and Simulacrum Weimar Surfaces Now Tactility in the City Exhibiting Superficies Philosophies of Counterfeit Resistances to Weimar Surface Surface, Academy, and World 1. Functionalist Facades: The Reformation of Weimar Architecture The Building's New Face Decoration Do's and Don'ts Brave New World Glass Culture The Pains of Tabula Rasa Surface Art at Home Fashioning the Female Body 2. Electric Stimulations: The Shock of the New Objectivity in Weimar Advertising Advertising as Power Electric Modernity The Architecture of Light Shock Treatments "Light Lures People," Rejecting the Modern The Embrace of the Avant-Garde Postmodernity and the Space of Advertising 3. Into the Mouth of the Moloch: Weimar Surface Culture Goes to the Movies From Caligari-Effect to Film-Set Omnipotence Kracauer versus the Weimar Film City Celebratory Film Streets The Weimar Movie Palaces: Facades on Facades "The Total Artwork of Effects," Cinema and the Secularization of Ritual 4. The Display Window: Designs and Desires of Weimar Consumerism The Phantasmagoria of Selling Through the Looking Glass The Opening in the Wall Window Techniques The Display Window as Mechanical-Age Artwork Transparencies of Truth and Lie Mannequins on Both Sides of the Glass The Murderer at the Window Post-Wall Re-Creations Appendix: Selected Weimar Periodicals and Newspapers Notes Illustration Sources Index

About the Author

Janet Ward is Associate Professor of German Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She is the coeditor of Agonistics: Arenas of Contestatory Creativity (1997) and is currently writing a book on post-Wall architecture in Berlin.

Reviews

"This outstanding book has retrieved all the luminous qualities of its subject matter to produce an astonishing revelation of gleaming appearances on splendid display. It is unrivalled by any previous study." - Marcus Bullock, coeditor of Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings 1913-26 "Weimar Surfaces creates provocative new connections between the historical constellations that found a privileged expression in Weimar Berlin and the more contemporary debates on the legacies of modernism and modernity. A compelling study." - Sabine Hake, author of The Cinema's Third Machine "Janet Ward's study of Weimar architecture and design is the most comprehensive and integrated study of the surface of Weimar experience yet written.... A first-rate and stimulating book." - Sander L. Gilman, coauthor of Hysteria Beyond Freud"