Introduction
This project was an addendum to a chapter in my dissertation, titled "Negotiating the German Public Sphere: Workers, Soldiers, and Women in Photobooks of Weimar Germany." As I am revising my dissertation for publication, this project is going to be continuously updated and changed as necessary. Any parts of my analysis and selections of my materials are subject to change until the official release of this Scalar book.
January 2022 - Verena Kick
This Scalar book allows you to explore Kurt Tucholsky's and John Heartfield's Germany, Germany Above All (GG) (1929), particularly its text-image-combinations and montage sequences. These combinations of previously published texts and photographs showcase the extended potential of the genre of the photobook and allow the (implied) worker-reader to find a double role:
- First, he is supposed to be able to identify with the representation of the working class in the photographs included in GG.
- Secondly, at the same time, he is supposed to develop a critical stance to his own representation.
To this end, GG becomes a, as a I call it, second-order photobook.
It builds on those photo books produced in the 1920s that I would call first-order photobook. They primarily aimed to showcase the new possibilities of photography and of photo-photo or photo-text combinations within a book's page layout. They tried to show how these combinations could educate readers to become more visually literate.
Tucholsky and Heartfield re-use previously published texts and photographs (taken by others) not only to create juxtapositions between (several) texts and photographs, but also to create what I call functional montages.
These montages imitate the workers' daily perspective and engagement with the assembly line only to challenge then this perspective by the end of the photobook, asking worker-readers to develop a dynamic, adaptable perspective. Such a different perspective - building on the montage of the assembly line, yet also freeing them from this daily view - aimed at bestowing an effective self-consciousness and self-awareness on them and thus elevating them to the status of a potential counter public.
Now it's your turn!
Like the student in the photograph below:
Learn to read and look!
You will be able to choose between 8 different paths to explore this photobook's text-image-combinations and functional montages.
First, I suggest you take a moment to simply flip trough a few pages of the photobook (path 1).
Mainly for students, but also scholars:
You can choose between encountering and discovering the functional montage on your own (path 2) or follow a step-by-step guide (path 3) that explains the functional montage.
Mainly for scholars, but also for students:
On other paths you can learn how the functional montage relates to the photomontage (path 4) and to the photo reportage (path 7) published by Tucholsky before GG appeared.
One path will also allow you to compare several functional montages (path 6).
For both students and scholars:
And one path will even test you! (path 5) How does the functional montage work for you? Will you be able to developing your own dynamical view of these text-image combinations?
