CURRENTS

Professors Celia Applegate (above) and Joan Rubin (below) are team teaching a new course that explores the cultural explosion that took place in Europe and America in the 1920s. Rubin says the course has made her re-evalute the period: “There’s a politics to the art of the ’20s—it’s not all me, me, me.” The course takes its title from the ongoing project, The Transatlantic Twenties: America, Europe, and the Making of Modernism, that features several upcoming talks funded through the Humanities Project.

On a recent Tuesday morning, some 25 students filed into a Meliora Hall classroom, trading early-spring Rochester for the frenzy, excitement, and anxiety of Weimar Germany of the 1920s.

“It was one of the greatest periods of cultural vitality ever,” says Professor of History Celia Applegate about Berlin in the years after World War I, as she begins a lecture titled “The New Objectivity.”

This semester Applegate and colleague Joan Rubin, also a professor of history, are coteaching the Transatlantic Twenties: America, Europe, and the Making of Modernism. The undergraduate, 100-level course in the Department of History is part of the Humanities Project.

The course introduces the history of modern art, music, film, dance, and literature that emerged in the context of political, social, and cultural developments in Europe following the First World War. Applegate and Rubin particularly emphasize the transatlantic trade in ideas, with special attention to Germany, France, Great Britain, and the United States.

As Applegate projects slides of works by Weimar artists onto a large screen, she leads students in a discussion about the paintings, photographs, and photomontages, helping them tease apart often chaotic and disturbing images to find what they might reveal about German culture in the 1920s.

“This isn’t comfortable art,” Applegate observes as she shows paintings by Georg Grosz. The loss of the First World War freed Germans to explore outrageousness, and the Weimar Republic granted more artistic freedom than almost any other country at the time, she explains. But the art that resulted was fueled by desperation along with a sense of crisis and breakdown.

“A theme through all of Grosz’s work,” she tells the class, “is the ugliness of modern life, a faint menace that lies behind things.” Students scrutinize his “Midsummer Night,” a painting that pulls the eye in countless directions and shows a murder at its center.

As Applegate delivers that day’s lecture, Rubin sits to the side, asking occasional questions and offering comments. Applegate pauses frequently to open the class up to student remarks.

The Transatlantic Twenties is a course that has never before been offered, and it is the first course that Rubin and Applegate have taught together. Their inspiration in creating it was their joint interest in art and society—a subject on which both have recently published books.

The course moves during the semester from the aural to the visual, the architectural to the literary, and finally to popular culture. Among its major themes are the aftermath of war, responses to the machine, cosmopolitanism and the role of the avant-garde, and youth and the idea of artistic generations.

Readings include Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, Claude McKay’s A Long Way from Home, and Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera, as well as Peter Gay’s Weimar Culture, Malcolm Cowley’s Exile’s Return, and George Antheil’s Bad Boy of Music.

The class has attracted a range of students, from freshmen and sophomores to graduate students eager to take part in a course devoted to modernism. Rubin and Applegate decided to offer the course at the 100 level, Rubin says, in order to “expose students who perhaps haven’t decided on a major. And I wanted to make the point that history includes the study of culture.”

Guest speakers have come from areas throughout the University and beyond, and the range of topics they have discussed demonstrates the breadth of the course. Speakers have included John Covach, chair of the College Music Department, on composer Arnold Schoenberg’s modernism; Grace Seiberling of the Department of Art and Art History on dadaism and surrealism; Joan Saab, director of the graduate program in Visual and Cultural Studies, on modernist photography; James Longenbach of the Department of English on modernist poetry; and Harold Danko of the Eastman School on aspects of 1920s jazz.

Thanks to support provided by the Humanities Project, Applegate and Rubin have also brought in speakers from other universities. Two more will come to campus in April. On Thursday, April 5, at 7:30 p.m. in 321 Morey Hall, Peter Jelavich will give a talk titled “Berlin-Alexanderplatz: Radio, Film, and the Death of Weimar Culture.”

Jelavich is a professor of history at Johns Hopkins University who specializes in the cultural and intellectual history of Europe since the Enlightenment.

“All through his career he has done cultural history in ways that are innovative, using film, music, and art,” Applegate says.

At 8 p.m. on the night before Jelavich’s talk, the Dryden Theatre at the George Eastman House will screen the 1931 film Berlin-Alexanderplatz. Admission is free with University ID.

On Thursday, April 19, at 7:30 p.m. in the Hawkins-Carlson Room at Rush Rhees Library, Richard Palls will offer a talk titled “From Modernism to the Movies: The Global Impact of American Culture in the 20th and 21st Centuries.” Pells is a professor in the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin and a specialist in 20th-century American cultural and intellectual history. He is also, coincidentally, a former teacher of Rubin’s. His talk is cosponsored by the Department of History Verne Moore Lecture Series.

Other highlights of the semester include a February trip to a dress rehearsal of Maurice Ravel’s opera L’Enfant et les Sortilèges at the Eastman School. By incorporating such events into the course, Applegate says, students can “experience modernism, as well as study it. It’s striking to us, the number of resources they have here.”

“Part of what we wanted to do in the course was look at the two-way street between the United States and Europe” to see how they interacted in popular culture, Rubin says. What they hope to do, she and Applegate say, is draw connections between art forms, artists, and the cultural life of two continents.

Back in the classroom, Applegate closes her lecture with a ten-minute excerpt from the 1927 German film Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, directed by Walter Ruttman. The silent film depicts one day in the life of Berlin, from dawn to midnight. Applegate and Rubin’s students watch as Berliners emerge from their houses in the morning to fill the city streets. A tidy schoolgirl walks jauntily down the front steps of her building; in another shot pigeons peck at refuse in the street; and continually the camera turns to Berlin’s factories, recording the whirl of gears and slow ballet of giant machinery.

The film is a collection of impressions, without conventional narrative. The “new objectivity” of her lecture’s title, Applegate explains to her students, refers to an art movement characterized by such documentary efforts—an exploration of the part of the observer and an attempt by 1920s Germans to represent life, in the wake of the First World War, “as it really is.”

“The course has really made me re-examine the 20s. There’s a politics to the art of the ’20s—it’s not all me, me, me,” says Rubin, referring to a common conception of the decade as one of indulgence and self-absorption. “There’s a social dimension that’s beyond self-expression.”

For more information about the Transatlantic Twenties course and related events, visit the Humanities Project Web site: www.rochester.edu/College/humanities.

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