This is the first study of mass media in Germany from a social and cultural-historical perspective. Beyond the conventional focus on organizational structures or aesthetic content, it investigates the impact the media has on German society under varying political systems, and how the media is shaped by wider social, political and cultural context.

Few developments in the industrial era have had a greater impact on everyday social life than the explosion of the mass media and commercial entertainments, and none have exerted a more profound influence on the nature of modern politics. Nowhere in Europe were the tensions and controversies surrounding the rise of mass culture more politically charged than in Germany-debates that played fatefully into the hands of the radical right. Corey Ross provides the first general account of the expansion of the mass media in Germany up to the Second World War, examining how the rise of film, radio, recorded music, popular press, and advertising fitted into the wider development of social, political, and cultural life. Spanning the period from the late nineteenth century to the Third Reich, Media and the Making of Modern Germany shows how the social impact and meaning of 'mass culture' were by no means straightforward or homogenizing, but rather changed under different political and economic circumstances. By locating the rapid expansion of communications media and commercial entertainments firmly within their broader social and political context, Ross sheds new light on the relationship between mass media, social change, and political culture during this tumultuous period in German history.

A legal and cultural history of censorship, youth protection, and national identity in early twentieth-century Germany.

This book traces shifting attitudes towards science and technology, nature and the environment in Twentieth-century Germany. It approaches them through discussion of a range of literary texts and explores the philosophical influences on them and their political contexts, and asks what part novels and plays have played in environmental debate.

From Hitler's notorious fondness for Wagner's operas to classical music's role in fuelling German chauvinism in the era of the world wars, many observers have pointed to a distinct relationship between German culture and reactionary politics. In Classical Music in Weimar Germany, Brendan Fay challenges this paradigm by reassessing the relationship between conservative musical culture and German politics. Drawing upon a range of archival sources, concert reviews and satirical cartoons, Fay maps the complex path of classical music culture from Weimar to Nazi Germany-a trajectory that was more crooked, uneven, or broken than straight. Through an examination of topics as varied as radio and race to nationalism, this book demonstrates the diversity of competing aesthetic, philosophical and political ideals held by German music critics that were a hallmark of Weimar Germany. Rather than seeing the cultural conservatism of this period as a natural prelude for the violence and destruction later unleashed by Nazism, this fascinating book sheds new light on traditional culture and its relationship to the rise of Nazism in 20th-century Germany.

The new photo-illustrated magazines of the 1920s traded in images of an ideal modernity, promising motorised leisure, scientific progress, and social and sexual emancipation. Modernist Magazines and the Social Ideal is a pioneering history of these periodicals, focusing on two of the leading European titles: the German monthly UHU, and the French news weekly VU, taken as representative of the broad class of popular titles launched in the 1920s. The book is the first major study of UHU, and the first scholarly work on VU in English. Modernist Magazines explores, in particular, the striking use of regularity and repetition in photographs of modernity, reading these repetitious images as symbolic of modernist ideals of social order in the aftermath of the First World War. Introducing a novel methodology, pattern theory, the book argues for a critical return to the Gestalt tradition in visual studies. Alongside the UHU and VU case studies, Modernist Magazines offers an essential primer to interwar magazine culture in Europe. Accounts of rival titles are woven into the book's thematic chapters, which trace the evolution of the two magazines' photography and graphic design in the tumultuous years up to 1933.

The essays in this collection address the German television series Babylon Berlin and explore its unique contribution to contemporary visual culture. Since its inception in 2017 the series, a neo-noir thriller set in Berlin in the final years of the Weimar republic, has reached audiences throughout Europe, Asia, and the Americas and has been met with both critical and popular acclaim. As a visual work rife with historical and contemporary citations Babylon Berlin offers its audience a panoramic view of politics, crime, culture, gender, and sexual relations in the German capital. Focusing especially on the intermedial and transhistorical dimensions of the series, across four parts-Babylon Berlin, Global Media and Fan Culture; The Look and Sound of Babylon Berlin; Representing Weimar History; and Weimar Intertexts-the volume brings together an interdisciplinary and international group of scholars to critically examine various facets of the show, including its aesthetic form and citation style, its representation of the history and politics of the late Weimar Republic, and its exemplary status as a blockbuster production of neoliberal media culture. Considering the series from the perspective of a variety of disciplines, Babylon Berlin, German Visual Spectacle, and Global Media Culture is essential reading for students of film, TV, media studies, and visual culture on German Studies, History, and European Studies programmes.

The Oxford Handbook of the Weimar Republic is a multi-author survey of German history from 1918 to 1933. Covering a broad range of topics in social, political, economic, and cultural history, it presents an overview of current scholarship, and will help students and teachers to make sense of the contradictions and complexities of Germany's experiments with democracy and modern society in this period. The contributions emphasize the historical openness of Germany's first republic, which was more than just the coming of the Third Reich. The thirty-three chapters, all written by leading experts, contain information and interpretation based on cutting-edge scholarship, and together provides an unsurpassed panorama of the Weimar Republic.

Investigates the role of sex and sexuality in early 20th-century German culture, and how this past continues to shape the present

As with all other forms of popular culture, comics in East Germany were tightly controlled by the state. Comics were employed as extensions of the regime’s educational system, delivering official ideology so as to develop the “socialist personality” of young people and generate enthusiasm for state socialism. The East German children who avidly read these comics, however, found their own meanings in and projected their own desires upon them. Four-Color Communism gives a lively account of East German comics from both perspectives, showing how the perceived freedoms they embodied created expectations that ultimately limited the regime’s efforts to bring readers into the fold.