Degeneration and revolution: Radical cultural politics and the politics of the body in Weimar Germany, 1914--1933

My dissertation examines the complex connections between radical politics, modernist and avant garde culture, and the politics of the body in the Weimar period in Germany. Beginning with the First World War, this period of German history is often seen as a key moment in the development of modernity, encompassing both cultural experimentation and radical political ferment. It was also a period in which key theorists of modernity and modernism (Simmel, Benjamin, Kracauer, Bloch, Lukacs) developed their work. Drawing on theoretical, cultural and political sources, I reread this period from its margins, in particular from the perspective of the practices through which individual and social bodies were constructed as "degenerate." I argue that this politics of the body (including constructions of race, gender, sexuality, and ability) is crucial to understanding the connections between revolutionary left politics, radical cultural production and theorizations of modernity. In complexly related ways, these different practices sought to challenge and overthrow dominant bourgeois social and cultural practices, and to contest the rising power of the right, but in so doing they often (re)inscribed repressive social and cultural practices around the body.;My dissertation proceeds thematically, beginning with a theoretical and historical analysis of the idea of "degeneration" and the practices of eugenics and social hygiene in the Weimar period. Each subsequent chapter focuses on a specific theme (war, nostalgia and shock, bodies and minds, progress, revolution), as well as a specific medium (visual art, film, photography and theatre). Situated in the context of emergent mass consumer culture, I argue that radical cultural politics developed through a configuration of "degenerate" bodies (the prostitute, war wounded, the mad, racialized bodies, sexual "deviants,") and a constant concern with the "purity" of social and individual bodies. While deployed in the service of avant garde disruption and critique, these cultural practices also often dovetailed with and sustained repressive social practices, even while they also articulated radical anti-capitalist politics. These developments were, I argue, evident in theoretical writings emerging in the period as well. I thus resituate and decentre these very influential theorizations of capitalist modernity and modernism from the perspective of the politics of the body that ran through the radical cultural politics of Weimar Germany.