Crosscut: Handicraft and abstraction in Weimar Germany

This dissertation traces the interplay of handicraft and abstraction in artistic practices and critical writing in Germany during the Weimar period. Reading selected works by Bauhaus weaver Anni Albers, artist Hannah Hoech, and silhouette filmmaker Lotte Reiniger alongside contemporaneous cultural theory, I develop the concept of "crosscutting" as a critical response to German modernity in the nineteen twenties. Taking my cue from Siegfried Kracauer who invoked the crosscut as an intellectual model in 1921, I show how this concept epitomizes, on the formal level, the refusal of Weimar artists and essayists to resolve tensions deriving from social, political, and material changes. My introduction charts the term as it manifested itself as a metaphorical and analytical figure in the cultural production of the Weimar Republic.;Chapter One examines Hannah Hoch's work in collage and essays about embroidery from the years immediately following the war and the founding of Germany's first democracy. In these works Hoch investigated differences and similarities between discrete artistic contexts. She thus called into question conventional oppositions between a non-industrial craft encoded as bourgeois and feminine, and Dada, an avant-garde movement known for its aversion to traditional social and aesthetic forms associated with capitalist culture.;Chapter Two follows the way Lotte Reiniger's hand-crafted silhouette film, entitled The Adventures of Prince Achmed, brings the dialectic of magic and rationalism, and the relationship between history and modernization, into representation. The film was perceived by the critics in Weimar Germany as a production that infused the era's self-professed culture of sobriety and technological rationalism with enchantment. It also invoked self-reflexively the status and history of film. This is most apparent in the way it stages the tale of Aladdin and the magic lamp which alludes to film's precursor, the magic lantern.;Chapter Three analyzes a hand-made weaving that Anni Albers completed in 1926 in dialogue with contemporaneous discussions of surface culture, artificiality, and geometry. I show that Albers' work gives form to the Bauhaus' public profile as well as to the cultural discussions centered around the critical potential of doubt, fragmentation, and tedium, key attributes also of the crosscut paradigm.;The thesis concludes with a close reading of a ninety-minute segment from Weimar Germany's quintessential crosscut film, Berlin, Symphony of a Big City.