George Grosz's paintings and drawings of Berlin during the Weimar period demonstrate a complex matrix of tensions between nature and the urban experience. In his work, mechanization, sexuality, gender and animality are recurring themes that cue the viewer to the profound anxiety that modernity had unleashed a chaotic force into the city. Using an ecofeminist analysis, I show how the disorder of the city was imagined as a primordial human condition in which a previously disavowed connection to nature was suddenly foregrounded. Though Grosz's renditions of Berlin scenes are ironic, they also revel in the demise of social order. In this thesis, I argue that Grosz's art deploys the conceptual force of unmastered nature as a critical tool, at the same time showing how nature was integrated into the cultural fabric of urban life.

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