Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis / Gabriele Münter (1877-1962) was a primary member of the twentieth-century German Expressionist group Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider). This thesis examine the stylistic intersection between avant-garde French Fauvism and German Expressionism in Gabriele Münter's substantial oeuvre. Her body of work demonstrates an unmistakable affiliation with modern French aesthetic inclinations, a distinctive characteristic that confirms Münter's intrinsic comprehension of innovation artistic principles in creative communities across Europe. To contextualize the analysis of Münter's stylistic experimentation, this thesis illuminates the development and maturation of German feminine artistic culture from 1900 to 1933.

Between the years of 1919 and 1933, the Weimar Republic was a world leader in art and entertainment. However, it was also torn apart by severe economic depressions and political violence. This intense atmosphere provided a powerful context for the art and films of the period. As the political and economic tides shifted, the style of painting and filmmaking changed, as well. The idealistic Expressionist art of the years immediately following the optimistic revolution subsided as a sober realism emerged. This New Objectivity was both evident in the paintings of artists such as Otto Dix and George Grosz, as well as in the films of G.W. Pabst. However, within the changing artistic and social climate of Weimar Germany, Pabst has received little attention by scholars. This thesis contextualizes G.W. Pabst, one of Weimar's leading film directors, within the artistic transitions and social climate of the era, specifically analyzing issues of class and gender within his silent features. / Master of Arts

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German resistance to Nazi oppression existed within the ranks of academe, the military, the working classes, and the established churches. The Catholic Church, under the leadership of Pope Pius XI, entered into a non-interference agreement with Hitler, but the Evangelical Church experienced a severe split. From this division grew the Confessing Church. A number of leaders within the Confessing Church were arrested or killed during Nazi Germany, and it was the women of the church who continued the work overtly and covertly. The work of these women has mostly been marginalized by history, in part because historic writings belonged to the male hegemony, and in part because the women did not seek recognition. As most of the women about whom I am writing came of age during Weimar Republic (1919-1933), I argue that the women of the resistance received their empowerment to rise up against Nazi oppression from the women's movement of the interwar years. To understand the normative influences, one must consider the societal and political forces that helped shape that time. What led Germany on this path of destruction and caused it to vote for a leviathan in 1933? How did the work of the resistance women serve to fight against the forces of evil that threatened to drown out all reason? What motivated these women to disregard their own safety in their struggle against evil? / Ph. D.

This dissertation evaluates the career and work of the underappreciated Austrian-Jewish-American novelist, dramatist, essayist and screen writer Gina Kaus (1894 - 1985). The dissertation's approach is interdisciplinary in nature, drawing from the fields of German, American, exile, literary, feminist, performance, global, cultural as well as film studies. The unusually diverse corpus of Kaus's work in both the literary and filmic medium makes such an interdisciplinary approach indispensable. The dissertation argues that Kaus's specific female and little visible exile experience was shaped and accompanied by a significant, social, cultural, political, linguistic and geographical change. It reconstructs and consciously reinserts Kaus' transatlantic accomplishments into the larger exile history. My dissertation offers close reading of Gina Kaus's second play Toni (1928) and positions her piece within the larger landscape of the Weimar Republic and Vienna during the 1920s. The analysis incorporates a feminist reading, which focuses on the performances of gender and the representation of femininity and illustrates the destabilization of gender and sexual identities during the Weimar period. The analysis of Die Überfahrt (1932), Kaus's second bestseller novel, discusses her novel as a Zeitroman (novel of the times). It contextualizes her book in terms of its readership and the literary market while examining it as a comment on the political, financial and social circumstances of 1920s Weimar culture. A thorough investigation of two films for which Kaus invented the story and collaborated on the screenplay, namely The Wife Takes a Flyer (directed by Richard Wallace, USA, 1942), an Anti-Nazi comedy, and Three Secrets (directed by Robert Wise, USA, 1950), a melodrama, challenges the persistent idea that Kaus's work for Hollywood was incapable to live up to her earlier literary and theatrical successes as an author of the Weimar period. My particular focus on the representation of femininity and female agency sheds light on how the émigrée Kaus, who had been known as an ardent feminist in Europe, successfully managed to subvert ideas of heteronormative gender and power discourses even within the restrictive limits of the Hollywood apparatus. The dissertation further investigates the understudied text form screenplay and the practice of screenwriting. It examines for the first time various unpublished film script versions of the The Wife Takes a Flyer and Three Secrets and thus promotes the film script as a textual form worthy of investigation and integration in both literary and film studies. The script analysis pays attention to the collaborative nature, considers the various versions and revisions the script underwent, offers a comparison to the movies and evaluates the script in its multi-functionality, style, and aesthetics. The scripts also give insight into the ways in which Kaus's exilic consciousness permeates her scriptwriting. My close analysis of Kaus's autobiography, which was published in 1979 and targeted at a German-speaking readership, uncovers the ways in which exile is reflected in the practice of autobiographical writing. The dissertation focuses foremost on the narrative strategies as well as omissions in Kaus's attempt to re-inscribe herself into the literary and artistic scene of Vienna and Berlin; and her effort to position herself among the prominent and predominantly male German-Jewish diaspora in Hollywood. I also shed light on her ability to adapt to the United States and her decision to remain and become a citizen. Her perception of exile as an opportunity, rather than as a limitation is an important new aspect in the existing exile research. Among the Jewish-German exile community in Hollywood, Gina Kaus had a truly transnational career and deserves more credit for her filmic works.

This thesis examines three photomontages by Berlin Dada artist Hannah Höch, The Beautiful Girl (1919-20), an untitled work from 1920, and Dada-Tanz (1922). It discusses how Höch used photomontage to fulfill the Dada mission of incorporating chaos into art as an expressive means of commenting on the sociopolitical climate of Germany post-World War I. These three photomontages specifically reveal Höch's concerns for female individuality in an environment of gender inequality during this early modern era.

This dissertation is a social and cultural history of chemical industrialists and their role in the development of both science and capitalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It focuses on the case of Germany, where many chemists became some the most powerful industrial leaders during this period. Since the late nineteenth century, chemistry in Germany constituted a cosmos radiating from the large industrial sites, of which the academic discipline was just the tip of the iceberg. The chemical Industry supported a formidable scientific research system, and industrial chemists rose to the highest social circles, from which they exerted unique forms of activism. In particular, science philanthropy provided chemical industrialists with a point of entry to elite German society. Their status as scientists, combined with their manufacturing social backgrounds, led to an inclination towards supporting scientific research through direct participation and political lobbying, with less emphasis on the financial donations common in American philanthropy. Crucially, this support extended beyond chemistry, to other applied sciences and even apparently non-industrial pursuits such as astronomy. In these other fields, they sought to replicate the industrial support system that existed in chemistry, while opening the opportunity to participate directly in their amateur scientific interests. I contend that these non-financial forms of support for science played an important role during the radical changes in twentieth-century Germany, including war, hyperinflation, extreme economic cycles, and the increasing political polarization of the Weimar era. / History of Science

<p>Group songs with direct political messages rose to enormous popularity during the interwar period (1918-1939), particularly in recently-defeated Germany and in the newly-established Soviet Union. This dissertation explores the musical relationship between these two troubled countries and aims to explain the similarities and differences in their approaches to collective singing. The discussion of the very complex and problematic relationship between the German left and the Soviet government sets the framework for the analysis of music. Beginning in late 1920s, as a result of Stalin's abandonment of the international revolutionary cause, the divergences between the policies of the Soviet government and utopian aims of the German communist party can be traced in the musical propaganda of both countries. </p><p> There currently exists no scholarly literature providing a wide-ranging view of the German and Soviet musical exchange during the 1920s and 30s. The paucity of comprehensive studies is especially apparent in the English-language scholarship on German and Russian mass music, also known as "music for the people." Even though scholars have produced works devoted to the Soviet and Weimar mass music movements in isolation, they rarely explore the musical connections between the two countries. The lack of scholarship exploring the musical exchanges between the Soviet Union and Germany suggests that scholars have not yet fully examined the influences that the Soviet and German mass songs and their proponents had on each other during the 1920s and 1930s. Exposing these musical influences provides a valuable perspective on the broader differences and similarities between the Soviet and German communist parties. The connections between Soviet and German songs went beyond straightforward translations of propaganda texts from one language to another; the musical and textual transformations--such as word changes, differences in the instrumental arrangements, and distinct approaches to performance--allow for a more nuanced comparison of the philosophical, ideological, and political aspects of Soviet and the German communist movements. In my dissertation, I consider the musical roots of collective singing in Germany as opposed to Russia, evaluate the musical exchanges and borrowings between the early Soviet communists and their counterparts in the Weimar Republic, and explore the effects of musical propaganda on the working classes of both countries. I see my research as a mediation of existing Soviet and Weimar music scholarship.</p> / Dissertation