Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

The women of Weimar Germany had an uneasy alliance with modernity: while they experienced cultural liberation after World War I, these New Women still faced restrictions in their earning power, political participation, and reproductive freedom. Images of women in newspapers, films, magazines, and fine art of the 1920s, reflected their ambiguous social role, for the women who were pictured working in factories, wearing androgynous fashions, or enjoying urban nightlife seemed to be at once empowered and ornamental, both consumers and products of the new culture. In this book Maud Lavin investigates the multilayered social construction of femininity in the mass culture of Weimar Germany, focusing on the photomontages of the avant-garde artist Hannah Hoch.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

This acclaimed study was the first English-language book on Berlin Dada artist Hannah Hoch. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

CHOICE Review

Lavin's primary focus in this excellent monograph is explaining how avant-garde photomontages were made and viewed within the cultural context of Weimar Germany. Although she analyzes and interprets many of H"och's montages in specific detail, she concentrates on how these images composed of fragments of other images relate to ideas of modernity in a particular historical period. Since most of H"och's montage elements came from mass media sources, Lavin explains what these sources were, what cultural interests they promoted, to whom they were oriented and how they came to be associated with the idea of the modern. Lavin is especially interested in the theme of the "New Woman" and examines how H"och used a wide range of images including body culture, sport, dance, movie stars, and androgyny to explore the complex and fluid new role of women in a new Germany. Lavin's thorough research and insightful analysis adds greatly to an understanding of H"och's work in itself and of the work as an expression and reflection of values and concerns of her time period. Advanced undergraduate; graduate; faculty. S. Spencer; North Carolina State University